Meeting Jim and helping him for a while was a very important part of my journey. Because he helped me to believe it’s ok to be me.
(fwiw there was a different version of this post ‘how I met Jim’ up briefly, but I took it down due to me being a little (or a lot?) psychotic when I wrote it)
I can see based on dates that I ran across Jim on the internet just a few months after I left church.
My second acute episode of mental illness late in 2000 led to the unravelling of my Christian faith. I think it was unravelled by the end of 2002, possibly earlier. I kept going to church and BSF for a while (for a few more years!) because I was concerned that leaving my social communities might precipitate further mental illness episodes.
I felt like a hypocrite, “going through the motions” at church and in my bible study while not believing. I knew all the right answers but they didn’t work for me anymore. But what choice did I have if I wanted to stay well? And anyway they worked for everyone else there, as best I could tell. So it didn’t seem that I was doing any harm except to myself, by not being honest.
I finally felt strong enough to leave church in the fall of 2005 (as best I recall). I didn’t realize until I was writing this that I met Jim Henderson online just a few months after that, early in 2006. There’s enough on the internet about the ‘ebay atheist’ to be sure about that timing
I think I heard about the atheist, Hemant Mehta, selling his soul on ebay on an atheist forum. I was heavily into those at the time. I’d started reading them because I was scared – scared that I wouldn’t be able to be happy if I was an atheist. I wanted to know how people found happiness apart from God. I’d been a Christian for 17 years, since early adulthood, so I had no idea if that was possible.
I found that many of the atheists on the forums were angry, especially some of those who had been Christians. Real Christians, like I had been, who truly believed in Jesus as their best friend and Lord and Savior, who oriented their life around him. By that point I completely understood what they were angry about and shared their frustration that they couldn’t see a God who sends people to hell as good.
Nevertheless I was there to find out whether it was possible to be happy. So the posts which meant the most to me were those like one older person posted, about sitting on his deck in the morning enjoying some fruit for breakfast. Happiness, peace and contentment exuded from that post. And he was kind to me in interactions, although I was pretending to be a Christian, on those forums. He had no ax to grind and I was so happy to see that that was possible, for atheists.
Ah, it’s coming back to me: I think I justified my existence on those forums as an attempt to show a better side of Christians to these mostly angry atheists. But if I hadn’t been an atheist on the inside I’m not sure I could have stayed there and done that.
So early in 2006 I read about ‘the ebay atheist’. I think I felt sorry for Hemant (pronounced like ‘hem’ of a garment plus the first syllable of ‘unto’) when I saw his soul was purchased by a Christian who was going to make him go to church. “Here goes nothing” I thought. There’s no way this atheist is going to be converted by being pushed to attend some church services.
Anyway I followed the links to Jim’s site, Off the Map, and I was intrigued. Back then Jim had a clear tagline ‘helping Christians learn to be normal’. (He still cares about that, but his current sites highlight his current projects and emphases).
I loved the tagline. I started reading the new blog Jim had set up for Hemant to post write-ups of his church visits on. As was (and still is, at times) my current practice online, I fairly soon posted something in response to Hemant. In my current guise as a Christian I attempted to explain the ‘why’ about some Christian practice – which is similar to what I was doing on the other atheist forums. I didn’t want to use my own name at that point so used the name ‘Ir’, which I think I chose because my middle name is ‘Irene’. I don’t think anyone online could have guessed that was me.
I don’t think I said I was a Christian but Jim assumed from my post that I was and responded in a way which I felt highly indignant about – he basically defended Hemant against me. That led me to pretty quickly, either in public or by email, explain to Jim that I was not a Christian at all, anymore.
Which led to a lot of private email interaction and eventually a face to face meeting which I think lasted 3 hours?
Which was so healing for me. Even when I was a Christian I was misjudged a lot. I never got to talk to Christian leaders much about much of anything. But here was Jim, willing to listen, not worried about this being a male/female interaction, not judging me.
(If you’re not Christian you may have no idea that this male/female thing can be an issue, so please just trust me on this, that it is a huge enough issue for some Christian leaders to have a rule that they will never be alone with a woman who is not their wife)
Jim was technically an ex-pastor, but seriously, I doubt anyone who ever felt called to that role, ever gives up entirely the desire of a pastor’s heart, to help others. I think that’s why I like talking to pastors. Because of that and because they have enough faith to have made it their career rather than a hobby to fit in their lives here and there, where there’s a little room.
So Jim helped me heal from all the rejection from churches, which actually started the day I became a Christian because I was already dating an atheist (bad Helen!) Once we were married I couldn’t be persuaded out of it (since divorce is bad) but it was still hard to go to church alone, and then the next thing I knew was churches trying to figure out how to handle mentally ill me. I loved church because I loved God, but church hurt me a lot.
Jim helped me a lot partly because he could laugh at almost anything. He laughed at me not believing anything and called me “Almost an atheist”. Which I thought was a fun nickname and I used it when he asked me to speak at one of his conferences. Here’s one of my more lucid (?) attempts to explain it.
Basically Jim helped me feel ok about myself. He helped me believe it’s ok to be me. I think that is actually what the whole gospel was supposed to be about. That if Jesus did die on the cross for me, it was so I could know it’s ok to be me.
I helped Jim with his blogs for quite a while then I needed to move on and do other things with my time. Nevertheless, he will always be very special to me and we try to stay in touch. I know he’s there if I need him, which means a lot.
I have had other pastors who have tried to help me too (this was probably the least successful attempt ever, unfortunately). But Jim was the only one who could help me when I was almost an atheist, which ironically was when I needed one most of all.