He is risen: personal reflections on Easter Sunday

Spiritually surrendering to becoming a naive normie

Dear reader: I wrote this all in one stretch, unedited, barely formatted, from my iPad on Easter Sunday. Some of this was written from a park with my family; the rest from my bedroom late at night. I’m purposely leaving it totally unrefined. I’m not even bothering to embed links; if I mentioned something you want to look up, I’m sure you can search for it.

This is very different from my usual content. It’s personal, not professional. It’s spiritual, not secular. It’s written and sent all in one go, not scheduled in advance. It also meanders quite a bit, covers a lot of ground, and FYI: does eventually weave it all together.

If the topic or style doesn’t interest you, please feel free to skip it. If you do choose to read, I hope it becomes abundantly clear that this is NOT an invitation to a theological debate. If you don’t have something nice to say, you need not say anything at all.

But I wanted to get these thoughts out there while it’s still Easter. So, here they are. Christ is risen. - Stephanie

Like many of the youth I coach parents about, I have what I call a lopsided brain: exceptionally good at some things, yet especially poor at others. My 99th-percentile verbal skills often create a halo effect, fooling people into overgeneralizing my competency. In reality, while my brain might be a sponge for certain types of information, it’s playing more of a rubber-versus-glue game in other departments. Suffice to say, you don’t want to me on your team at trivia night, unless the real reason you invited me is so that I could observe how your friend’s marriage is doing.

Sorry. I can’t help what I notice and what refuses to stick.

Someone on the internet recently got mad at me for reposting a funny video of Mike Tyson. Of course, I was supposed to know he was a convicted rapist. The reality was, I wouldn’t have even known it was Mike Tyson if the comments hadn’t said so, what to speak of being familiar with his criminal record. Heck, I barely know the guy is a boxer.

My husband is the opposite. He has an incredible memory for actors, and his facial recognition must be in the top 1% for men. We’ve even had interactions where he says “that’s so-and-so, from such-and-such” and I say “no way, I watched such-and-such twice and don’t recognize her” and he turned out to be correct. I couldn’t recognize an actress ten years later in a different context and with a different hair color. He could.

I can’t even recall if I’ve seen a movie or not until I’m halfway through seeing it for what turns out to be the second time.

When I was in school, a hundred years ago, I could remember anything just long enough to ace the exam. The knowledge would disappear immediately afterward.

But back then, the world misled me, just like it continues to mislead high achievers. For roughly a decade, from middle school through grad school, teachers and parents lead the bright, developing young person to believe that the world will reward them for proving how much they know and how confidently they can elaborate their naive worldviews — only to launch them into the realities of young adulthood. In the real world, few things are more insufferable to the rest of us than a know-it-all in their early twenties. Outside of the college lecture hall, absolutely no one wants a twenty-two year old to prove how much they know and how definitively they know it. We are not the least bit interested. Please, spare us.

What the rest of us want from “baby adults,” as I like to call them, is intellectual humility. We want them to admit to just how little they really know. We want them to seek our guidance, and be open to feedback. We intuitively understand they’d be better off if they were unassuming and gracious. We know they could chill out if only they could receive the good news.

In Christianity, “you’re a sinner, but Jesus died on the cross for your sins so you could be forgiven” is overall good news even though it contains a bitter pill. Likewise, when it comes to adulting, this message is ultimately more positive than negative: “you’re an idiot, but that’s okay because — guess what, kid? Everyone knows you’re a dumbass because they were once a dumbass too, back when they were your age. So just relax. Stop trying to be perfect and have it all figured out. People who know more than you KNOW that they know more than you. They want to help you, not humiliate you with that knowledge. So let them.”

The more years of my life I spend doing the work most clearly cut out for me, the easier it becomes to admit my relative weaknesses. I excel at pattern recognition in human behavior, psychology and family systems, to such an extent that it sometimes seems I’m the only person who can see color in a world where everyone else only sees in black and white. I have to regularly remind myself that what’s obvious to me is not very obvious to very many people at all. My husband reminds me too, on occasion, when I give him a wink or a nudge about something occurring in our vicinity that, as it turns out, he didn’t register at all. (And no, he’s not autistic.)

The only reason this perceptual difference can be classified as a verifiable skill and not a form of insanity is that I’m very practiced at refining these perceptions through feedback: thousands of iterations of testing out my observations, seeing how they land with others, and following through on their implications. My work gives me ample opportunity to do so. I’m regularly told “that’s exactly right” or “you hit the nail on the head.” I’m able to predict how someone I have never met would react to a situation they’ve never been put in, simply by spending enough hours listening to people who love them. I can zoom in, and zoom in, and zoom in, like an infinite vector image. In the thick of coaching work, my most patient clients are sometimes my most successful; we might spend an entire hour analyzing a single sentence.

But there’s a significant downside to so much of my brain space being allotted to such a specialized skillset. And it’s not just my failure to recognize actors, or organize my finances, or recall embarrassingly commonplace historical facts that you assume everyone should know. It’s that, when I step outside my wheelhouse, my brain tends to hit a wall, and the price of pushing past that wall is often not worth paying.

When I try to force my brain to do something it doesn’t want to do, not only do I feel stupid; I also can become an anxious, tearful, emotional mess. I also get terrible heart palpitations, thanks in part to my dysautonomia. But it gets worse than that. Under stress, I can become paranoid and obsessive-compulsive.

And that’s what happened to me in January, when I hit a theological speed bump and then my husband broke his arm.

Let me back up a second, because that didn’t make any sense, but it will soon.

See, back in October, I became a Christian. It was a meaningful conversion, and one that had progressed slowly until that point, seemingly years in the making. Besides divine grace, or maybe as manifestations of it, numerous factors had led me there. Among these: my interactions with Christians over the years, including many who prayed over me and blessed my work; life challenges that tested my personal, unarticulated faith and refined my understanding of virtue and vice; a number of compelling books; the sense of revival around the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And, more broadly, as some internet anon once cheekily put it, “slowly becoming a normie from first principles.” (More on that coming soon.) My husband was with me the whole way; we’ve been walking in sync with each other since we met, always able to see eye to eye on matters of faith, reason, and values.

We had a three month honeymoon period and began attending a church. I listened to Nick Mulvey’s latest album on repeat — the eclectic sounds of a kindred spirit, a seeker close to me in age who came to Christ only after traveling the world and sampling a broad variety of spiritual traditions. I soaked up C.S. Lewis and several enlightening Christian books and podcasts. I read the gospels, and researched Bibles, and bought a couple of beautiful sets for Christmas, and received as gifts that year my first cross and the Prince of Peace painting. I started praying daily in a prayer journal I decorated with boho Christian decorative stickers. I planned to get baptized, probably in the spring, since my church did it outdoors.

And then, something happened.

Shortly after Christmas, I knew it was time to finally take Bible study seriously. I was armed and ready with the new study and journaling bibles I’d bought for us, all carefully researched and chosen for reasons. I took my reading material with me to Hawai’i on a solo trip; I consider these rejuvenating trips health necessities, and logistically it isn’t always possible for my husband to join me. But on the plane, in early January, I ran into a problem.

You guessed it: the problem was Leviticus. But frankly, it began in Exodus.

Here is the problem I was having: based on the Old Testament, I did not like God. And by the end of Leviticus, this dislike was so intense I felt angry.

I wanted to like him as well as love him. Respect and admire and maybe just a little bit fear, sure — but fear appropriately. Based on all the apologetic discourse I’d exposed myself to by that point, I had ready-made explanations at hand for what I knew would be difficult passages depicting a wrathful deity. I felt I’d already somewhat digested and integrated these explanations and was prepared to apply them faithfully when I encountered something I didn’t understand.

But I wasn’t prepared for what I actually encountered in the early books of the Old Testament. It was far more wrathful than the warnings I’d heard had led me to believe. The God of the OT seemed capricious, deceptive, merciless, narcissistic, tribalistic, and bloodthirsty. None of the concepts I’d encountered in apologetics literature seemed to have any footing in the actual content of these books. They began to seem made up post-hoc to rationalize the irreconcilable in a way that began to feel like gaslighting.

I started counting all the ways God would have had me killed in the OT. I stopped at three. I’m reluctant to continue in this fashion through the remaining books; the final tally may be in the double digits. The message was that the God of the OT would have hated me without a trace of mercy, compassion or understanding — and would have slaughtered me without a second thought over small infractions. All while demanding to be worshipped via elaborate procedures involving lots of gold and even more blood, never mind the fact that those he demanded such garish worship from were often starving in the desert. And it was he who had led them there to be starved.

How was THIS the same God as the one who loved me so much that he died on the cross for my sins? It couldn’t be. Hence the anger that had me close my book dramatically on the plane, lean my head against the chair ahead, and turn toward the Christian father next to me with questions of sheer bewilderment to which he had no satisfactory answers.

The best way I can explain that feeling is this: you know when you’re watching a movie that requires some suspension of disbelief, and at first you willingly go along with it for the experience — but then the plot holes keep adding up, and eventually they accumulate past the point of absurdity, and you start to feel that your intelligence as a viewer has been insulted by being asked to suspend disbelief over SO MANY dramatic plot holes? Has that ever happened to you? Well, that’s how I felt in reading the OT and being asked to believe that the God described therein was the same person as Jesus called Father.

Soon after landing in Hawai’i, I posted a question about this on X. It went viral and got hundreds of comments. Most of them were quite unsatisfactory. Again, I didn’t see the connection between the standard Christian apologetic answers, and the actual content of the books. Only one comment stood out, and it pointed me to the work of Israel Anderson, who calls himself a modern heretic.

Israel Anderson is a dreadlocked man of about 50, originally from New Zealand, living in a van somewhere in the United States — I’ve heard mention of both Colorado and Texas. He has a YouTube channel with something like seventeen thousand followers. An orphan who was helped in childhood by good Christians, he’s been in ministry his entire adult life, but now states that he “left Christianity to follow Jesus.” He’s definitely read the Bible more times than you, and probably also knows more Greek and Hebrew than you. He prays and studies the Bible intensively. And he’s a little bit too much like me.

Israel’s mind is a lot like my own — lopsided, with a sort of ADHD hyperfocus superpower verging on obsessive mania. He’s got a keen intellect, a passion for truth, a distrust of authority, a tremendous love of Jesus, and apparently, an allergy to structures not of his own design. I trust that he’s sincere, guileless, whole-hearted, and not driven by ulterior motives. I do not trust that he’s wholly stable, that he has a secure attachment style, or that we can entirely rule out the presence of a cluster A personality disorder. To be fair, I don’t think he claims to be any of these last things either. I say this with nothing but love for the man; again, he’s an eerily kindred spirit. To put it in the parlance of a video that recently went viral, Israel is a schizo, and schizos have an important place in the social ecosystem.

So, here’s what happened next: Israel Anderson was the only person who made sense to me. His explanations actually reconciled the problems in what I was seeing, when nothing else did. And his theology is SO very far from mainstream Christianity, it’s hard to know what to call it. (And no, it’s not Marcianism or Gnosticism; Israel has videos responding to those labels.)

Israel essentially believes, first of all, that it was a mistake to translate the Hebrew and Greek words for God. There are only a handful of them, and each has its own meaning. In English translations of the Bible, all words are essentially interchangeable — Lord, God, Lord God, The Lord your God, etc. However, Israel believes that Elohim is a title referring to a type of being — an eternal divine being, sometimes a council of them — we don’t actually know how many there are; while Yahweh is not actually the most high God, but a particular Elohim — a son of the most high God, and not an especially good one at that. In Israel’s theology, Yahweh is essentially a belligerent, envious, and deceitful younger brother of Jesus, while Jesus is the son who actually does the bidding of his Father in Heaven.

A few of many pieces of evidence Israel points to:

Yahweh is described as having dwelt among the people of Israel. In John 10:8 Jesus says that all who came before him were thieves and robbers. In John 8:44, Jesus calls the Pharisees, who worship Yahweh, sons of the devil, who was a murderer from the beginning. In Genesis, it is Yahweh who murders Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit. There’s much more here, and I am not going to do Israel’s theology justice; please listen to his lectures for yourself if you want, but don’t debate me on this — it’s not what I came here to do. My point is to share a personal journey. Bear with me.

Suffice to say that during my solo vacation time in Hawaii I probably listened to 20 hours of Israel’s lectures and found them incredibly enlightening. I shared them with my husband back home, who listened and followed along with my thought process. It was also a lonely time. I was in Hawaii to relax and heal, but in the absence of work and other real life pressures, going through a major theological shift expanded to feel like an existential crisis. I tried to talk with a friend or two, but no one was asking the same questions or felt the same urgency or significance that these questions held for me.

So there I was, in paradise, boogie boarding and snorkeling by day; the rest of the time, my mind suddenly much more free to solve complex theological problems than it is when I’m working and with family.

It started to feel very lonely, and I began to mourn my short-lived sense of having felt a sense of belonging within the body of Christ. Instead, I felt something far more familiar set back in: paranoia and obsessiveness. Feeling, once again, that I was part of a very small minority who knew the truth about something of great importance while the vast majority of “normies” were deceived. I’d been there before, but having always associated Christianity with the mainstream, I never expected finally making the decision to surrender my life to Jesus to be a thing that could lead me back this place.

And then, my husband broke his arm back at home. Everything changed in an instant. We were thrown into genuine crisis, overpowering the existential crisis. I rushed home. Thank God our friends were able to step in until I got home and for some time after, when my lumbering giant needed help in and out of bed that I was barely equipped to offer. He was in tremendous pain and immobilized until surgery, scheduled for the day after my birthday, which was supposed to have been spent in the ocean but was instead spent handling disaster. Then followed a week or two on such a heavy pain med regime that his personality was barely there. Meanwhile I was handling double my usual share of housework (normally he handles the kitchen and meal prep), and figuring out how to keep us financially solvent knowing he’d be unable to work for at least 3 months. It felt like I was working 16 hours a day, and it nearly broke my brain.

It really bothered me to be left with unanswered theological dilemmas while all this was going on, because my brain was stretched and my faith tested. I had just been praying quite sincerely that my Father in Heaven lead me not into a time of testing, when all this happened and I felt quite tested indeed. Did I freaking stutter, Lord?! Did I not deserve a longer honeymoon phase, a warmer welcome party, a more lavish dinner upon the long-awaited arrival home of the prodigal daughter?

My newfound faith had just been so significantly tested that I now was no longer sure whether or not I should call myself a Christian, and then I suddenly needed Jesus even a whole lot more, but I didn’t know how to reach him. What if everyone was wrong and worshipping the devil instead of God? What did it mean about the power of prayer at all, if so many could seek and not find the truth?

Meanwhile, though I tried to pray still, many prayers went unanswered. I recognized a dire need for friendship, but felt abandoned by those I most wanted to hear from. At my most vulnerable moments, I asked God to please send me a sign that someone was thinking of me… please, if anyone cared, give them a nudge and tell them to reach out to me… and my phone remained silent. I was crushed. But I couldn’t let on that I was crushed; I had to take on more work than ever before, in order to keep us afloat. I over-functioned by day, and was a mess at night. I ended a couple of friendships because I was so disappointed in people not looking out for me after all I had done to build community for them. I was not well.

Days, weeks, months passed like this as my husband made gradual improvements and was able to take on more for us. Now he will be returning to work soon. It’s spring, and beautiful outside. The days are light and bright, not dreary and doom-filled. We are still managing our financial problems, but they’re handled for now. Several goals have been met. It no longer feels like a crisis around here. My mood is better, and I’m back to accepting that my lot in this season of life seems to be having what I call “medium friends,” but no besties.

Meanwhile, my husband had a lot more time on his hands than usual. He continued studying the Bible and taking in several different theological perspectives simultaneously. Thank God for him — I mean that in so many ways. In this instance, I mean thank God I’m paired with someone with such a complementary disposition. Although we walk side-by-side in our exploration of intellectual and moral matters, we’re wired differently. Whereas my temperament is highly sensitive to a fault, he’s alexithymic and unoffendable and remarkably stable. Although quirky enough to be married to me, my husband is, fundamentally, a normie by nature. He had the quintessential childhood of a Gen X kid from a big, midwestern, Catholic family.

In other words, my husband can go down a rabbit hole like listening to Israel Anderson lectures, side by side with other Christian perspectives, and not completely lose his mind in the process. Me, though? I’m not so sure about that. I might have too much of a tendency toward paranoia and obsessiveness under stress to be able to handle that and still be a healthy person.

So where does that leave me?

I initially turned to the Christian faith in all sincerity, and earnestly followed that path where it led me. In the process, I discovered something incredibly unsettling, and enormous cognitive dissonance erupted, creating what felt like an existential crisis over a moral and intellectual problem. I then tried to make my mind, which LOVES to solve problems, work hard at solving a problem of such a nature that it cannot be definitively answered this side of death; meanwhile, the potential consequence of answering incorrectly could actually be eternal spiritual death! The stakes are high but the path to resolution is unclear. If I err on one side, I could end up forcing myself to believe things that feel untrue and — if Israel is right — inadvertently worshipping evil and never really knowing Jesus nor finding the narrow path that leads to eternal life. But if I err on the other side, I risk feeling chronically alone, paranoid, obsessive, and isolated; the fruits of that path are at least somewhat evident this side of Heaven and aren’t looking good so far. This terrible dilemma broke my brain, which I need for other things — most of all, for doing what my brain is actually good at. (And now you see how it all connects, how this circles back to my opening.)

Is it perhaps time for some intellectual humility? For surrender on a new level? For admitting I’m no theologian and never will be, and I’m as good as crippled in some intellectual departments… possibly even as retarded at theology as I am at history and finance?

I can’t believe that a loving Father God would send me to hell for getting theological questions wrong, or for setting them aside because grappling with them broke my brain and left me less able to help my family and clients. I’m compelled by what Israel calls the Good Father discourse, which really struck me back when I first read some of it in Luke 11 prior to coming across Israel’s work; I happened to mention this in my conversation with pastor and therapist Chris Legg, right before all of this went down. I still can’t reconcile this Good Father with the wrathful and merciless deity of the Old Testament, and I’m not sure that I want to try, or even to read the Old Testament. And I don’t want to believe that my eternal salvation really hangs in the balance of whether I can stretch my brain wide enough to tolerate cognitive dissonance the size of the Grand Canyon.

I can’t just believe Christians at face value, and frankly I think a lot of their explanations sound really off. But I also don’t think my Father in Heaven wants me to spend the rest of my life going down a rabbit hole that leaves me feeling so disconnected from the rest of humanity. Jesus told us we will be known by our love for one another; fear and hatred mean you’re getting colder, not warmer. I am really compelled by the near death experiences detailed by John Burke; the overarching theme of those who have met Jesus in Heaven is that he cares most about our relationships. He really does want us to love one another. That’s why he died on the cross for our sins, and arose on the third day — the day we now call Easter; the day I am writing this. He is risen.

So what I’ve discovered, I guess, for now, if you could call it that, is that I am allowed to be theologically stupid. I am allowed to have a brain that can’t go there without going crazy. God doesn’t want me to break my brain. God loves people much dumber than me when it comes to areas where I excel. I am sure he can tolerate my stupidity too, in the areas where I do not. God wants me to help people with the gifts he’s given me, including at least one rare gift. An ironic twist is that my rare gift closely resembles the gift of my brother in Christ, Israel Anderson, a kindred spirit. But whereas his is applied to theology, mine is not. He holds up a mirror to how my mind works. He shows me what it looks like when it goes down that particular rabbit hole. But I am not that rabbit, and that is not my burrow. (Insert clever easter bunny remark.)

When it comes to faith, a lot of mine has been fairly blind. I very well might be better off that way than trying to cultivate a third eye. A lot of my life, I didn’t know who I was praying to, but I felt a connection to God anyway, and sometimes he even gave me what I wanted. I asked for career guidance; I received it — I have an amazing career, actually. I asked for my husband — well, eventually, begged and pleaded for him, but also got really quiet so I could hear God’s guidance — and finally, eventually, this incredible man started doting on me and promised to never stop. And in many “God moments” in my life, I have blessed and been blessed. With providence, serendipity, protection, intuition, companionship, and love.

So, when it comes to faith, perhaps I am meant to be a naive normie. A spiritual dumb-dumb. That’s so scary to say. Normies can be gullible, misled, fooled, taken advantage of, vulnerable, and completely wrong. I pride myself on not being that way on key issues I care about. Regarding all the many topics I lack special knowledge of, where I have little choice but to follow mainstream advice, it’s genuinely scary to think that there could be any parallels. In other words, as an expert on my own rather obscure niche, I understand the grave consequences of naively following the masses. To think that I could be equally a part of another naive mass, when the stakes may be equally high, regarding some issue I’m poorly equipped to discern, is quite unsettling. But what choice do I have? I can’t become an expert on everything. Anyway, we’re all going to die and we’re all probably being poisoned by a thousand different chemicals every minute. Oh well. I just hope eternal life isn’t at stake here.

Perhaps a better path than being paranoid (and ending up isolated), or trying to become an expert at everything (and breaking your brain), is to simply pray to God for protection and discernment as needed in day-to-day life for the decisions that are actually yours to make. It’s wild how it took me writing this whole essay, all the way til the end, and getting ready to publish it, before I realized that last sentence was a missing key.

We went to a new church today. We won’t be going back there. The message was actually pretty helpful for me — a sermon on doubt and faith that met me where I was today — but I found the pastor’s voice grating. The church we were going to before is prettier, and the pastor’s voice more pleasant, but requires a longer commute. In every church we’ve been to, I haven’t liked the feeling of wading through impersonal hordes of people. We might not ever find a church that truly feels like a spiritual home for us. But here is what I do know.

I really am not sure about the whole Yahweh-is-the-Father thing. Sorry guys. I might be with Israel on this one, but still decide anyway to be a Christian normie who just accepts that I am a spiritual dumb-dumb who knows nothing, because I’ve got a life on earth here to live and I cannot become a paranoid, obsessive person. It’s possible I will never pick up where I left off in the Old Testament.

I know Jesus is the son of God, that he died on the cross for our sins, and arose on the third day, and ascended to Heaven. It took me years to get there. I had to sort through a lot of evidence. I arrived in October, and I’m still there. I still believe this.

I also believe that we meet him when we die. I believe Heaven is a real place, and I’d like to spend eternity there, but I really have no concept of what this means. None of us do.

We don’t get into Heaven by being good, because we can never be good enough to be perfect, and — talk about breaking your brain — trying is a recipe for disaster. Do my fellow Enneagram 1’s hear me? We get there through Jesus and what he has done for us. All we have to do is accept his love, often in the form of grace. I believe that accepting his love is a lifelong endeavor and the only daily question that really matters. What does it mean today for me to accept the love of Jesus Christ, my lord and savior? That sounds like a good question to live by.

How amazing would it be if what God wanted for me turned out to be not terribly dissimilar to what I’d say to any given 22-year-old seeking honest life advice:

Kid, stop trying to show off what you know. It doesn’t matter if you graduated summa cum laude; we all actually think your college knowledge is pretty worthless here in the real world until you get some experience under your belt and develop integrity. Accept that you are loved. Yes, life is scary and hard and punishing and uncertain and we’re all going to die, but you’ve been given things to work with; use them wisely and with gratitude; don’t waste them. Don’t underestimate how much the world is filled with good-ish people who want to help you. Character and relationships are more important than everything else, so be good to those around you. Be kind and humble. Always be learning, but stop well before any learning breaks your brain; don’t hurt yourself. Go down the rabbit holes you’re uniquely suited to follow with a passion; those point you towards God’s purpose for your life. Immerse yourself in the studies and reflections that draw you in, where you can’t stop learning and time becomes dilated. Feel free to ignore most other subjects most of the time, unless it obviously needs your attention; but be humble about it. Admit that the things you’re not drawn to and haven’t immersed yourself in are probably areas where others know a lot more than you do. Trust the experts if you can, the consensus if you must; try to discern the character of the experts and leaders without becoming paranoid; but accept that you may receive terrible guidance and be misled, because wherever there are sheep, there are bad shepherds. God will set things just; he hates to see his sheep led astray. When you make mistakes, God knows if you should have known better or couldn’t have known better; that is part of what is meant by “he knows what is in your heart.” You will succeed and excel in some areas and fail pathetically in others. It’s okay. Your worth and dignity do not depend on avoiding failure. You will die, and before that, you will grow old. Aging starts earlier and more gradually than you think. Try to prevent illness and limitation, but when they arrive, accept them as part of life. Life will eventually erode you down to practically nothing, and what’s left is your soul. As the body returns to the earth, so too the soul will be returned to its maker. See to it that, despite all of life’s distractions and temptations, scratches and dings, the soul returns to its maker with its capacity to love intact.

*Update: where I originally put Cluster C, I meant Cluster A. My apologies.