Perfect Bodies Summer 1999

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Dear Mom and Dad,

You're probably wondering what's been going on with me ever since JoAnna, the kids, and I stopped going to church three years ago. I've heard you chalked up that first year to the stresses of buying our first home and having to repair it in six months, doing the labor ourselves. "We were extremely tired and busy, I imagine you told people, trying to do the work without experience and with such a short deadline. A person needs some space under such conditions. They'll be back when it's over.

But when the house was done, church was too.

The stress of that time was the final inch in a deepening fissure, one that started with my baptism when I was twelve. I asked to be baptized not because I wanted God but because 1 didn't want to go to hell. And though I grew up in the Church of Christ, I never was able to make your faith my own. When push came to shove in the darker moments of my adult life, the Sunday school pietism of my youth proved a rickety foundation—cracking, shuddering, collapsing in a jumble of lumber and stone upon itself.

I've been reading lately about my generation—Generation X, Baby Busters, Generation 13, pick your label. Though I've never thought of myself as belonging in that group, I've been struck by how much of an Xer I really am. It has been written that my generation is the first raised without religion, which wouldn't seem to apply to me, since I grew up in the church. But in a way, it does. I don't mean to hurt you, but I feel as though I inherited a Christianity lived out as if God doesn't really exist. Though I've always believed in God, deep down I've had a hard time believing that he really cares about me, that he would do anything to help me.

There are really only two moments ...

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