Why I left Evangelical Christianity Pt. 3

When I mentioned the things that life brings, this time was one of the darker times for me. We found ourselves in Seattle, 2000 miles away from our family and really no reason to be there. When we found out Kimberly was pregnant with our third child and the owners of the condo we were renting decided to sell, forcing us out, we decided to move back to Oklahoma. I am thankful for our families, without them I am not sure we would have made it. So many people in this world don't have the kind of support that our families provided us.

It was a humbling experience to say the least. After bouncing around several jobs I eventually went back to work as a copier tech, work I had done before in Tulsa and Seattle. At the same time I decided to go back to community college. My degree was in Biblical Studies, not a great degree for getting a job that would support my family. We were active in our church, but we found ourselves in the midst of a church split. Many families wanted the preacher fired and when he wasn't, they left. It was disconcerting because there were several families in the church that homeschooled their kids, as we did, and after the split we were the only homeschool family left. Eventually the preacher resigned anyway, but the families did not return. Now that I think of it, this seems like a recurrent theme that we lived. We put our heart and soul into a church and all the people we really bonded with would leave. In addition, as part of the minister selection committee, the only decent candidate on which we could agree had a very narrow view of who was a christian and who wasn't. I think deep down I probably thought that I could fix the issues with the churches we attended. All they needed was some good theology and they would change. We did eventually move to a different church, but it would only be a few months before we moved to Arkansas.

Fortunately, the UNIX classes I took at the community college landed me a job at Walmart's headquarters in Northwest Arkansas a couple of hours away. Finally, at age 33 I would start my career. On January 6, 1996 we moved to Arkansas. We had three children who were 8(Dietrich), 6(Annika), and 4(Erik) years old. We already had a homeschool group that we had come to know through Kimberly's sister who already lived in AR. We were hopeful for a new beginning.