I Don’t Have The Luxury of Being An Atheist

I recently told a friend, “I don’t have the luxury of being an atheist like you”, and I meant that in the most gentle way possible.

My friend who doesn’t believe in God does her best to dissuade me whenever I bring up something about my religion. It usually starts like this, “I had this revelation…” and then she replies with “Maybe it isn’t God. Maybe it is just you?” And then it ends with me saying, “I’m consistently praying for you” because I actually am praying for her.

But when I told her that “I don’t have the luxury of being an atheist like you”, what I meant was, God has revealed too much of Himself to me, that saying to myself that He doesn’t exist will be the same as lying to myself.

How do I explain the dreams, visions He has laid in my heart years before they come to pass, the lives He has saved through burdens He put in my heart to pray for those people beforehand?

I see why my friend feels the way she does. When something goes wrong, for her, it’s just chance, bad luck, bad timing, bad systems. There’s no wrestling match at 2 am. There’s no “why would You allow this.” There’s just what happened, and what she does next.

I used to think that was freedom.

But I have built my life, more than once, on ground that had no business holding weight.

I’ve walked into rooms three sizes too big for me, moved countries with no support system but myself, navigated job loss, depression, suicidal thoughts, with nothing but a conviction that this was not the end of the story. Not optimism or positive thinking.

Just something stronger than that: a belief and strong feeling that I was being held by something bigger and outside of my own understanding, because my own understanding was just not always enough to explain how I was still standing.

For people who are atheists, and who wear it well, it tends to work best when the ground is relatively stable. When you have enough margin, financially, legally, emotionally, that the universe being indifferent doesn’t feel like a threat, just a fact. Indifference is bearable when you’re not depending on anything to be for you.

I have not always had that margin.

There have been seasons where the only thing standing between me and total collapse was a decision to believe that I was not forgotten, by a process, a system, a country, a God. Not because the evidence was overwhelming. Sometimes because the evidence was thin and I needed a reason to keep moving anyway.

The evidence of belief with atheists almost always boils down to intellect. The argument of who brought the most objectivity to the table, who has read the most books, who has the most evidence.

But for me, belief functions less like a conclusion and more like a weight bearer. You simply cannot debate about removing the weight-bearer of a house you are still living in. You simply don’t have that luxury.

If you’ve read to this point, you are probably saying to yourself, “okay I get it. What happens when everything falls into place and you no longer need God per se?”

It’s a fair question, and I don’t think the honest answer is a straightforward one. What I can tell you is that in seasons of my life where the function has shifted from ‘weight bearing of the house’, because I became stable and technically didn’t need Him, God became the reason why I bothered to ‘furnish the house’.

God’s purpose and leading has continued to be a guiding light even in my day to day, that I can point His hand out in situations that I would have otherwise handled terribly.

The need for God evolved from me needing something to now wanting his company, to sit in a quiet place and ask him questions about how the world works. To intercede for my friends and family. It became a situation where I went to bed every day hoping to hear from God in my dreams. Or even just asking God to order my footsteps every day.

A relationship you only maintain while you’re desperate isn’t a relationship. It’s a transaction. What convinced me that mine wasn’t a transaction is that it didn’t end when I became sufficient.

So, while I don’t have the “luxury” of being an atheist, I do have the luxury of a God who has stayed with me long enough to become someone I’ll choose again and again even when I don’t have to.

Isaiah 41: 10 So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.