💔 When I Drifted

And grace found another way in...

This is the third post in my series, “Grace Between the Lines” - a journey through the beautifully strange overlap between Lutheran theology, mystical spirituality, and the books and ideas that have shaped me along the way. Whether you've been around since the early days of my writing or you're just tuning in, I’m so glad you’re here.

Each post in this arc explores a thread in my spiritual story. Sometimes surprising, occasionally side-eyed by the canon police, but always grounded in grace. And while I hope it offers insight into my own weird and winding path, I also hope it speaks to yours. Because chances are, you’ve drifted too. Or you’ve found yourself somewhere unexpected, with a faith that no longer fits, a church that doesn’t feel like home, or a longing you can’t quite name. This one? This one begins where a lot of spiritual journeys do: with grief, disillusionment, and the unsettling feeling that maybe the old answers don’t work anymore.

In case you missed the previous posts in the series…

Intro - ✨ This Time, It’s Not a Comeback — It’s a Reconciliation

Post #1 - 📚 Did You Hear the One Where the Lutheran Pastor Walks Into the Metaphysics Aisle?

Post #2 - 📺 How a PBS Mystic Became My Spiritual Gateway Drug

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When Church Felt Like Home (Until It Didn't)

If you’ve ever loved church and then found yourself quietly drifting, this part might sound familiar. It’s not always a dramatic split. Sometimes it’s just life happening… Grief, distance, questions that no longer fit inside the lines. Sometimes, the place that once felt like home begins to feel like someone else’s house. That was me.

I actually enjoyed church as a kid. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I loved the liturgy… The smells, the bells, the order. It provided a refreshing calm against the chaos of my home life. The rhythms and rituals of Mass felt like a kind of sanctuary. I didn’t understand all the theology, but I felt something real in the hush of incense, the flicker of candles, the solemnity of kneeling (and standing… and kneeling again… and standing).

My dad was raised Southern Baptist, Though I don’t recall him ever attending church, he considered himself a Christian. My mom was my tie to Catholicism. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was eight. She also suffered from debilitating anxiety and was on strong medication that made driving hard. The functionality of our car at the time was questionable at best. So we didn’t go to Mass regularly. Maybe every couple of months. I never received First Communion or was confirmed as a child. I do remember going to catechism a couple times and getting yelled at by the nuns. Which, I think, is a rite of passage for every Catholic kid.

When my mom got really sick, we stopped going altogether. And when she died 8 years later, I lost my connection to church. It wasn’t just grief, it was theology. The Christianity I absorbed painted Jesus as a human shield from an angry Father in the sky. That the goal was to be perfect like Jesus (or else!). Yes, technically, God ‘forgave’ me. At least that’s what they said. But He was also always kinda mad at me. Or at least disapproving. And I thought: if this is what God is like, I just don’t know. I never fully went atheist or even non-Christian. I just didn’t know where I fit.

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Cue Wayne Dyer, Again

Maybe you’ve had this too. A moment when something on a screen or in a book found you in your in-between space. When traditional faith felt out of reach, but you still needed something. For me, it came in the form of a bald man on PBS with a gentle voice and wild ideas: Wayne Dyer. (If you missed last week’s post, I wrote about the night he unexpectedly pulled me back into the God conversation. You can find it here.)

He spoke a language I hadn’t heard in church: one of inner alignment, a friendly universe, and God’s unconditional love. He wasn’t trying to scare me into salvation. He was inviting me to remember who I really was. And somewhere in the mix of his storytelling and impressive memorization of a plethora of Rumi quotes, he kept mentioning this mysterious text called A Course in Miracles.

When he quoted his friend Marianne Williamson (ACIM’s unofficial evangelist) I leaned in. But it wasn’t until a few years later, after I got married, that I picked up the big blue book itself.

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Marriage, Money, and the Blue Book

If you’ve ever been in love while broke and spiritually unmoored, welcome. This season of my life was equal parts romantic comedy and existential drama. The vows were of joy and abundant love. The bank account balance was not. And in the midst of all that, a strange blue book cracked open a new way of seeing faith.

Alex and I met at the golf course where I worked in northern Nevada (yes, my past life was as a club pro). Her family lived nearby, and it was the summer before her freshman year of college. We went on a few dates, and something clicked. But then she flew off to Chicago for college, and I stayed back in Nevada, working and living with my dad. Our relationship could’ve fizzled. I mean, she was off to college in the big city. Here I was, a small-town golf pro barely making enough to buy a hot dog and a beer at the turn. But instead, it deepened.

We kept talking. Emailing (ahhh, the days of emailing each other when texting was too laborious on our Nokia flip phones). We kept flying back and forth, thanks to my friend’s dad and his magical stash of airline miles. Over time, long-distance became a rhythm, and that rhythm led to love.

A big part of our early connection was her gently drawing me back into the Catholic church. She’d nudge me when to kneel, stand, cross myself. I loved it.

When we got engaged, I got confirmed so we could be married in the Catholic Church. I went through adult confirmation, and a couple years later, we tied the knot. I moved to Chicago. And promptly (like a lot of us Catholics apparently do) had a faith crisis of her own.

So while she was done with church, I drifted back to what had always felt safe and expansive. I read authors like Wayne, Marianne, and that blue book I’d been circling for years.

We were broke. It was the fall of 2008. I had moved to Chicago with no money and no job. I was day trading on the side, barely scraping by (long story). And then the market crashed. My trading account was wiped. The only money we had left was from Alex’s student loans. Going into winter, golf courses were laying people off, not hiring. ‘Twas not an ideal scenario.

A couple weeks earlier, I’d picked up A Course in Miracles. While Alex was in class and I was racking up job application rejection emails from Walmart, Culver’s, Wells Fargo, and the U.S. Postal Service, I started reading.

To be honest, this book seemed out there. And for me, this is saying a lot. Because I'm down with most things 'out there.' But to my surprise, when I let my inner cynic take a long coffee break, it didn’t feel crazy. It felt like balm.

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Jesus, Reintroduced

I share all this not because I think everyone should read A Course in Miracles, but because it helped me rediscover Jesus in a way that felt less like fear and more like love. If you’ve ever tried to hold together a deep longing for Christ with a deep discomfort with the way Christ has been presented to you, you’re in good company here.

Like I said, the book itself was a bit of a trip. The language was dense. The structure confusing. And the tone—authoritative but loving—took some getting used to. The Jesus in A Course in Miracles didn’t sound like the one from my childhood. There was no emphasis on punishment, no cross-heavy guilt trips. Instead, there was this compassionate, piercing voice that cut through shame and ego with surgical grace.

The more I read, the more I felt like it was translating my spiritual longings into a new dialect. It didn’t erase what came before. It reframed it. It felt like my soul was being rewired. It wasn’t scripture, but it was sacred. Not orthodox, but strangely orthodox-adjacent. It said: You are loved. You were never separate. And in that season, I clung to those words like oxygen.

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Up Next

Of course, this raises questions. Who wrote A Course in Miracles? Where did this voice come from? Is this just some new-age fever dream—or something more ancient?

In the next post, I’ll explore what I now call “the channeling problem” and how the Apostle Paul might just be the patron saint of mystics like the scribe of ACIM, Helen Schucman, a psychology professor at Columbia University with a wildly interesting relationship with Jesus.

If you’re in that place now—unmoored, unsure, halfway between the pews and something unnameable—I hope you know you’re not alone. Grace finds other ways in and Jesus is in all of it.