The first truth I learned was the one they handed me, polished smooth by years of repetition, a God shaped to fit the pulpit, solid enough to lean on, small enough to carry.
But as the seasons turned and the sermons wore grooves in my voice, I felt the edges loosen. Certainty, once bright as brass, dulled under the weight of lived experience.
I watched people break, heal, rise, fall, and in their stories I found a God far larger than the one I’d been taught — a Presence not confined to doctrine but woven through the marrow of existence.
It struck me then: the miracle is not that we were made, but that we were made aware — that consciousness stirs in us like a tide remembering the moon, that we can look at our own beginnings and dare to ask why anything exists at all.
Free will, perhaps, is the moment the universe recognises itself in human thought and chooses to keep unfolding.
So I stand here now, still a Reverend, but no longer bound to the narrow beam of inherited belief.
I honour the vast intelligence that breathes through all things, and I trust that whatever we call God is not threatened by our questions — only revealed by them.
They wrote their truth chosen by wisdom. I write mine in the quiet between thoughts. And now, brother, so do you.