A month later I sat eight feet away in the same coffee shop with a different conversation partner who also knew I was busy. This time there was no pretending life was tidy, sane, and successful. After some introductory reflections on COVID and the season, we got to the point. “Why do you still bother with Christianity?”
I paused. I actually looked over my left shoulder to see if my previous conversation partner was still sitting there with a raised eyebrow. I considered referring to my previous dialogue—“Would you believe someone else asked me a very similar question in here just the other day?”—but thought better of it. I sensed that this may have sounded like the same question but was in fact very different. It seemed a much bigger, harder, and more challenging question—after all, God, the Trinity, and the universe seem rather bigger than the church. Yet in another way it felt like a much simpler question—an easier, one-coffee question—mostly because the person really wanted a reply, rather than needing to voice a lament.
I settled on a straight answer. “Because the alternatives are too terrible to contemplate.”