You Don't Need the Lightning Bolt

I walked out of church as a kid and stayed out for two decades. What brought me back had no date and no feeling to start it.

I sat in church a couple of Sundays ago, 65 years old, a believer by any test you’d care to run, and I could not tell you the date it happened to me. There isn’t one. There’s a stretch of years, and somewhere inside that stretch I crossed over.

The only religious moment in my life I can put on a calendar is the day I walked out.

There’s a question that comes up early in Christian circles. “What’s your testimony?” What people mean is the day the switch flipped, the before and the after with a date sitting between them. I never had an answer to give. For a long time I took that as evidence that nothing had happened to me.

Sunday and Monday

I was raised Catholic in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Church wasn’t a daily thing in our house, but we went every Sunday, my entire family. First Communion. Confirmation. I did all of it on schedule.

And I sat there as a kid doing math nobody asked me to do. We’d go to Mass on Sunday, and by Monday morning the only subject in the house was money. “Our friends cheat on their taxes. Why don’t we cheat on our taxes.”

I remember thinking, this doesn’t make any sense. That’s the first thing I learned to look for, before I understood it: the distance between the Sunday version of a person and the Monday version.

Then, somewhere between age 9 and 11, a kid I can’t even name backed me up against a low fence railing outside church, right after Mass. The railing hit me mid-back. He had both hands around my throat.

A crowd of adults formed around us. Standing in the middle of that crowd was the priest who had just said Mass. I looked right at him and pleaded with my eyes for him to do something, to get this kid off me.

Every one of them watched, and did nothing. I got so enraged it was like the Hulk, and I found enough adrenaline-fueled strength to throw him off and run ten blocks home.

My mother still took me to church after that. I went, and the whole time I was thinking, really, this is church? I’m done with this.

I was gone for the next two decades.

I never went full atheist. I’ve always thought atheism was the height of hubris, believing you know everything there is to be known. Like people believing manned flight was impossible in the 19th century, right up until it wasn’t.

So I parked in agnostic and stayed there through my twenties and thirties, and my posture toward dramatic testimony was an eye-roll I didn’t bother hiding. Men who opened sentences with “God told me” made me check for my wallet. I assumed faith arrived like weather: sudden and unmistakable, a lightning bolt. And no bolt of lightning ever arrived for me.

I came back around during my first marriage. She was new to the faith, I started going to church with her, and I began calling myself a Christian again. One of my old pastors had a name for what I was: a casual Christian. I’d take those pastors out for coffee and ask them the hard questions, the ones that don’t have clean answers, and I never got an answer that satisfied me.

I don’t believe I was saved then. I had the label, I had the attendance, and I had nothing underneath either one. When the testimony question came around, I had nothing for that either.

The audit

What finally moved me was slower and much harder to dismiss. A wife whose faith I could audit up close, and I’m a man who audits everything. I spent my career looking at spreadsheets every day, and I’ve logged every meal in Lose It since 2010. I trust data over feelings.

I wrote once that my wife Mai showed me what faith looks like lived out, and the operative word is lived. What I was watching for was the gap. The same thing I was looking for at the kitchen table as a boy: the distance between who somebody is at church and who they are on Monday when it costs them something. I’ve found it in nearly everyone I’ve ever checked, including me.

I never found hers.

That didn’t convert me on its own. It retired my best argument, which was that the whole thing was theater.

Prayer came after that, and I’d call those first attempts experiments more than prayers. Then reading. Then a community group we still sit with every couple of weeks. None of it felt like lightning. All of it, run long enough, changed the readings on every gauge I know how to check: my temper, and how long I could hold a grudge before I got bored of holding it.

I want to be clear about the pace, because the pace is the point. This wasn’t a season. It was years, with plateaus, with long stretches where I’d have told you flatly that nothing was happening. Anyone who has trained a body past 50 knows that curve. The gains came anyway.

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The whisper on the mountain

There’s a scene in 1 Kings I didn’t understand until I’d lived a version of it. Elijah, fresh off the biggest public win of his career, collapses into a burnout that reads like a midlife crisis. He runs, hides in a cave, and asks God to take his life: I have had enough, Lord. God tells him to go stand on the mountain. A wind tears the rocks apart, but God isn’t in the wind. Then an earthquake, and God isn’t in the earthquake. Then a fire, and God isn’t in the fire either.

“And after the fire came a gentle whisper.”
(1 Kings 19:12)

The man who most needed to hear from God got him at the lowest possible volume. That’s the one every testimony leaves out. I’d add one observation of my own here: a whisper requires you to stop making noise, and a man mid-collapse generates a lot of it. My drinking was loud. The achievements I kept piling up to prove I was fine were louder than the drinking ever got.

Waiting for the lightning bolt

Maybe you’ve been waiting for lightning, too. Waiting to feel something before you’ll take any of this seriously, because starting without the feeling seems dishonest, and the men you’ve heard testify all seem to have been struck by something that never came for you.

I’d offer you my experience instead, since it’s the only one I can vouch for. Read one of the Gospels the way you’d read anything else, skeptically and all the way through. Say one honest sentence out loud, even if it opens with “I’m not sure you’re there.” Then give it real time, which is the ingredient every lightning story skips.

And if the slowness bothers you, if some voice tells you a real conversion would have hit harder, look at how everything else durable in your life arrived. The strength you built. The job you know cold. Nothing you count on came in a flash, and I’d stopped trusting flashes long before God declined to send me one.

I never squared the priest. Sixty-five years old and I still haven’t, and what brought me back had nothing to do with settling it. I still have questions. I just don’t worry so much about the answers now.

I can date the day I left. The day I came back has no date at all. I still don’t have a testimony anyone would recognize. What I have is a before and an after that everyone around me can see, and years of readings that all moved the same direction.

Start without the feeling. Give it a year, then read your own gauges.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.