I’m skeptical of the Truth. It’s not that I don’t believe there is a truth, but I’m wary of anyone who thinks they have it. I find it hard to trust the voice of anyone who says, this is the true way. I’m suspicious of five-minute hacks to change your life. I question do this next time that happens advice from people who think they know anything about what’s going to happen next and what the perfect solution will be. I don’t believe the truth lasts. I believe it changes as time goes forward. It’s like walking on a wire stretched out a mile long to the opposite cliffs of a canyon. The truth sways with the wind, rises and falls with each step of my feet, and sometimes, I will completely fall off before my harness arrests me to that very wire. I guess I’m saying that I am always connected to the Truth, but it’s flexible as much as it is sturdy.

Am I making any sense?

I have trouble with the truth because I was trained from adolescence in the enduring, eternal answers to everything. Growing up in an Evangelical family, I shoveled the Truth into my mouth without question. All the answers kept coming and coming. No one uttered dissent, and just one voice of opposition or difference might have been enough to shake me out of the daydream, but that was the structure my parents created: no dissenters. I believed with all my heart, no questions asked until I was about fifteen. By then, I was more concerned with having the freedom to meet people my age outside of the social places my parents conscripted. Those being church and hockey—both over an hour’s drive away from our property in northeastern Washington, where we lived deep in the woods in a time before blanketed cell service and internet connection. It wasn’t the idyllic property you might think of out in the country. No open fields. No real farms. Just the shadowy north side of a mountain surrounded by a young, dense forest of evergreens. Even though I was surrounded by so much unfenced space, I could not see far in any direction I looked where the dark, thick forest did not block the view. It was a crowded second or third growth since it was last logged in the eighties. You couldn’t walk through the forest in most places without dodging a web of branches, most dead and snapped like small, dry bones. On all sides, we were surrounded by old logging tracts offloaded to folks like my parents who wanted to escape the suburbs for cheap. It was a small yet big place in the woods at the end of a two-mile dirt road that the county didn’t and still doesn’t maintain. In that place, I was homeschooled and rarely left except for church on Sundays or hockey practice in the fall and winter. After the first year, the novelty of the woods wore off, and I began to count the days until Sunday or the months until hockey season returned. Church was mandatory, but hockey was conditional. My mother told me that if I came home swearing from practice, she’d stop driving me. She always worried about influences swaying me from God. Yet, none of the guys I played hockey with had big thoughts about God and Truth, and no matter how much they swore, talked about movies I hadn’t seen, music I’d never heard of, or doing things with girls that I had only imagined, it wasn’t God I hoped they’d sway me from. I hoped they’d ask me a question, but I was terrified of this possibility because I knew nothing about their world. I knew my mom was trying to keep me safe because that was important to her, but those years were hard. I always sat in the corner and smiled like a foreigner who didn’t understand anything except body language, and even then, I missed some cues. No one ever asked to hang out outside of hockey, and I figured it was because they knew I lived so far away. At least, that’s what I told myself.

            At fifteen, I wasn’t worried about the Truth anymore because it had made me so lonely. As a kid, it seemed like the Truth blocked my ability to have a single friend. In my head, the Truth equaled a loneliness I didn’t want anymore. I was alone and angry all the time.

That was around the time when I got a small MP3 player for Christmas, and since we’d had a phone line put in with the electricity, we got dial-up internet, giving me a razor-thin connection to the outside world. It opened the possibility to music that wasn’t made by Christian bands, something akin to blasphemy that could get my MP3 player revoked and end my internet privileges, but it was a risk I was willing to take. I was starved for knowledge. I downloaded heavy metal and rap songs from torrent sites without anyone knowing. Then, because we were all so close in the trailer and Mom’s hearing was good, I couldn’t risk her hearing the sounds that would bleed out my headphones. So I went outside to the slight rise in the woods, above a gravel pad that we’d leveled for a garage we never made, where a huge wooden dumpster spilled the smell of fermented decay from our trash, and I sat down in the grass between the trees and listened to someone scream in my ears. I always picked a spot so I couldn’t see the trailer, cars, or dirt driveway. I wanted to see nothing but trees. I tried to pretend that nothing else existed.

In this way, trees became my earliest and oldest friends. Trees became my safe space. They did not seem to care what I was doing or who I was and sheltered me without conditions. In the trees, I felt a peace I’d never felt inside my home, church, or anywhere. I studied their frond and needled fingers and tested the texture of their bark with my bare hands. I always had sap on my fingers. I always rubbed them in the dirt and pine needles to get the stickiness off. I drank in their smell, that citrus and spice that tickled my nose and forever after made me think of the color green. I looked up to them for their patience, curiosity, sturdiness, and sociality. I went into the forest every day. The only other option was to be cooped up in the trailer with my brothers and our mom while our dad was working. I envied that he got to leave five days out of the week and that he spent so much time with the outside world. But at least I had my trees and my heavy metal music.

Being a teenager in those years was tough, but I believed we were doing what God wanted us to do. So, I didn’t question it. I was a student of the End Times; signs of the rapture were never far from my mother’s tongue, and at every significant historical event—like Y2K or the September 11^th attacks—I watched the sky for Jesus’ return. When he didn’t come back, when we had been living for almost six years in a quickly breaking travel trailer with a shed on one side for a living room, when no amount of prayer could make up for my parents’ unsound financial decisions, I started to wonder. I began to resent God for making us live this way, for messing up the world so badly that we had to be out all alone. What was God trying to tell us by making those years so hard, cramped, and lonely?

            I didn’t understand at the time that my parents were countercultural. I didn’t know they were the kind of people my older self might look in the eye and have many questions. That there was a reason my parents didn’t have any friends, never had anyone over for dinner, and only family members came to things like birthdays or Easter. It took me even longer to realize our move to the forest had little to do with the End Times and almost everything to do with their fractured relationship with the world.

Justified by experiences that were never fully explained, that happened long before I was born, my parents lost their trust in people and decided only to put their trust in God. My parents fell hard into the category of those who only believe what is written in the Bible and take it as literal. They believed God whispered to them in Prophecy. As a child, my mother often said she’d had a prophecy about us living in the woods and having a cabin there. One day, it would happen. Then I turned ten, and we left the suburbs for the wilderness. Except there was no cabin, just a lonely patch of land in a quiet corner of the world and a travel trailer for a home. It was what God intended. It was the Truth. Like any kid who believes in the people who care for him, and at the time, they seemed the sanest out of our family, I followed my parents’ lead.

Yet, I understand that they did something many people now fantasize about. They escaped. They got their hands on cheap, remote property in the woods. A quiet place where time moves slower as if it’s the beginning of the world—like there was never a before or after. A place that envelops you in its drowsy arms and tells you to rest. It was that place, and some days I miss it. As a kid, I didn’t know that living way out in the woods might be considered strange if you had kids you homeschooled and rarely left the place. I didn’t realize that was questionable until I was far enough away that it had no hold over me.

            That has a lot to do with how I see the truth. Doctrine and physical space had become the same during my formative years. Though I knew the outside world existed and some people lived what my parents’ called “Godless” lives, I didn’t know much about either. I had one truth, which crushed me when I realized it wasn’t the only one. In that way, my life was built upon an incredible and totalizing fiction that presented itself as the Truth. I think this is where my skepticism comes from, and it’s good to be skeptical at times, but I also have been waiting to plant my flag in the ground for all the years that I pulled it out of the land of Evangelicalism. My flag is getting heavy, and I want to roll it off my shoulder and drop it on the ground. I want to feel the sweet relief of muscle and bone when that weight is gone. I wonder how long it will be and how far I must search before I find the truth again. Maybe those who have never been inside a religion from a young age won’t understand, but I believe all those who have had an experience like mine can relate to this feeling at some point in their lives.

My relationship with skepticism is so powerful because of the rug pull on my consciousness at such a late age. When that happened, I didn’t even have the chance to pull up my flag. I was falling off the edge of nowhere. Sometimes, I forget how destabilizing it was to be introduced to a different world until so late in my teens when things were becoming solid. I think that’s why I went right back to religion after a brief stint of rebellion between my eighteenth and twenty-first year because I had never pulled up my flag. I returned and thought I could be happy within the confines of the Christian faith, and I stayed, sometimes begrudgingly, until my mid-twenties. It offered me a social life that I never had. Being alone, I’d learned, was worse than anything. I was there to make friends, not read the bible or be touched by God, even though I did get swept up in it from time to time, weeping to a song I’d sung full-throated as a kid or when a pastor said a prayer that felt like it was meant for me. The church is like a home. It’s a place where you get to see people who all want to be better and who go to heaven instead of hell. What was the harm? I asked myself. It’s like insurance. These people weren’t as radical as my parents. They surprised me with how cool they could be. I was enamored by this different kind of Christianity that allowed more self-expression. Guys had stylish haircuts and leather jackets, and women dressed cute instead of the baggy modesty I’d come to accept. We went out afterward to the bar to watch the Seahawks games and drank beer from pitchers. There weren’t so many strict rules. People swore and told jokes that treaded lightly into the profane. It seemed to be a great place, and I thought because they weren’t so extreme, they had the Truth, but they didn’t. Nobody does.

            One of the most impactful things I read in those days was the Buddhist parable about the five blind men and the elephant, how all of them touch a different part of the animal, and all of them come up with different, exclusionary answers to what the object in front of them is. It made me wonder how big my existence would be if I looked in places other than where I’d been my whole life. I had to see for myself; I had to ask more questions, and I had to get very unsure about the world to let go of Christianity for good. That’s what I did. I pulled up my flag, and I’ve had it resting on my shoulder ever since. I’m afraid to plant it somewhere and find it is the wrong spot. I’m conscious of my blindness, how I must trace this whole thing with my fingers before I can arrive at an answer. The older I get, the more I realize that what was true five years ago is not the same as it was the next year or the one after. It’s like grabbing a wet bar of soap. I can only hold on lightly. Over the years, I began to understand why I had so much trouble with the truth, but it only synthesized for me recently.

            What is true right now is true.

It might not be true tomorrow, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Tomorrow’s standards should not measure today’s truth. What is true in a moment does not make it any less true because it no longer serves me the next moment.

Indeed, the more consecutive days or years that something remains true is what I would call a central thread, and it is part of the cable I am walking to the other side of the canyon.

And, of course, I’m speaking not of the external world but of the inner self and its relationship to the external world. It’s strange to accept that something may be true right now but won’t be true in the future. I was born into certainty and crave it, but I’m starting to accept this. What is true now may no longer be applicable in the future because, like it or not, I am a biodegradable product of the earth locked in a transformation process. Every step I take along the wire is true. It will always be what led me to this point, even if it no longer applies. Whether I can rely on today’s truth at some point in the future is a question only time will answer.

            I’m so good at doubting myself, running myself through a lie-detector test each time I stumble upon something that seems essential. I don’t want to plant my flag because I don’t know if this is the Truth yet. I’m guilty of thinking that when I plant the flag, I won’t be able to pull it out and move it again. I will be like some retiree settling down in a cabin surrounded by pasture and living out the rest of my life in a spot like my parents. This has been my crutch, my never-ending injury, an internal wobble in the face of anything that resembles certainty. But I’ve realized it’s more than just my doubt.

            It is my inability to let go of my belief that there is a Truth.

            I believe Truth exists, and this is a Truth for oneself to discover.

Yet, in the stubbornness of my belief, I have overlooked the power of all the truth that led me in search of it—that every step I took, every calculation I based a decision on, was true. Just because I know more now doesn’t make it any less so. Little truth and big Truth—I must believe these two things exist. One is the call down a holy path, and the other is the steps that I have taken towards it.  

            It has taken me a long time to accept that Truth is a place I may never arrive. Regardless, every forward, backward, and sideways step was true. I’m only just now realizing that I can plant my flag, and it’s okay to move it later. It’s OK to rest in the present. It’s OK to pick up and move when I learn something new. I’m trying to remember that every moment is a step rather than an arrival. And that doesn’t make it any less true.