The short answer: I fell in love with His character.

What Jesus said:
Love your neighbor as yourself.

What Jesus did not say:
Just kidding if they’re gay.

________

The long answer:

When you grow up caring for a parent with a terminal illness, you end up writing a lot of essays about how horrific it is to watch them suffer. This Easter, I’ve decided I’ve written enough about C. Michael Dunn the cancer patient; it’s time I put my heart into praising Dad the fierce believer.

When I say Dad, I mean with a capital “D” – In 1,000-point font while the rest of the sentence whispers in 8- or below. He loves being Dad. I once called him “Pops” as a throwaway joke, and he immediately made me promise I would never do that again. He wanted to be ‘Dad’ for a very long time, he told me. And so, Dad he is, and Dad he always will be.

You may have noticed that I continue to use the present tense in the aftermath of his passing. Not two weeks ago, I would’ve called it wishful thinking. I spent the twelve years after his diagnosis desperately seeking a way to cope with what I thought must be a Godless world. A pastor once insisted to our congregation that he knew God was real because he had received instructions in His voice. I practically scoffed. Impossible. Fairy tales. I probably even thought, bullshit. It broke Dad’s heart to see his son, once passionate about sharing the Gospel, regard these things with contempt. In my mind, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had lied to me. There could be no all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God who allowed a tumor in Dad’s brain. That was the end of that. Next question.

While Dad struggled more and more with everyday tasks, his faith burned with an intensity that would make a supernova blush. At the time, I was afraid I might ruin his last hope if I shared what I really thought about his conviction. With no proof – just a hope, a feeling, really? I couldn’t see myself as a believer and a rational human being. My heart was hardened further when I had my first and only bipolar manic episode. Months after I started to recover, I looked back on the sea of religious thoughts and delusions I experienced. I decided that religious experiences were probably just ancient, undiagnosed mental illness. Why God would obscure Himself from me further, I couldn’t fathom, and therefore I considered it biting proof that there was no Big Guy up there looking out for me.

I find it no coincidence that the founders of the Methodist church struggled in much the same way. In 1735, brothers John and Charles Wesley sailed their return voyage from the Americas. They had set out to minister to the Native Americans, but realized they lacked the requisite Christian faith and would therefore have no success in missionary work. 

It was in this state of uncertainty that John Wesley experienced what is known today in Methodist tradition as evangelical conversion (not to be confused with the Evangelical movement). As he sought to distance himself from the church, he encountered the Holy Spirit, recognizing God’s direct presence for the first time in his life. He felt his heart “strangely warmed,” so much so that he devoted the rest of his life to spreading the good news across the globe! He records the event in his journal: “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

I found God in Somerville. I had just dropped a friend off so he could catch his flight from Logan the next morning. I was parked in a tough spot to pull into oncoming traffic, and my frustration began to snowball. Only a few days ago, I entered age twenty-six with the worst birthday weekend I had ever experienced in my life. I had organized and paid for a trip to New York City that, in the short term at least, boiled down to a waste of my time, money, feelings, and energy. Why? I asked no one in particular. My rage built and built and built. Then, I felt pure peace, the manifestation of Jesus’ promise to his disciples: “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 18:1-4). It was like God injected helium into my soul. In that moment, I realized that I could not ignore what I knew, buried deep in my heart: Dad was right!!! My dad’s faith transformed, in my mind, from an awkward tension in our relationship to the most important truth I could possibly imagine: that God is real, and God is alive, and God will meet us wherever we are.

How do you know you can trust God, one might ask, after such a tumultuous journey to faith? Didn’t He abandon you?

I return to Summer 2018, my 5-star stay at the Whittier Pavilion. The nurses regularly shoo me away from the bill of patient rights in the hallway. If I wasn’t experiencing paranoia symptoms before, I’m sure freaking out now. Three of my friends, Michael, Coleman, and Anthony, arrive to spend some time with me as all these new chemicals settle in my brain. I will always remember our laughter in the face of a broken system. At the end of their visit, another patient makes a comment to me.

“What I’d give to have four friends like that.”
“Hmm?”
“Not everybody has one friend willing to visit them in a [place] like this. Not to mention four.”

I was a little confused, but I thought that the patient was probably confused himself. A bit later, I went to the nurse’s station to take my pills.

“Hey Ryan, great to see some folks visit you today! Going forward, make sure you don’t exceed our visitor cap.”
“Okay. What’s the cap?”
“Three at most. If your friends want to come back, they should pair up and take turns.”

Though Michael, Coleman, and Anthony would make for an incredible Veggie Tales cast, I imagine Lamotrigine tastes significantly worse than ‘the Bunny’ (Veggie Tales explores the story of Daniel 3, Nebuchadnezzar’s Golden Image, through a giant chocolate bunny).

Today, we celebrate that God the Father sent his only son Jesus Christ to be the “fourth” person in a furnace filled with all of us. May they know we are Christians by our love.

Happy Easter! He is Risen indeed!!!

Love,
Ryan