Another Letter I'll Never Send

Another letter I'll never send.

Dear Pastor,

If I had to come up with a list of the most influencial people who have ever come into my life, you would be among the top five. I listen to you preach the Good News every week, and every week I am reminded of how good the news really is, how good it is to know God's love. Now you're retiring, leaving your tiny congregation, many of whom take God's love for granted. I can't beg you to stay, I can't implore them to listen to you when you preach, to act like Christians, to act humanely. It seems I am powerless in this situation, but I am not so powerless that I can't take the things you taught me and use them in my life, to teach others, to attempt to teach a blind and deaf congregation hell bent on remaining stationary in this rapidly moving world.

I came to you when I was fifteen, as lost and confused as any teenager, searching for all the answers to all the questions. I had spent so much time focusing on hating God, believing God was at fault for my father's death, that I began to hate life. One can't live when one hates life, and for the longest time I was dead, almost without hope. I didn't know that my hatred for a God I never knew was eating me alive.

Until the day that I decided I couldn't hate myself anymore, I couldn't hate life anymore, I couldn't hate God anymore. How could I hate something I didn't understand? I began to seek out answers everywhere I could, but truth is elusive.

And then I found you, and your tiny congregation, with a life sized wooden cross as the only decoration into the long white hall. And we sat for hours, once a week, every week, discussing God, faith, religion, death, life, Christianity, Buddhism, men, women, family, service.

Sometimes you listened, sometimes I listened. Always you saw my pain, always I saw your humanity.

You didn't hold my hand and lead me out of the wilderness. No, you didn't even lay a path before my faulty feet.

Rather, you set a beacon on a hill, far off in the distance, something I could see but never touch. You gave me something to aspire to: love. You showed me that even two complete strangers, a devoted life-long Christian and a sincere but confused agnostic, both from very different generations and very different life experiences, can meet, can agree that love is far more productive than hate.

I've never told you my deepest secrets, but you could see the writing on the walls. All that mattered to you was that I was lost and alone, and in the truest Christian spirit, you welcomed me into God's house and showed me how to love again. It didn't matter where I had been, or where I was going, so long as I took love with me.
Everything I do, I do with love and earnestness. I take your words with me everywhere I go, and I reshape them into my own.

I know I believe in God, I believe that Jesus Christ was God's Son, and I know His love in my heart. I know the importance of faith, the importance of ANY belief.

I can't believe the hate that many people, many Christians, preach. I've known so much hate, and I've come to know so so so much love, and I simply can't be swept up in the hate any longer. It doesn't exist for me.

And that's thanks to you, Pastor, that I've forgotten hate. It's so hard when you have to watch the person you love the most in the world be ripped out of your life forever. It was so hard not to hate what happened to him, what happened to my mother, what happened to me, what happened to our lives. I can accept what happened to us, what will happen. I can be mad as hell sometimes, but I can never hate.

Thank you, Pastor, for not taking me by the hand and leading me out of the dark. I needed to find my own way, and I did, and I am forever grateful to you. Happy retirement!