Sunday, September 13, 2026
Saturday, September 12, 2026
They Went Out From Us
The First Baptist Family
On June 1, 1992, my pastor sent me a photograph.
In it, I am standing against a plain wall wearing a red shirt, looking directly at the camera with the expression of a child who has been told to stand still long enough for someone to take his picture. The photograph came with a typewritten letter.
“Dear David,” it begins.
The pastor explained that he was sending the picture “as a remembrance of the day you became a part of the First Baptist family.”
I have kept both.
At the time, there was nothing remarkable about the language. I understood what he meant. I belonged to the church. More importantly, I belonged to the faith the church represented.
The letter went on to express the hope that, as part of that family, I would join the church in reaching “those who are lost around us.”
There were two groups in that sentence.
There was the family.
And there were the lost.
I knew which one I belonged to.
I was a Christian.
That statement feels simple to me even now. It describes the world as I understood it then. I believed in God. I believed Jesus was the Son of God. I believed that human beings were separated from God by sin and that Jesus had died to save us. I believed the Bible told the truth about those things. I believed prayer mattered. I believed people could be saved, and I believed I was one of them.
As I grew older, those beliefs became more than something I had inherited from adults.
I participated.
I studied scripture.
I attended Sunday school.
I worshiped.
I evangelized.
I preached.
I worried about whether I was living as I should.
I tried to understand what God wanted from me.
Christianity was not an affiliation I checked on a form. It was one of the primary ways I understood who I was and what the world meant.
The people around me understood me that way too.
The letter matters to me now partly because it preserves that shared understanding.
Memory is unreliable. We revise our own histories. Details disappear. Later experiences change the emphasis we place on earlier ones. I know that the person remembering his childhood today is not the child who lived it.
But the letter is still there.
A pastor looked at that child and wrote that he had become part of the First Baptist family.
No one knew where his life would go.
No one knew what questions he would eventually ask.
No one knew that he would study religion closely enough to begin questioning some of the explanations he had been given for it.
No one knew that he would someday stop calling himself Christian.
The photograph contains none of that.
It is simply a picture of a boy who belonged.
That is what makes it important to me.
More than a decade later, in another Baptist church, I would stand in a small kitchenette between Sunday school and worship and have a very different conversation.
By then, I was in my early twenties. College had changed the kinds of questions I was asking. My beliefs had begun moving outside the boundaries of the congregation. Church leaders had discussed me. I had already lost roles that had once affirmed my place in the community.
During one of those conversations, an older deacon would tell me that I had never really been saved.
The statement did more than describe what he thought about the person standing in front of him.
It reached backward toward the boy in the photograph.
If I was not a Christian now, then perhaps I had never really been one.
If salvation could not be lost, then whatever had happened in 1992—and everything that came afterward—had to mean something other than what we had believed it meant at the time.
That tension has stayed with me.
A church once sent me a photograph to commemorate the day I became part of its family.
Years later, another church would help me understand that, according to the theology I had inherited, my eventual departure could be evidence that I had never truly belonged.
The ending could change the meaning of the beginning.
For a long time, I thought the important question was which interpretation was correct.
Was I really saved?
Was I never saved?
Did I lose something that theology said could not be lost?
Those questions once seemed enormous to me.
They do not anymore.
I have become more interested in a different question.
How do we construct the stories that allow our beliefs to survive?
We do it with scripture.
We do it with doctrine.
We do it with history.
And we do it with one another.
The photograph on my desk is a small reminder that, before anyone knew how the story would end, there was a time when the story meant something else.
And one of the things we believed then was very simple.
Once saved, always saved.
Antigonish (I met a man who wasn't there)
By Hughes Mearns
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Evening
Evening
By H.D.
The light passesfrom ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower—
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint—
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.
The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots—
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots—
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.
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