I was a boy in a church, in Lugazi, when the reverend made the altar call. “Anyone who wants to give their life to Christ, raise your hand”. I put mine up and my father, who was seated beside me, reached over and pulled it back down, with a look that said “you don’t know what you’re doing boy“. I lowered it. But the question stayed with me. Did he not believe? Why would a man who had prayed over me before every journey stop me from stepping forward to proclaim my belief? I would spend the next thirty years trying to find the answer.
I had already started asking questions when I was about twelve. One Sunday afternoon in our two-room rental near Kiryateete, I told my mum, Abwooli, that the Bible seemed to me like a book of guidelines. Good advice, but only for the place and the people it was written for. It didn’t seem to match the good I could see around me. There were things that were good in our world that the book never accounted for, and things it called good that didn’t quite fit our reality. She heard me out and agreed more than I had expected. She also said that it was still an important guide, and that people took it seriously. Both injunctions were true, but I couldn’t yet hold them together. She was like that. Throughout my childhood, she had always said that God is everywhere and looks after everyone, whether they ask or not. We also had a saying that went: “God helps those who help themselves”.
My father was a practical man, a farmer who trusted what he could test, and he had taught me to experiment and gather evidence, and approved when I did. So I applied that same approach to the one thing I had been taught to take purely on faith. I did the obligatory confirmation course at the local church, learned to recite the creeds, was handed my own Bible at graduation, and yet remained unconvinced. The book of Revelation baffled me the most. It still does to this day. But the experiments kept returning one result I couldn’t dismiss. Prayer. When I was in trouble and prayed, something real happened. I got courage and hope. And when something arrived that looked like a miracle, I would examine it afterwards and mechanically trace the ordinary machinery of how it had come about. For years I read that backwards, and logged it as evidence against. The magic kept dissolving into life logic, so I concluded there was no magic. It took me twenty years to flip the experiment and ask why the life logic kept arranging itself like that.
The long way around
I left, the way my generation left, not with theatrics and drama but silently, like sneaking away from a sleeping baby. What reopened the door was permission. In Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Genesis, and in a debate where he paused to define exactly how he was using the word “God”, I saw something I hadn’t known I was allowed to do: define, and redefine. The word was not a wall but a working part. A Jewish friend had told me years earlier that for her people the Torah is alive, that it says different things depending on when you read it, while we had treated the Bible as though it always said the same thing the same way. I hadn’t been ready for that sentence when she said it, but now it landed. And John Vervaeke gave me the language for what I had been circling my whole life: that we don’t come to know the world by holding right opinions about it; we come to know it by taking part in it, through participation.
Slowly the whole structure flipped for me. The Bible was never a rulebook to copy. It was a manual for living, an ideal example, the same thing every serious tradition is reaching for. Jesus, it occurred to me one day, wasn’t a Christian. He was a man trying to live well in his own reality, and he did it so well that his friends wrote it down for future reference, just like we take pictures and record videos today. The saints and sages were all doing the same, trying to live well in the place and time they lived in. Copying their exact steps onto my road today is akin to putting the cart before the horse, as they say. What was available to inherit from them was never the particular procedure in itself, but rather the courage and the way of participation, the stance. The procedures were just the tracks their participation left behind from that instance of life. So it seemed that the challenge was to track what good looked like for us here, as they did back then, and to become good at this.
The boy in Kiryateete had been right that the guidelines were written from somewhere else. He couldn’t yet see that this was the book doing its work, the same way a parent’s advice is specific to a life you may never live and somehow still about your own.
And the God I was handed as a boy, the old man in the sky from the Watch Tower comics, was not there, because that was never where he was. What I found instead is harder to draw and easier to feel. God as reality itself, the ground that everything else stands on, the whole that holds its parts the way a Russian doll holds the ones inside it, all the way up and all the way down. Not a being I petition from outside, but the one we live inside and could never be outside of. It is the only way I can make sense of something that is everywhere at once. We are not looking up at God. We are in him.
Home
When that settled, so did I. Life stopped looking like something I had to correct and started looking like something I had to learn. It is not wrong. It has a way it works and a rate at which it moves, and when you find the part of the pattern you are standing inside, the struggle eases, and the meaning rises up to meet you. The more I looked, the more I was humbled. And I saw, at last, that everything in these essays had been this same homecoming at a smaller scale. Coming home to Phiona, to the children, to a week with days that announce themselves, to a Sunday table full of near-strangers, to my father, the man who was sometimes violent and the man who carried us, held in the same hand. Each was a turning toward the source, in one room or another.
I began this series with a hum, the “is this it?“ that found me on ordinary evenings. It was never the sign that something was broken. It was homesickness, the sound of a man standing just outside the thing he was built to be inside. No achievement was ever going to silence it because it wasn’t asking for one. It was asking for a turning. Coming home wasn’t returning to a building. It was re-membering, in the oldest sense, becoming a member again, of my family, of a Sunday table, of a lineage of praying fathers, of the whole unfolding thing I had been treating as scenery.
My father pulled my hand down in that church because, I think now, he did not trust a faith you announce with a raised arm. He trusted the kind you live, the early mornings, the work, the prayer before a journey, the God who helps those who get up and help themselves. He wasn’t refusing me the sacred, only the shortcut. He was right, and it took me thirty years to agree with him. I never did go back and raise my hand. I came home another way.
These days we pray as a family before bed, the prayer I kept from him and remade in our own voice, and the children seal it with the “Hey” and will not sleep without it. Every time I leave on a journey or stand at the start of something new, I feel his hand again. The hand he pulled down is, on most evenings, folded over small heads in the dark in prayer. It took the long way. Everything in my life that turned out to be worth keeping took the long way.
That is the road home. It was never a belief I had to hold. It was a direction I had to turn. I don’t ask you to see it my way. I built this view out of my own road’s materials, and your road will offer you different ones. I ask only the thing the whole series has been asking. Turn toward the life already in front of you, take up some small, unglamorous piece of its keeping, and let the participation teach you what it taught me, that the thing you’ve been aching for has been aching for you back.
Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t.
Questions to carry
What were you handed as a child that you have since set down? Is it the thing itself that you outgrew, or only the shape it came in?
Whose exact steps are you still trying to copy? They left tracks, not instructions. What were they doing that you could do here, in your own place and time?
You know the hum, the “is this it?” that arrives on an ordinary evening. What is it pointing at? And what would it cost you to turn that way?
