It’s a thing. God is Dead. Everything is futile. Do all seven deadly sins because it doesn’t matter. Then rinse/repeat until you become worm food. If that’s you, sorry. As for me, God is not Dead.
I’ve spent most of my adult life living on the wrong side of the tracks. Friends of mine have died from complications related to addiction and a dedicated effort to make Bacchus proud. They are the people my parents warned me about. So . . . what about me? Have I achieved a completed bucket list of all seven deadly sins? Nope. Hard pass on that.
It’s a fashy thing. Accuse an enemy of the sins of their peers. Since I count addicts and sexual deviants as friends the accusation floats around me that I am addicted to something and/or have some sort of kink I haven’t repented from. Jesus consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors. Yet we say he was without sin. I’m not Jesus, far from it. But counting deplorables as peers is not on its face proof that I too am deplorable.
Dead Lead
I’m burying the lead. This is it–the stronger my discipleship becomes the harder it is to live any other way. God is Not Dead for me. He is surely alive and very present for me. Remember this? “You get what you give.” I’ll play along. God is dead, “vanity of vanities, all is vanity“. So . . . I’ve known many who finish their debauchery in a recovery meeting confessing that they are an addict. I’ve known a few who never finish and the conclusion is a transformation into worm food.
The usual pitch is this, “Believe in Christ and you will have eternal life.” Yeah, ok. Live forever? Hard pass. It was a task getting to retirement age. Recorded history is roughly 5,000 years old. Christ got himself martyred about 2,000 years ago. I don’t know anyone who is 2,000 years old. I do know that for me, 80-90 years is good enough.
I’m not Christian because I want to live forever. Well . . . “we are all sinners and Christ died for our sins.” So . . . that’s a problem. That miscreant in your life, the toxic one who, tbh, you’d rather see dead, is forgiven? That sucks. Deathbed confessions are annoying. I’m Christian because that loving root was planted in me by my Father when he had me baptized at First Presbyterian Church, Pitman. I was raised in that church. As hard as I’ve tried to live another way, The Way, The Truth, and The Life Everlasting survived my dissident urges. God isn’t dead for me because I need him and His Way.
Travail
A third pitch is easy living. Name your list of troubles. Jesus will remove them from your life. Maybe. His Way isn’t a windfall of good fortune. The Prosperity Gospel is a bit of a hustle. The closer you come to Christ the better things get. What you won’t get is easy. I worship a guy who was persecuted throughout his ministerial life. His detractors felt so threatened by him that they martyred him. Most (?all?) of the disciples were jailed and/or tortured, maybe killed by the Romans. Some at the behest of Jewish authorities. So you were thinking that coming to Jesus includes a pink Cadillac? Sorry about that.
Or maybe you feel like I do and without structure and discipline this idea seems good: run naked through a park with a katana shouting, “I’m here to save the princess!” Even better if you are drunk and high. So a religious sect strong on legalist eschatology seems like a better plan. Well . . . Legalism both has failed and still fails. The law is not enough. There is plenty of law within Judaism and Catholicism. Catholic priests caught diddling altar boys, anybody? Some post-great-awakening American sects like the Mormons are all about legalism. I wonder how that is going for them. It seems like legalist sects are no less tempted than the rest of us. There be sinners in them legalists?! Uh Huh.
Why are so many Jews great lawyers? Because they have mastered the art of interpreting law. Define work. What can you do/not do on the Sabbath? What time does the Sabbath start, exactly? You and I, either non-believers or believers, don’t bother with this. Ask a Rabbi. He has an answer.

道路
One more, is it violent to cause pain to an attacker but not injure them? The boundary has moved so far from physical violence that failing to intuit someone’s preferred pronouns and core beliefs is tantamount to murder in some circles. My Sensei’s boundary, “Are you bleeding? Can you walk it off? Yes? That wasn’t violent.” Oh.
So there must be a Way, a Truth, and a Life Everlasting that provides a healthy path. Yep. It’s that dissident stone mason from Nazareth who so thoroughly upset his church leadership that they had him crucified. He said a lot, among them, Mark 12:30-31, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Then this, which is restated many ways, “Treat others as you wish to be treated,” and its corollary, “We teach people how to treat us.” How is this important? Well . . . without a Way, a Truth, and a Life I suffer from low impulse control. I act first and either benefit or suffer from my actions. I’m “FIRE!, was I supposed to aim first? Oops.” I got to near retirement age living like this. One wonders how.

Escalating Consequences
This is what prompted these words—this post sat in the queue for almost a year. Why? Depression for one. Then a thing happened. 2024-05-29 I wrecked my car. And because my blood sugar was over 600 I was a little out of it. Ok, a lot out of it. Enough out of it that the cop called an ambulance and I got a ride to the hospital. So out of it that I fought with the ER staff when I got there. I wanted to leave. Things were spinning further out of control.
I’d been happily telling other people that escalating negative consequences are a warning. Getting in a car wreck, learning that my blood pressure was dangerously high, my blood sugar was deadly high, and fighting with the ER nurses—the consequences escalated pretty high. I was admitted to the hospital. I stayed three days while they worked to get my blood pressure and my blood glucose scores under control. By the time I was discharged my clothes, my wallet, and my phone had disappeared. All I had was some donated pajamas and my discharge papers.
The hospital paid for a cab to the pharmacy where I could pick up my meds. Fail. The pharmacy was closed. A cab to my house? With what money? So I found a bus that got me close to home and walked the rest of the way. Once home I had to break in because my keys went missing along with everything else.
Total Loss
My car was totaled. I had no way to get to work. My things were gone. This was a low moment for me. How was I to gather myself and recover from the wreck and the hospital stay? I started by going to bed.
It got worse. My son arrived (٩(^ᗜ^ )و ´-). He was a big help, kinda. We were trying to recover my online presence and managed to lock me out. So I lost access to my digital presence. I still don’t have it.
Nobody cares, right? Sucks to be me and maybe my proper place is back in a rehab program like our The Healing Place. Repeating a cliche—it’s not the circumstances we find ourselves in, it’s how we respond to them. The calvary, in the form of my son and my longtime friend TJ showed up. We began the work of putting me back together again.

The Only Open Door
I know that when I don’t listen to God’s prompts the escalating negative consequences start. Turn away from the direction He wants me to go and things start to go south. Things went south.
It’s early August 2024 as I make this rewrite. The sirens are singing the praises of Kamala Harris and the terrible dangers of Nacho Nazi. Our more shouty meteorologists are forecasting immanent, apocalyptic CLIMATE CHANGE if we don’t elect the correct candidate in November. There are rumblings from the usual rabble rousers that if the election doesn’t turn out correctly they’ll be lighting our streets on fire again. These noisemakers proclaim themselves to be the normies and we are weird. Gone south enough for you?
I went through the door that promised me I didn’t need God. God could die and I’d be fine. I had it going on. Erm . . . it started with a car wreck. New thought: I need God alive. I need to follow the Way of His son, the martyred stone mason from Nazareth. Things are bad enough. His Way, please.

Yo, How about No
I get it that for some, things would be easier if God was dead. Do the darkness thing. F*ck consequences or the impact of our choices on other people. Rather, make other people, especially those who aren’t part of our tribe, bend to our whims. The Others must behave in a way pleasing to us so we can be happy. Because The Others are oppressing us, obvi.
Both paths are there. One, belonging to Christ, promises a better life but is not an easy life. The other makes seductive promises of ease and indulgence but turns out to be deadly. No. The only open door I’ll walk through leads to the Empty Tomb. God isn’t dead on the other side of that door.