I Walked With Jesus and He Led Me to the Slaughter

I was a religious kid growing up. I come from a long line of southern baptists who all pretty much attended the same church at one time or another, so there really wasn’t any avoiding it. I was baptized at the ripe age of eight in a green Bugle Boy T-shirt and blue jeans, and I was made to feel like that was the most important thing I was ever going to do with my life because that was the most important thing anybody could do with their lives. I took that shit seriously too, boy. I loved God and wanted to live up to Their standards. I spread the Good Word every chance that I could and even wanted to become a pastor myself someday. 

The first story I ever wrote was for my sixth grade Language Arts class. We’d been learning a little bit about Greek mythology and we were tasked with writing a fictional story based on any mythological being of our choosing. I chose the Hound of Hades itself, Cerberus. My story was basically a knock-off version of the Book of Genesis. Three dogs in the Garden of Eden are tricked by a serpent into eating forbidden golden apples, and they are punished by an elder wizard (I don’t fucking know, man) who uses his magic to turn the dogs into a three-headed beast and banish them to the underworld. The teacher loved my story and said I was a natural writer and I felt like hot shit for a while.

I started writing all the time—usually poetry and song lyrics. I’d had a pretty troubled life up to that point, and I found that writing was a conductive way for me to work out some of those feelings. A full year later when I was in seventh grade, I stopped paying attention in any of my classes and instead used the time to write song lyrics. I carried them all in a blue folder and I just fucking knew those songs were going to bring me so much success in the future. Though most of my songs were about the pain and the angst I was feeling, I occasionally wrote about my love for God. There was one song in particular that I was proud of, and I only remember it now because of the absolute fucking horror that it brought upon me. I have no idea what the verses were, but the chorus was this:

I will spread

Like butter on bread

The word of Christ

Until I am dead

Brutal, I know. But at the time, it felt good. Spread like butter on bread? I was a genius. I didn’t know how embarrassing it was until this shit-head kid named Josh went through my song folder while I wasn’t paying attention and started cackling, his braces gleaming under the bright classroom lights. Picture Scut Farkus with frosted tips and a too-tight silver link necklace. I turned to face him, saw my song in his hands, and I froze. I was helplessly paralyzed as he read those words aloud to the entire class and each of his cronies began laughing along with him. It was a nightmare for an anxious kid like me, and looking back now—perhaps was the beginning of my religious fallout.

I stopped writing about God altogether after that. Then, before I even made it out of middle school, my family had stopped going to church. We faced blow after blow at such an alarming rate, it was easier for us just to fade away than to hear our names mentioned in the prayer requests every Sunday. Gone were the dreams of being a pastor. Gone was my love for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. IN was my newfound appreciation for how the words God and Damn felt rolling off my tongue at the same time.

But every journey has to begin somewhere. Mine—this nearly lifelong obsession with stringing words together for people to read—began much like the Christian universe: in the Garden of Eden, deceived by a snake.