Walking through my faith deconstruction/reconstruction journey has required a lot of vulnerability. That is why there is a paywall below. If you want to support my writing but do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation. I will give you one month of access to all paid content.
The previous chapter
And now
In Indianapolis, we had finally found adult friendships. We had people we could depend on who had traveled with us through some difficult waters. I had a sister living geographically close and my husband Jeff got along with our brother-in-law. We had a church and jobs where we had worked to build strong connections.
All of that disappeared in a matter of weeks.
Years later, I can look back and admit that I didn’t really want to move on after we moved. I was still clinging to the past and mourning what I had lost when we packed up our cars, our daughter, and our dog and moved two hours northeast.
But I was also completely out of my element. Yes, I had experienced many difficult moves throughout my childhood. Yes, we had moved twice since getting married so I could take new teaching positions. But each time I moved, whether I wanted the life change or not, I never left my primary non-biological ecosystem: the Church.
Every time we moved when I was a kid, we had an automatic community. I went to Sunday School at our church. I went to confirmation at our church. I went to youth group at our church. When I started teaching in Illinois, I had a faculty support system, regardless of how little help it actually offered. When we moved to Indianapolis, the school community welcomed me and Jeff, bringing us both into the fold with faculty gatherings. I had people to eat lunch with and talk with before and after school and the close proximity led to deep and lasting friendships.
When we moved to Fort Wayne, Jeff still had many of the same coworkers he had before. Yes, he had new colleagues to develop new relationships with, but he wasn’t the new kid. His boss tried to make me feel at home when I visited Jeff at the plant and around his coworkers, but I felt increasingly alone. I had to find my people from scratch. I had no job to offer me proximity to potential friends. I had no principal recommending where I should attend church, so we had to figure it out on our own. We were in a city full of the whole spectrum of Lutheran churches, and I had to find the right place with no guidance or context before we attended, other than what I could find on the internet. I had a cousin in town with whom I had become increasingly distant. I had college classmates who were going through their own personal shit at the time and couldn’t offer me the support I needed.
I was just so alone.
We began the long search for a new church in a city full of options. We first attended the Lutheran church closest to us, but were immediately turned off by the overt display of patriotism and the fear mongering against our Muslim neighbors from the pulpit. So we kept searching, struggling to find a spiritual home offering opportunities for our young family.
Because I couldn’t find a teaching job right away, we took the financial risk as I started graduate school. I rushed into summer classes as soon as we closed on our house; I had to take the summer class if I wanted to keep the Teaching Assistant position I had been offered. The TA position would help pay for my schooling, fund our monthly payment on my car, and leave enough for me to pay for childcare for our daughter three days a week. My graduate classes got me out of the house and with other adults, and teaching freshman composition four times a week kept me actively in the classroom. I loved the academic work, but it was still often isolating and lonely.
