In 2011 we arrived in Delaware and I began my work as a teacher, instructing high school students in Algebra and Calculus. I enjoyed the work, especially interacting with the students. As a Catholic school, we were instructed to lead the students in prayer before each class. I felt a little awkward doing this, as I wasn’t Catholic. I saw some of the other teachers make the sign of the cross and say a rote prayer. I didn’t know any of those, and I didn’t want to imitate something I didn’t understand, so I just prayed the way I knew how — spontaneously. And nobody seemed to mind, which was good.

We also attended Mass every Wednesday in the school cafeteria. The principal, Fr. L., would celebrate the Mass. The music department led the singing, with a handful of students singing and even playing guitar. The music felt like soft folk from the ’70s. It sounded pleasant. I didn’t think of Catholic Mass as a place that had guitars, but there it was. I admit there was a slight dissonance, though. I had been wrestling with modern worship music in my own tradition, and I didn’t expect to encounter something similar in a Catholic setting. I realized I had come in with my own assumptions — I imagined incense and chanting — and it surprised me to find something much more familiar instead.

Maria and I spent a few weeks looking for a church. It was more difficult than I expected. One church we visited turned out to be Pentecostal. The people greeted us warmly — and as a young couple, churches always seem to greet you extra well — but the worship soon became far more expressive than anything I was used to. People began speaking in tongues, moaning, yelling, stepping over pews, and even running around. It grew so intense that the sermon was cancelled.

Seeing all this made me feel uncomfortable and even angry. I just wanted to leave, but the only way out was through the door at the front of the sanctuary. I would have had to walk past the entire congregation and the pastor to get out. I was ready to do it, but Maria grabbed my arm and told me to stay put. So we sat there, and I tried to steady myself while the service continued.

When it finally ended, we got up to leave. A couple rushed over to us to explain that this wasn’t what church normally looked like. I brushed them off and got out into the parking lot as fast as I could. I was seething. I knew I wasn’t ready to walk into anything like that again.

Finally we found a Baptist church and felt comfortable enough to begin attending regularly. The people were nice, though their style and concerns felt more traditional and conservative than what I had grown used to. In a lot of ways they reminded me of my own spiritual upbringing. They were deeply engaged in conversations about culture and the end times. Since attending college and spreading my wings, so to speak, I no longer felt like that represented my own personal spiritual identity, but it felt familiar. It felt like home.

They sang traditional hymns from a hymn book, which I appreciated, as I was antagonistic toward the contemporary Christian music industry. And the sermons were serious, encouraging us not to conform to this world but to live for Christ. One time they even had an evangelist come. He preached a real fire and brimstone sermon — the first I ever witnessed in person. It was intense, and I found myself both surprised and slightly amused by how passionately he spoke about the culture wars and the problems of our modern time. I left feeling a mix of fascination and bewilderment.

Meanwhile I continued to grow relationships at the school. I felt a strong connection to the students, and because it was a small private school where everybody knew each other, Maria and I started to feel like part of the family. I had the opportunity to chaperone several spiritual retreats during the year. One of them was to the shrine of Saint Katherine Drexel — my first time seeing relics of a saint. Her life story was amazing: she had given up her massive inheritance to serve the poor and needy, both in Philadelphia and across the country, particularly among the native population. I felt moved as we entered the shrine and saw some of her relics and personal items. The idea that saints exist today, not just in the ancient deserts, really spoke to me, and I was thankful for the opportunity to do this retreat. It made me quietly reflect on my own life, and I found myself wanting to be more attentive to the people around me who needed help.

Another time we attended a retreat at a campground on the eastern shore of Maryland. It was calmer than the retreats I grew up with. There was no big band, no passionate preaching. Instead, it was a quiet, reflective time. Of course we had lots of fun and games too. But I saw the students doing things I was always told Catholics don’t do — reading the Bible, praying to Jesus from their hearts, worshipping with their hands up and their eyes closed, making decisions about whether to enter ministry as priests, nuns, or lay people. There was even a special service just for the boys to help them discern if they felt called to the priesthood. To me this spoke of a living faith exhibited by the students. Their devotion ran deeper than I had expected, and it left me examining my own.

I was taken aback by all of this. The things I had been taught about Catholics in my upbringing simply didn’t match what I was seeing. These people loved Christ and wanted to serve Him and follow Him the best way they knew how. It left me wondering how my understanding had become so narrow in the first place.
This revelation was good for me, but it also caused some issues. The new things I was learning about Catholics, combined with the rational way I was taught to think as a math major, were causing me to leave behind a lot of my assumptions and presuppositions about faith. I was starting to see the modern evangelical church system in a different light — it felt increasingly manufactured to me, especially the music. At the same time, the teachings I had grown up with were becoming harder to hold onto, and I found myself questioning whether they were even true at all. Young Earth Creationism, rapture timelines, the culture-war mindset, the caricatures of Catholics, even my own spiritual rut – it was all pressing in at once. It made my foundation feel shaky, as though everything I had built my faith on was threatening to come crashing down.

In the runup to the birth of our son Evan, the students at the school threw Maria and me a baby shower. It was so kind of them, one of my best memories from that school. In March of 2012 Evan was born. The Baptist church was good to us during this time, bringing us meals and offering to do whatever they could to help us out. The generosity of others meant more to us than we could express, especially as we were alone, without her or my parents to help us much with the new baby. Their kindness made us feel less isolated, as though we had been folded into a larger family.

Eventually, though, they began pressing us to become official members of the church. We did not want to become members. Looking back, I think we made too big of a deal out of it, but at the time membership seemed like a very serious commitment we weren’t ready to make. The church eventually gave us an ultimatum, and so, with disappointment and sadness at the thought of leaving people we cared about, we decided it was time to say goodbye. We searched around again before finding a Nazarene church, where we would attend for the remainder of our time in Delaware.

This marked the beginning of a real spiritual crisis for me. And it started a pattern in my life of being in churches where I was involved, I loved the people, but I hated the Sunday service. I cannot overstate this fact. I loved the people — from Pastor A. to the nursery attendant Miss C. and all the others in the church. It really was like a family. Their kindness to us was sincere and warm. We enjoyed getting together with them outside of church and being friends. In many ways, the relationships felt stronger than my connection to the worship itself, which only made the tension inside me harder to ignore.

But I absolutely could not stand the Sunday service. The modern worship music felt like something I had to endure, not something that lifted my heart. The sermons were long and often sounded like self help talks. And that was it — just songs and a long sermon. After experiencing liturgical worship, this felt empty, like something essential was missing. I was frustrated, and I kept Maria well informed of my feelings, which was not very kind of me. But she, as usual, was more moderate — acknowledging there was some truth in what I was feeling, while also reminding me that if God could use it, then it couldn’t be all bad.

But I was starting to look elsewhere. In fact, I was looking in a new direction altogether. As my foundation crumbled beneath me, I turned to what I had learned to trust as a math major: rationality and logic. My introduction to atheism came through memes. One of my students introduced me to Reddit, which back in 2012 was a seriously wild place to be — like the last remnant of the ’90s internet, all concentrated in one place. Atheism was one of the top subreddits, and I began scrolling through it, reading posts, seeing memes, and laughing at religion and faith. Because of the state I was already in, the humor felt devastatingly true — sharp little observations that seemed to confirm the cracks I was already seeing in my spiritual foundation. Many of the posts pointed out biblical “contradictions,” mocked the God of the Old Testament as angry and capricious, and most especially mocked conservative evangelical Christianity — my own upbringing — and its hypocrisies when it came to faith and life. As much as I roll my eyes at atheism now, at the time it had a huge effect on me. I was already standing on shifting sand, and their blunt certainty made it feel like I had nowhere solid left to place my feet. My faith in Christ was beginning to fall apart.

Sunday school was becoming almost unbearable for me. Every week we sat in a circle discussing the same culture war topics I had heard all my life — whether Christians should celebrate Halloween, whether Starbucks cups were an attack on Christmas, whether saying “happy holidays” was capitulating to secularism. I remember one morning in particular. In my condescending attitude I felt like everyone was giving the same routine answers, repeating the same lines we had all been taught since childhood. And something in me snapped. In an instant, irritation turned into contempt. I looked around the circle and thought, They’re just repeating what they’ve been told. I wanted to say something disruptive or shocking, something that would jolt the room awake. I felt superior, prideful, rebellious, almost exhilarated. And underneath all of it, a new thought surfaced — quiet but unmistakable: I want out of this faith.

One night I opened my laptop and typed out a public announcement on Facebook saying I was becoming an atheist. I hovered the mouse over the “post” button for a long time. But then I thought of my mom — the pain it would cause her, the confusion, the heartbreak. In that moment, all the boldness I had felt drained away, and something inside me collapsed. A sadness washed over me, like a part of myself was dying. I closed the laptop without making the post. Whatever was happening inside me would remain private for now.

I never stopped believing in God deep down in my heart. In fact, I couldn’t. How can you choose to believe or stop believing in something, anyway? But I began living as if I didn’t believe, and maybe that’s no different from actual unbelief. I adopted the worldview of atheism, which I assumed was coldly rational and realistic. I really wanted truth, and I felt like I was getting it from this worldview — even though it clashed with that deeper part of me that seemed incapable of letting go of God.

It was a worldview that didn’t bring me any happiness, though. While I was glad to be learning new things and seeking truth, I was also causing strain in my marriage, in my church, and at the school. I would bring up these ideas in conversation constantly. I acted superior in Sunday School discussions, as if I were above it all when they talked about the Bible or what it meant in their personal lives. I looked down on people, treating them condescendingly, accusing them of being ignorant sheep. The atheist “leaders” I saw online (mostly old British guys for some reason) behaved this way, and I started to imitate them. It was pride, and it was a way of shielding myself from the people whose simple faith reminded me of what I was walking away from and stirred up a guilt that came from inside me. I viewed them almost like children. And the words I used to dismantle their ideas were casual, almost like it was too easy.

Looking back, I deeply regret how I behaved, but God can make good out of any situation, and I think He was using this time to scrape away the rubble of my old foundation and begin to build me again. It didn’t make it easy for the people around me, though.

The strain on my marriage began to reach the boiling point. Maria was not happy with me. She must have felt as if I had betrayed her. We had entered our marriage with the understanding that we both loved Christ and wanted to follow Him together. What right did I have to suddenly change that agreement? To her, it wasn’t just that my ideas were different — it felt like I was walking away from the life we had promised each other. She tried her best to argue with me on specific topics — creation, Noah’s flood, the Tower of Babel — all the stories atheists on Reddit love to mock and dismantle through memes and ridicule. But bless her heart, she didn’t stand a chance. I had been trained to analyze arguments. Any time she offered some kind of “what if” to support the Bible, I tore it down with ice cold logic.

One day, as we were out on a walk pushing the baby stroller, we started arguing about the Bible again. Maria tried to keep the peace. She always did. She wasn’t arguing; she was trying to understand, trying to keep me on her team regarding faith. She admitted that some parts of the Bible could be metaphorical, willing to meet me halfway if that would help. Of course she still believed, but she wasn’t against learning and growing. Her faith was still her anchor, and she wasn’t going to let go of it just because I was drifting. And on that walk, the cost of all this finally showed on her face.

Her face was focused, concerned. She looked at me like a wife trying to hold her marriage together, not like someone trying to win a debate. But I didn’t see that then. I wasn’t thinking about her feelings or her worry. I was treating the whole thing like an intellectual contest. My tone was lecturing, impatient, and intense. All I cared about was proving my point. I was unwittingly proselytizing for atheism.

She tried to hang in there. She tried to keep up with me, to follow the logic, to offer her own thoughts. But the imbalance was obvious. We were husband and wife, yet I was acting like a debater and she was still acting like a wife. The air between us felt tense and fragile, like something was being stretched too far, like something was about to break.

Eventually, she reached her limit. I could see the frustration building in her face, the way her eyes tightened, the way her voice wavered. She wasn’t a logical machine. She had a heart, soul, feelings, emotions. Finally, she broke. She got angry — not loud, but sharp — and tears came at the same time. It wasn’t just frustration at “losing” an argument. It was something deeper, something more painful: she felt me slipping away. Right there on the sidewalk in full view of the public, she was mourning me.

And in that moment, I went completely silent.

It hit me all at once — a sudden fear, like I was standing at the edge of a point of no return. My stomach dropped. My chest tightened. I realized I had taken things dangerously too far. I didn’t want to cross that line. I didn’t want to hurt her. My love for her was stronger than my need to win the debate, and for the first time, I understood that this wasn’t just about ideas — it was about her. Lives and relationships were at stake.

I shut my mouth, because I knew that if I didn’t, something in our marriage might break for good. I had to come to grips with this: Do I really want to go down this road? Am I ready for where it is going to lead me?

But, Glory to God, it was in this moment that the hand of God reached down and saved us from ourselves.