Chapter 1: A New Beginning

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       2020 has been, to put it mildly, an eventful year thus far. A global pandemic, social and civil unrest, and a national election in 6 weeks. America has been thrust into a crucible, and, if you’re like me, you’ve stood at your front door, staring out at the world with a mixture of astonishment, befuddlement, anxiety, and, at times, quiet fear. Every morning has brought news headlines worse than the day before. Since mid-March, it has felt to most of us as if the entire world was flipped upside down and turned inside out. Where daily life was once an ordinary, comfortable routine, it has now taken on the feeling of a long, terrifying roller coaster ride: lengthy, nervous pauses followed by heart-stopping, terror-filled drops, and we never know at each sundown what the next sunrise will bring.
         For me, personally, the last six months have been all of that – and more. No, thank God, I did not lose my job. Ever since moving to Las Vegas in 2012, I have had a successful career at a payday loan company. For the last eight years I have done well for myself, attaining the rank of assistant manager and making more than enough money to not only meet my needs but also put some away for the future. I’m still single with no children to support, so I have always been a workaholic; not so much that I burn myself out and have no social life, but neither do I believe in stopping at just 40 hours a week when I’m still young and capable enough to go for at least 60 or 65 on a good week. The last 8 years have been incredibly rewarding for me, and I’ve been very happy with my decision to relocate to Las Vegas.
         But then, in mid-March of this year, my luxurious comfort zone was abruptly – suddenly – shattered. The Nevada governor declared a statewide shutdown of all non-essential businesses and a forced quarantine of non-essential workers. My job remained intact due to our status as a financial services company, but because all the casinos, restaurants, and most of the other businesses on the Las Vegas strip were abruptly shut down, most of my job’s customer base was suddenly unemployed. As a result, our company had to adjust accordingly. We have 26 stores in Las Vegas and Henderson, four of them operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. One of the reasons I was making so much money was because I could pick up overtime shifts at other stores. As soon as the statewide shutdown and quarantine went into effect, our company was forced to cut back store hours, lay off some employees, and cancel all overtime. Other perks such as quarterly bonuses were also canceled along with annual raises. All of this caused a sudden and immediate drop in my monthly income that I was not ready for.
          Something you should know about me is that I am a type “A” personality. That means that I prefer schedules, planning, and as much preparation as possible for anything and everything. I live my life by a clock and lists. There’s no such thing as spontaneity or lollygagging. We workaholics believe time is money, and even on our days off we never really relax. We’re using that precious little free time to get the household chores done and prepare for the busy week ahead. Even when I watch TV I’m multitasking – usually doing the crossword or playing a game on my phone or Nintendo Switch. Type “A” people need to know exactly what’s coming and we usually plan not just for tomorrow or the week ahead or even the month ahead. We plan for at least 3 months ahead, and we freak out if anything unexpected pops up to ruin our best laid plans.
       Now, of course, we all know that daily life is full of little surprises and upsets. But, if we’ve planned and prepped well, then we’re not entirely thrown out of whack by life’s minor emergencies. Flat tire on the expressway? No problem. We have great auto insurance, and there’s plenty in savings to cover a new tire and time lost in wages for missing that day’s work. Wake up with my throat feeling a little scratchy and nose stuffed? No problem! Grab that emergency bag of tea bags and cough drops from the bathroom medicine cabinet on my way out the door to work. Type “A” folks are what keep the world running smooth and on time. We’d control the timing of the sunrise and sunset if it were possible.
       So, you can see why the economic shutdown of 2020 threw a massive and wholly detestable wrench into my comfortable, orderly life. I say this with a dryly humorous tone, but it was no joke. I had to scramble to rearrange my finances, but my monthly bills depended on a specific amount to make all ends meet, and I was suddenly going to be very short. The future, which had once seemed so bright and certain, was now dark and unknown, and I could no longer plan for even one week ahead, let alone three months. Yes, there was some relief in the form of the economic impact payments from the government as well as a one-time withdrawal allowed by my 401K. But always, in the back of my mind, there was the nagging worry about what would come after that extra money ran out. If the statewide shutdown wasn’t lifted, if my job didn’t allow me to work overtime, and if I hadn’t found a second job by then, what would I do? This is where it began to feel as if I was on a roller coaster. There were days when I felt good, when I forced myself to not worry about the future and live in the present, and I focused on my work. And, because I had so much free time now that I was working only 35 or 38 hours a week, I used the opportunity to catch up on my reading list as well as my writing. (I also watched more TV and movies in two months than I had in my entire life to that point.)
        But then there were sleepless nights where all I could do was toss and turn and worry. April dragged into May, May slowly turned into June, and the news headlines just got worse and worse. George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in late May, and suddenly the nation was erupting with violent and frightening civil unrest. Portland, Chicago, Seattle, New York – and even Las Vegas – saw marches, protests, demonstrations, and none of them were peaceful. Social media was flooded with black squares and “Black Lives Matter” posts, and now we didn’t have just a global pandemic to worry about. For me, personally, it wasn’t my own financial future that had suddenly become uncertain. The future of the nation which I have called home for my whole life was unexpectedly called into question.
        Life had turned upside down and inside out. My own anxiety and worry multiplied with each passing day, and I did my best to distract myself with writing, reading, binging old TV, and a brief vacation back home to Idaho. But always, in the darkest hour of the night, in the back of my mind all during the day, there was that steady, drumming fear: how much worse could things get? How much longer could we endure all of this? What in the world would happen next? I began to suffer periods of genuine depression. It took everything I had to force a smile on my face and pretend at work that everything was fine. Inside, I was falling apart.
 
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         In the first week of July I landed a second job at Walmart. My financial future suddenly became a lot more certain, and there was some genuine relief in that. But the violence, the unrest, and politics of the world around me continued to be a major source of worry and anxiety. It wasn’t just my daily life – job, home, friends, local government – that needed to be orderly, calm and predictable. I needed the world at large to also be certain, ordered and organized. I needed to know that my basic freedoms that I had taken for granted my entire life were not going to suddenly disappear. In just a span of a few weeks, the American dream that I had been living for 42 years was rapidly disappearing in a rising tide of ideological dogma that was gaining a foothold in every American institution with alarming speed. For the first time in my life I was witnessing the stuff that I had only read about in sci-fi novels such as 1984. All I could think was, What if the democrats win this election? What if the police really are defunded? Could America really devolve into a true socialist state? What if the worst-case scenario really happens?
          And that is what finally brought me to what I can only describe is a mid-life spiritual crisis. I throw the word “spiritual” in there for good reason. I’m an atheist, you see. I was raised in the Baptist church, but I walked away from the church and all religion in my senior year of high school because I couldn’t reconcile the fact that I’m gay with what the Bible teaches about that particularly heinous sin. The only way I could live a successful, happy life was to be myself. I have always been out and proud, and I had no room for any religion that would call me a sinner and claim that my soul was damned because of my lifestyle “choice”. (More detail on this in a later post.) I’ve been on my own for 23 years now, and I’ve been just fine. I decided a long time ago that God doesn’t exist. He’s a figment of man’s overactive imagination, a crutch for those too weak to face life on their own. I have never needed such a crutch, and, until this year, I was doing just dandy living my own life and my truth.
         My job at Walmart is to stand outside the front entrance and, per the new health mandates from the state governor, ensure that everyone entering the store is wearing their mask. Those who aren’t and who don’t have a valid reason for not wearing one – such as a medical exclusion – cannot go in. This means that I’m paid $11/hour to do basically nothing. I stand outside by myself, greeting the customers, and doing a LOT of thinking. For the last few weeks I have thought about everything happening just beyond my front doorstep. I’ve thought about the future of my nation, as well as the future of my own soul. I have silently questioned all of the beliefs and convictions that were once so certain. I have wrestled with my ego and my intellect, confused and angry with the fact that I was so certain of many things in my youth, yet now I am so unsure and afraid. My parents say that God is in control. Yet I see no evidence that God – or anyone – is in control. The world has lost its collective mind, and America, in particular, is on a fast track to chaos and anarchy. IF God really is out there, why is he allowing any of this to go on?
          One of the fundamental changes that occurred as a result of this soul-searching was my decision to switch political parties. For the last 20 years or so I have been a staunch democrat. I have had no use for the conservative views of the republican party. I’m gay, after all, and I proudly supported all the progressive movements over the last two decades that eventually culminated in 2015 with the nationwide legalization of gay marriage. I also believed that no one other than the police, the military and government agents needed to own a gun. I was also pro-choice. But I have never been much interested in politics. Until 2012 I had never even voted. My reasoning for this was a combination of laziness and apathy. No matter which political party won the election, my life never changed. The world went on every day as it always had since before I was born, and besides, thanks to the electoral college, the majority vote doesn’t always mean a win. Therefore, I reasoned, my one vote didn’t really matter unless I was in a swing state. And since Nevada is a blue state, and since I was a democrat, I knew which candidate would get my state’s vote every time, no matter what. (The only reason I voted in the 2012 national election was because I wanted Obama to have a second term just to piss off my conservative family and friends; and I was bored that afternoon after work.)
         But then, in the wake of George Floyd’s death in late May, as the Black Lives Matter movement began a newly rapid ascension in almost every aspect and institution of American life, I began to do a lot of reading online during my lunch breaks and days off. Later, in July and August, as the national election campaigns kicked into full gear, I read even more news from both sides of the biases on the candidates, their views, and their platforms. In particular, I started subscribing to The Daily Wire and The Federalist. As time went on, as I read more and more opinions and news, and as I spent my days in front of Walmart in the Las Vegas heat, I started to ruminate on everything happening in the headlines as well as the ideological war going on behind the scenes in daily American life. I also began to wrestle with my own beliefs and convictions.
          There was no specific time and day for my change of heart. I do know it was somewhere in late July that I decided I was no longer a democrat. I was going to vote all republican in November, and I was now a proud supporter of Donald Trump. But this was only the start of my mid-life spiritual crisis. I realized in early August that I wasn’t just a republican. All of my fear and anxieties about the civil unrest, the economic shutdowns due the pandemic, the war over whether or not mandated masks and social distancing were, in fact, the first step in many that would end with all Americans under a socialist dictatorship after November 3rd, the national debates about critical race theory and “white fragility”, the numbers of Americans on forced unemployment with no hope in the near future of any economic relief, the conflicting reports in the media surrounding everything to do with COVID-19 – all of it was just becoming too much to bear. It seemed that there was too much happening at once, every day, for me – or any of us ordinary citizens – to keep track of, let alone properly digest and analyze. By the end of the summer, as every state was debating whether or not to re-open public schools for the fall semester, it appeared to me as if everyone was close to their breaking point. My time spent every day in front of Walmart gave me plenty of firsthand evidence of just how frayed the nerves of all Americans had become. Everyone seemed on edge, yelling at one another because someone wasn’t wearing a mask, or someone else was wearing a “Trump 2020” t-shirt, or a black man cursing at the white store security officer, calling her a racist, because she was kicking him out for shoplifting. Tempers were short, nerves were frayed (including mine), and I – like so many others – started wondering: Just how bad things could really get?
        In other words, it seemed to me as if the entire world around me had lost its ever-lovin' mind.
        It was around the end of August that my worry finally turned into genuine fear. In the last few weeks, I have to come realize that America’s future as a democratic republic is not as sure as it’s been these last two centuries. My mind started to spin with all the “What if?” scenarios. What if Biden wins the election? What if the police force everywhere – not just cities like Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle and New York – really are defunded and scaled back? What if all the chaos caused by the unchecked rioting in those cities spreads to other cities and states? What if this pandemic doesn’t end soon? What if all this “white fragility”, “critical race theory”, and BLM bullshit actually gains traction in the worst possible place: the white house? What if? What if? What if? (Remember, I’m type “A” all the way!)
 
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        And now, the present: my reason for putting all this down on electronic paper. I came to a decision about a week ago that I was tired. No, scratch that. Fucking exhausted is more like it. I realized that, for the last six months, I have been trying to digest, analyze, categorize, rationalize, and compartmentalize everything that’s been happening around me so that I can sleep peacefully at night. I’ve been trying to make sense of all of this in order to calm myself and stop worrying. This has always worked before, but not this time. I realized that everything I had put my faith in for the last 23 years – my own reason and intellect, the ordered certainty of the world around me, the calm predictability of everyday life – had been wiped away in the span of six months. For the first time in my adult life, I felt truly helpless.
      And that’s when I turned to the one thing that I had been ignoring for most of my life. For the last couple months, during my day shifts at Walmart, as I baked in the summer heat with no company other than my own thoughts, memories started to re-surface. Long forgotten memories, in fact. I began to wonder if maybe God really did, after all, exist. I remembered pieces of old sermons, fragments of Bible verses, lyrics from old songs of the Christian artists whose CDs I had long ago burned into iTunes. Some nights, as I drove home after finishing my late shift at my other job, physically and emotionally exhausted, I would pull up an old playlist on my phone and listen to Steven Curtis Chapman or Amy Grant or Michael W Smith. I have always enjoyed their music over the years as it reminds me of my youth and better times. Lately, however, it was reminding me of something else.
       As I finish writing this, September 20, 2020, I am sure of two things:
       1. I am saved. I accepted Jesus Christ into my heart in 1985 when I was 7 years old. I don’t remember exactly what time of day it was – or even the exact date – but I do remember it was after a SPARKS meeting. I believe without a shadow of a doubt that if I were to die this moment, I would be reunited in Heaven with both of my grandmothers, my grandfather, as well as others in my family who have passed on before. I believe that that prayer whispered by that seven-year-old boy those many years ago was genuine and heartfelt, and that it was uttered in sincere desire to have Jesus come into his heart. I have wandered far from grace in the decades since, but in just the last few days I have felt a peace and a calm deep in my soul that I have not felt for a very, very long time. God does not go back on His promises, and if we are sincere in our prayer for salvation, then I believe we are saved, no matter how far we might stray from Him afterwards.
        2. I am gay. This right here was the main issue that I have been grappling with for the last couple months. I will go into this more in another post, but, put simply, I had been taught for all of my youth that homosexuality is a sin. It is an abomination against God, and the Bible clearly condemns it in several different passages. But I know that I am made in the image of God, and I know that I was born this way. There is no doubt in my mind about this. I knew as early as sixth grade that I was different, and, later, in high school, I came to realize what exactly that difference was. I now believe that God created me this way, and that I can still serve Him and His will without converting my sexuality. I don’t yet know exactly how or why I believe that with such conviction, but I do. Part of this new journey will be to understand and reconcile this conviction through reading, prayer, and other research.
         My reason for creating this blog is twofold:
         1. I have felt a need for some time now to get all of my thoughts and feelings down in black and white. Just writing this post alone has helped me clear my head from what has been piling up in my brain for the last six months. The act of writing helps me organize, digest, and analyze exactly what it is I need to understand about all of this.
       2. And since I’m writing it all down, why not share it with the world? I know that I can’t be the only one who’s struggling to make sense of the world right now. Or, perhaps, there’s others out there, like me, who are trying to reconcile their belief in God with their sexual orientation? Or maybe they’re struggling with their own faith in some way in response to the chaos around us? Whatever the case, I want to be an inspiration for them, and I hope that this blog will help them in some way.
 
          I don’t know where this journey will take me. For now, I am just re-reading my Bible, starting at the beginning in Genesis. I have the love and support of my family, and, as I have thus far in this absolutely crazy, upside down year, I – and now God – are going to take this one day at a time.

Thank you for reading.