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. \u201cWhy do you still bother with Christianity?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2014\u201cWould you believe someone else asked me a very similar question in here just the other day?\u201d\u2014but 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\u2014after all, God, the Trinity, and the universe seem rather bigger than the church. Yet in another way it felt like a much simpler question\u2014an easier, one-coffee question\u2014mostly because the person really wanted a reply, rather than needing to voice a lament.<\/p>\n
I settled on a straight answer. \u201cBecause the alternatives are too terrible to contemplate.\u201d<\/p>\n