The Strange Experience of Outgrowing Yourself

I was sitting in a small upstairs room on a Wednesday night, the kind of room someone had clearly tried to make feel exciting for teenagers by ordering whatever showed up first when you search "youth group decorations" on Amazon, half listening the way you do when something is more habit than choice, when I noticed it. A contradiction. Small, almost forgettable. The kind of thing you could explain away if you wanted to. I didn't want to. I just sat there and let it sit with me.

I didn't leave that day. Nothing dramatic happened. I want to be honest about that, because most stories about losing faith get told like a courtroom drama, some final argument that settles the case. Mine wasn't like that. Mine was quieter and slower, and if I'm being fully honest, I didn't even notice it happening until it already had.

What actually got to me wasn't a theological argument. It was watching the same people be a completely different version of themselves on Wednesday night than they were the rest of the week. Holy for two hours, then back to normal.

We like to think of change as a decision. You wake up one day and decide to believe something new, or stop believing something old, and there's a clear line between who you were and who you are now. That's not how it usually works. Most of the time you just drift, and the drifting only becomes visible once you look back and realize the shore is gone.

I lost my grandpa in sixth grade. By seventh, I had stopped going to church. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make that sound like cause and effect, like grief broke something in me and faith was the casualty. I don't think that's quite right. What actually happened is simpler and stranger. Losing him pulled me out of a routine I'd never really examined. Church had just been something we did, a rhythm of the week, not something I'd thought hard about one way or another. When the routine stopped, so did the autopilot. And once I wasn't running on autopilot anymore, I started actually thinking.

That's when the contradictions I'd half noticed for years started to matter. Not because someone handed me an argument that dismantled everything. Because I finally had the space to sit with questions I used to walk past.

By the time I recognized what had happened, agnostic wasn't a decision I made. It was just where I looked up and found myself standing.

I think we're taught to be embarrassed by this kind of thing. We treat changing our minds like evidence of weakness, like we should have known better the first time, or like we owe an apology for who we used to be. I don't buy that anymore. If anything, I think the opposite is true. The people who never outgrow anything, who believe at forty exactly what they believed at ten without ever once stopping to actually examine it, aren't more faithful or more consistent. They're just less awake. Changing your mind, when it comes from actually paying attention instead of picking a side and defending it forever, isn't a failure. It's proof you were listening the whole time.

I don't know what I believe about God. I've made peace with that. Not the uneasy kind of peace where you're still quietly hoping for an answer to show up. The real kind, where not knowing stopped feeling like a hole and started feeling like room to breathe. Life got more enjoyable once I stopped needing it settled. Not less meaningful. More.

Sometimes I think about that upstairs room, the cheap decorations, the Wednesday night version of people I also saw the rest of the week. I don't picture it as the moment I lost something. I picture it as the first moment I was really paying attention, and everything after was just the slow, ordinary work of a person figuring out what he actually thinks, instead of what he'd always assumed.

That's the strange part about outgrowing yourself. It rarely announces itself. It doesn't come with a debate or a final argument or a clean before and after. Most of the time you just look up one day, a few years removed from who you used to be, and realize you can't quite find your way back to how that person saw the world. And instead of being embarrassed by that, I've started to think it might be the clearest sign we're actually alive.