The Only Gospel

Even now, when I smell hay or stale beer, my body flinches long before the memories surface. Then comes the old reflex: the quick apology, the prayer for forgiveness that no longer has a target. My brain still speaks fluent scripture.

Some afternoons, a breeze pushes dry leaves across the patio, their soft scraping reminding me of the whispers children make when they’re hiding something too big for their bodies. My shoulders tense as if I’m still trying to make myself smaller.

I once asked a pastor, years after I’d left the church, whether God intervenes in the small things. He smiled just shy of smugly and said, “Always.” I wanted to ask why He hadn’t intervened in mine. Instead, I nodded. Meek. Polite. Old habits die like saints: slowly, beautifully, and in public.

He handed me a church pamphlet before we parted ways, an attempt to fix my grief or my theology.

What religion gave me was a vocabulary. What it took from me was mercy.

When I think of that little girl now, I see her standing at a fence line on the edge of the world, hands gripping splintered wood, watching the sunrise come in gold. She’s trying to make sense of a God who lets the world keep shining despite what she already knows of it. She believes fiercely and without reservation, that light must mean goodness. Shadows were where the bad things stayed.

She will spend half her life learning that brightness can also blind. That fireflies spark flames that devastate acres.

I still pray sometimes - not to be forgiven, but to remember. Memory can be its own sacred act, a way of bearing witness when no one else will. If I close my eyes, I can hear the barn, though faintly now. I can see the horses shift, restless but quiet, understanding the need and value of silence. I can feel the rough towel, the scratch of the hay, the first lesson of my life: that secrets can sound holy if held gently enough.

What I couldn’t understand then was how theology - or, at least the way it was taught to me - made him untouchable. He was the elder. The authority. A man. The same sermons that warned me to obey also protected him.

God’s own image was drawn in his likeness: male, powerful, unquestioned. Whenever I tried to picture heaven, I saw his pale blue eyes blinking too close to mine. I’d assumed then that God had the same eyes.

It took years to separate the two, to peel God’s face away from his, to imagine a holiness that didn’t require my silence. Now, when I talk to my own children about faith - loosely, in fragments - I tell them that it’s not obedience that saves us. It’s honesty. I tell them that god, if there is one, is big enough to hold the truth. In fact, she insists on it. My kids, I’m happy to say, ask better questions than I ever dared to.

Sometimes, when I write, I feel the old dissociation rising: hovering just above myself, watching words settle like dust in a shaft of light. Only now I don’t float away to escape. I do it to see clearly - to widen the frame. The air smells like ink and old paper. Safety.

There’s a verse I loved as a child: The truth shall set you free. Back then I thought it meant confession - listing every sin until the list ran out. Now I know it means speaking what was once unspeakable, naming what happened, refusing to let silence sanctify it.

I return to this image often: the sky above the barn, the color of bruised fruit softening into blues of every shade. I imagine the girl and the woman both standing there, watching the same horizon. The light that once blinded now opens: steady and kind. Soft.

And into that air, I whisper the only gospel that ever mattered. The one I wish someone had spoken over me.

You were never the sin. You were always the prayer.