Freedom, by Surprise
a bigger surprise than most
Freedom comes from the strangest, most unexpected places.
It can come from insight, from awareness, or from letting go.
It can come from the mercy of thwarted expectations.
Or it can come from a sudden realization: you were once hostage to a desperate want, and now you want something else.
When it comes, it can be startling. Even shocking. It can take time to understand what shifted, to examine what’s different, and be sure.
But once you are sure that the thing which once had a grip on you no longer does, it can be quietly exhilarating. A private kind of awe.
It reminds me of getting my braces off. I ran my tongue across my teeth for days, reminding myself over and over that this was normal, this was the way my mouth was supposed to feel.
Eventually, it was just…my mouth again.
That’s the closest comparison I have for what happened to me recently. And trying to understand that shift — running my thoughts over it the way I once did my teeth — is why I sat down to write.
I have spent my entire adult life longing to believe in a God — specifically, the Christian one. The Father in the sky, the one whose love is infinite. The one who, they say, wanted me so badly that He designed me, deliberately; knew me before I was born, and loved me enough to die for me.
That God does not exist. But I wanted to believe He did, so badly it felt like hunger and thirst braided into one unfillable ache.
And so, for most of my adult life, I’ve whispered prayers at bedtime, just in case. Fluffed pillows and conjured the Sunday School Jesus — the one who welcomed children, beings with no status in ancient Judea.
The Jesus who pulled children into his lap, held them, treated them as valuable and worthy and lovable, and called them precious.
And I’d say something like, “I’m wrong all the time, and I hope I’m wrong about this. If You exist — if anyone’s there — I want to know You.”
But this week was different.
Four nights in a row now, I haven’t said anything at all.
A Familiar Dynamic
Not long ago, a relationship I treasure — with one of the people I love most — went through one of those human, painful, rupture-and-repair cycles.
These moments terrify me. I’m far more familiar with being ghosted than being forgiven. And so is he.
When I disappoint someone, even mildly, for any reason, I expect to be left behind.
But we talked. Even scared, we talked. We found the landmines we’d accidentally stepped on in each other, and why. And we’re good now.
Maybe even better. Because when something survives a rupture, you know there’s something real underneath. Something that matters more than comfort or self-protection. A willingness to stretch — even bleed a little — to meet the other person where they are: flaws, fuck-ups, and all.
That kind of grace softens the future. Even for me.
And it taught me something, too — something that stayed with me in a quieter way.
I started that conversation with a confession: that I didn’t know how much of my pain was truly about what had happened, and how much was old fear, from older wounds, handed to me before I had words for them.
It was both, of course. The proportions are impossible to pin down.
And I feel that same ambiguity now.
I can already hear the objections.
I’ve made some of them myself.
I know the Bible. I can exegete better than most laypeople and some seminarians. I know the arguments.
I know the fruit of the Spirit. I know the Sermon on the Mount. I know that merely claiming Christianity means nothing.
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’...”
I know the story of the sheep and the goats, and how the only difference between those God welcomed and those He condemned was what they did and didn’t do.
Not what they did and didn’t say.
I know all of that. Just as I know that at least some of this — maybe even a lot — is about the unresolved griefs of childhood.
But I also know this:
No matter how angry I got.
No matter how disappointed.
No matter how disgusted by the hypocrisy or cruelty I sometimes saw…
That hunger never left. It never even diminished.
Until now.
And I didn’t even have to try.
The Moment of Epiphany
I’m frustrated by the specifics of what set me free, because the whole thing is so goddamn stupid.
I don’t want to comment on it at all. Americans collectively have Political Borderline Personality Disorder, a diagnosis we seem determined to prove accurate. Republicans will not hold power forever. The cycle — overreaction to overreaction to overreaction — will keep escalating. We’ll keep refusing to learn a single, solitary thing.
The details don’t matter. I wish they did. I wish they were profound. I wish they made this essay easier to write.
But I didn’t get to choose.
What happened was this: I saw a woman, celebrated by many who claim to follow Christ, justify cruelty toward a child by declaring him inherently bad — “calling him out for what he was.” Her words echoed ghosts from my own past: my father’s voice telling me I was worthless (“called out for what (s)he was”) from the day I was born, my mother nodding, “It’s not like we haven’t tried.” I knew that voice. I’d lived in it.
Yes, I failed the test, too.
My thoughts were self-centered, leaping to the big picture — how abusers justify cruelty by deciding children are fixed entities, inherently good or bad, in need of harsh correction to be saved. I was horrified, not just by her but by those who cheered her, people who claim to prioritize a culture where children are safe and can thrive. My initial reaction wasn’t concern for the boy but for what it meant — for me, for the culture, for how far we’ve fallen.
I did exactly what they did: I used a child as an avatar for my own fears.
But eventually, I saw him.
Eventually, he stopped being a symbol and became a person. A child I could hope for.
I hoped he would not always be what he is now: a weapon in someone else’s proxy war. A tool for the use of adults. That he would get to be what he is: a little boy who behaved badly, who could be taught better — not “called out” by strangers but corrected by people who love him. Guided. Protected. Given the room to grow.
I thought of him and wished for that.
For awhile, I lingered there — not on the discourse, not on the strategy, not on the tit-for-tat of whose incentive structure would be strengthened or the morality of rewarding degeneracy with virality — but on the bitter irony that the golden ticket in America used to be talent or, sometimes, tragedy.
Now it's turning a child into a culture war cudgel by shouting racial slurs at him in public.
“The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!”
—2 Samuel 1:19, KJV
And that made something else come into focus.
What I saw, with startling clarity, was this: not one person — not one Christian, not one human who claims to have been transformed, regenerated, made new by the power of a risen God — expressed the slightest concern for a little boy.
Not for his needs. Not for what might’ve driven his behavior. Not for the danger he might be in, from the cameraman or anyone else.
The people of Christ — the One who welcomed children and called them precious — could only talk strategy. They swung between self-congratulatory glee at “sending a message” by making a millionaire of the woman who called a child something Jesus never would, and performative anxiety over whether the optics would hurt their side.
But if their story was true — if they had been transformed by the Christ who, literally while being executed, loved his sadistic, brutal executioners so much that under the agony of ongoing torture, He asked God to forgive them — then the culture war and the strategy and the justifications and the tribal tit-for-tat would not be the all-encompassing concern.
They wouldn’t be so quick to reduce a child to a symbol, or to place the most basic moral responsibilities of adults — like the welfare of children — at the very bottom of the priority list, if they bother to list them at all.
Believe me, I’m not judging. I do not believe human beings are capable of being transformed into creatures who love so radically.
And that’s the point.
That kind of transformation simply doesn’t happen.
It didn’t happen here, not even in the most Christian-majority country that has ever existed.
It might be possible, if deities existed. But they do not.
And without them, we’re left with what humans can offer: small, imperfect gestures. A little more patience. A little more attention. The decision to try, even when it’s late.
Humans can do better than I did — I believe that. We can notice sooner. Love more bravely. Center the child the first time.
But that’s all we can do: better.
Becoming something entirely new, born again into a vessel of divine love, remade by the Spirit of God? No.
That was never ours to do. Because no one is coming.
We will save ourselves, or we won’t be saved at all.
Just A Boy
And so, when the self-pity ebbed and the noise faded, I found myself thinking about the boy again — hoping, with everything in me, that someone will be there to help him become a child and not a tool.
Is that love? Does it mean I’m becoming a little bit less self-centered and a little bit more capable of love?
I’m not sure, but on balance, I don’t think so.
If nothing else, I think “love” is a big word that requires more than thoughts and prayers.
But I do believe that it’s closer to love — and closer to what I want to be, an adult who is fully capable of appreciating the nature of children and prioritizing their needs as humans, not as political tools — than I saw from anyone who claims to know the Father.
From anyone who believes that the same Jesus who welcomed children and called them precious has personally transformed them.
I am not praising myself here. I failed my own test, and I failed it badly.
My reaction was self-centered. The boy was an afterthought to an afterthought to an afterthought. I arrived at concern for him only after concern for myself, only after careful attention to how upsetting I personally found it to see a woman with a child abuser’s view of children — that they are fixed entities, and some of them are inherently bad entities who it is laudable and virtuous and brave to “call out” as such — become a cultural hero.
But eventually, after the self-centeredness was done, after the fear and disgust and horror at just how badly our society continues to betray children, I did hope for him, not for me.
And that hope, that moment of seeing him as a child, not a symbol or a tool, changed something I hadn’t expected.
I hoped that someone in that kid’s life can be like the story of the Christ for him: someone who would welcome him and “call him out for what he is.”
What all children are: precious.
And something about that shift, shifted me.
Something about wanting love and freedom for him, instead of the certainty of belief for me, made space in my chest that I didn’t know was tight.
Something about wanting to see another human being — an actual child — find his way to the love in the story, set me free from the hunger to believe.
The hunger I’d carried for so long began to leave me, like breath exhaled after a held note.
For years, I believed that kind of transformation — the shift from ego to empathy — had to come from God. From grace. From a light beyond the world.
But maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe it comes from something more human, and more difficult: radical attention. The willingness to see another person not as metaphor or enemy or reflection — but as real. As redeemable.
Maybe what I needed all along wasn’t to be chosen by God.
Maybe what I needed was to choose someone else.
And that night, for the first time I can remember, I didn’t ask to be loved.
I didn’t ask for anything at all.
I accepted that I was alone, and that no one is coming to save me.
Maybe this is what it feels like to have the braces off.
And to realize that no one noticed — not even you — when the grooves on the inside of your mouth began to fade.
Comments are off because it is absolutely predictable that people will want to argue the specifics of the insanity, about which I truly could not care less at this point, and/or proselytize me. So, no.