God Did Not Meet Me on the Toilet

This is a blog post about how fear-based faith was my old, simple-minded view of God, and how deconstruction taught me that God is much bigger than we ever could have imagined.

I grew up believing God was always watching. Listening. Waiting. Not in a comforting way—but in a way that meant every thought, every fear, every bodily experience could be turned into a moral moment.

When I was a kid, what I didn’t know was an OCD (but was VERY CLEARLY OCD) theme centered on germs was ruling over a large portion of my life. I was terrified of stomach bugs and throwing up (due to a lot of manipulation via my sibling, but off-topic). If my stomach hurt even a little, my mind would spiral into a panic. I would sit on the toilet, sweating, shaking, convinced that throwing up was the scariest and worst experience possible.

So I prayed. Not gently. And not honestly/earnestly. Transactionally.

“Please, God. Please don’t let me throw up…I’ll do X religious thing. I promise to do Y religious thing better. Please.”

I believed God was listening from somewhere above me, weighing my sincerity, deciding whether I had prayed correctly enough to deserve relief. I believed that if I threw up, it meant I had failed and I was a sinner not worth saving and God couldn’t come to my aid. God had not chosen to intervene with me. That I hadn’t earned protection.

This was not a belief that I invented on my own. I inherited this weird, weird relationship from church.

I was born and raised Southern Baptist in a hellfire-and-brimstone church. Some of my earliest memories of church and “lessons” involve being taught that I was responsible for other people’s eternal salvation or damnation. That it was my job as a five-year-old to have conversations. That it was my job to get people to recite the sinner’s prayer.

That it was my job to make sure they didn’t go to hell.

I remember lying awake at night, begging my sisters not to fall asleep before me. Because once they did, I was alone with my thoughts—replaying every interaction I had that day. Every cashier. Every other kid. Every stranger I hadn’t asked the right question or said the right words to.

I carried the weight of eternity on my shoulders as a child. And I also carried fear.

Fear of hell. Fear of getting it wrong. And really, fear that even though I had prayed the sinner’s prayer before, that I hadn’t prayed it RIGHT.

At the end of so many sermons, after angry preaching, we were introduced to the idea that maybe there was a way to say the sinner’s prayer wrong. What??

“Maybe you should say it again just in case.”

What??

My mind spiraled every time. What do you mean not right? What do you mean it didn’t count? What if I wasn’t actually saved? What if I was still going to burn in hell forever? It took years to quiet these thoughts. Years to untangle fear from faith. But what even was my faith and belief in God if it started as fear from going to hell?

When Tom and I got together, we chose our own church. It was still Baptist, but less fire-and-brimstone and more centered on love. That’s where my first round of deconstruction began.

I didn’t believe being gay was a sin. The lines around abortion felt complicated and human and deeply personal. I asked questions. I thought them through. I found peace with where I landed. I still believed in God. I still believed in Jesus. I still believed faith could be good.

But then the second round of my deconstruction came along.

In 2025, a surprising conversation with a friend cracked something open. I learned that people I trusted—people I never assumed would—still supported Donald Trump. Genuinely. Had we all not grown up from our East Tennessee conservatism? Had we all not grown up? Did everyone stay stagnant that I had left behind?

It really messed me up and sparked my round two. I found myself grappling with the reality that there were Christians I respected, Christians I thought shared my values, who were comfortable with cruelty. Comfortable with harm. Comfortable with being silent in the face of both of these things.

A few weeks into this second deconstruction journey, I caught a stomach bug. I’m thirty years old, and each time I’ve caught the stomach bug since I was 18, I’ve thankfully just had terrible diarrhea. But my stomach was twisting in familiar ways, and for the first time in 12 years, I knew I was going to throw up.

And for the first time in my life, I didn’t pray or CRY out to god for it to stop.

I didn’t bargain. I didn’t promise anything. All I thought in the few moments before I tossed my brisket was, “I don’t need god here. God does not need to be with me on this toilet. God needs to be with the children in Gaza who are being bombed.”

When it was over, I felt clear and grounded. I hadn’t been abandoned, and god hadn’t punished me. God had simply not met me on the toilet. And it felt as it should. I speak to god frequently (casually, not word-salad soliloquies that you will see in churches), and I muttered a thank you in my head for his strong presence. The kids suffering and dying, the place where it actually mattered, needed god.

This round of deconstruction was much longer and wider. I started seeking out Christians who had left fundamentalism. People who question the idea that the Bible is perfect and inerrant. People who believed it was written by humans, full of wisdom as well as mistakes, and that god was still real, still powerful, and still present.

I found forward-thinking believers who believed god could exist outside of a “flawless text.” They helped remind me that the holy spirit lived within people and not just within pages.

I hit the bottom of the pail during that season. For about 36 hours, I wasn’t sure if I even believed in god at all anymore. But even there, I felt something steady. Not a book, rules, or fear. But presence. I started seeing how many fundamentalist Christians place the Bible on the same pedestal as god the father, god the son, and god the holy spirit. But a book made my humans will never be equal to the god who created the universe.

If the holy spirit lives within me, then my faith does not hinge on an (un)inherrant text. The Bible can matter deeply without being god.

When Tom and I moved to Texas, we were completely alone. And we found a church community that welcomed us, loved us, and took us in. Our son, usually contrary, connected with the children’s ministry in a surprising way. And his joy honestly kept us there, even though both Tom and I knew we didn’t believe everything the church believed or its doctrine.

Even knowing the majority of the congregation was conservative, hearing phrases like “alphabet squad” tossed around casually, we believed that current disagreement didn’t mean we couldn’t stand in the presence of love and offer love back. With my therapist, I am always working hard to make sure I am not making decisions based on black-and-white thinking.

But turns out, there is a line. There is a boundary. Everything suddenly felt black and white.

The murder of Renee Nicole Good was our line. It was the last straw.

Her murder was a moment for Christians across the country to say this is wrong. That ICE was wrong. That a man murdered an innocent mother. That their tribal party had gone too far. But instead, I watched Christians justify it. I watched them say she deserved it. The people who are supposed to stand with Jesus and the least of these outwardly agreed that murder was justified. And if Christians weren’t saying that it was awful, they were very quiet.

Silence when they should have been outraged. Random Bible verses when there should have been action and holy anger.

Tom and I decided then and there we couldn’t keep physically showing up to spaces that acted like nothing was wrong. We couldn’t fathom the thought being in a body of believers again that raised their hands in worship while refusing to acknowledge suffering. That prayed for personal salvation while ignoring injustice towards the least of these.

And Tom and I just truly refuse to be silent and complicit anymore.

I don’t want to look back years from now and say that we knew about the parallelism of Nazi Germany (history has taught us what happens when religious communities choose comfort and silence over moral courage) and Christians either supporting or being complicit of ICE—and also remained complicit. As if nothing was happening. As if nothing was worth anger. As if everything was fine.

Because nothing is fine right now.

Leaving fundamentalism has been a long time coming. Leaving hasn’t felt like rebellion either. It has felt like grief. Grief for the parts of faith that once felt safe, even if they were never whole. But Tom and I are hopeful.

We no longer believe in things that didn’t make much sense before. We don’t believe god made us just to hate us. We don’t believe fear is the price of faith. We don’t believe a loving god created a system where shame is required for belonging. We are LGBTQ+ affirming; we reject Biblical inerrancy; we view Jesus’s death as an example of radical love and forgiveness (“What if when Jesus came to die…he came to save us? What if he has saved us? What if there is no clause that someone who is lucky enough to be taught the sinner’s prayer exists? What if Jesus is bigger than small-town Southern Baptism?); we are working through our interpretations of hell and are focusing on how heaven and love of god might need to be done correctly here; we are rejecting the idea of sin as a tool to shame and control, but rather reframing that there are acts that keep us from flourishing as the best loving humans we can be on this earth; and we have lots and lots of thoughts about the old testament, lol.

I will not pass on my same religious trauma onto my sons. I will not let them lie awake afraid of hell or believing he is responsible for saving others.

To those who have always doubted my “liberalism/leftism” and ask how I stayed for so long: the answer is complicated and not black and white. But also simple.

I was trying to search for the true meaning of Jesus’s love.

Now, loving means choosing justice. Choosing voice over silence. Choosing a faith that looks like Jesus flipping tables—not complying with harm, not protecting power, not pretending like how we raise our hands and perform in worship service on Sunday absolves the rest of the week.

God did not meet me on the toilet, and I hope he continues not to. I don’t believe he needed to. Instead, god now meets me in his presence. I find him in justice, in conscience, in love, in courage, in my children, in my refusal to be silent.

For those of you who have been with me on this journey since August 2025, I’ve been promising a list of resources that I’ve engaged with to help me deconstruct. Here it is! Full disclosure, I haven’t consumed everything on it yet, and I was trying to wait to release it into the wild after I had given a recommendation on everything. I made this decision to wait on it BECAUSE somehow!!! Someone recommended Alisa Childers as deconstruction material and after listening to her, I now understand that whoever sent that was trying to hint at me as SINNER. OF THE WORLD! HERETIC!

If you have a sharp reader’s eye, you may also notice where I stopped capitalizing god. Somewhere along the way, I realized that practice for what it was. God is bigger than capitalization. Bigger than performative reverence.

My friend Tara shared two thoughts that have stayed with me. The first is this: “god” — g-o-d — are just letters we shape with our mouths. What is holier, what is more reverent, is how we live and how we love.

And the last — the place I’ve landed most comfortably of all:

I don’t know what’s at the top of the mountain. But I know that on the way there, I am living well. I am loving others well.

PS: Save your prayers. Instead of praying for my sinner's soul, rather, pray for the innocent humans across the country being harmed by the current regime.