6 - Experience

In the years following my initial faith crisis, I resolved a lot of the issues that had originally bothered me, at least superficially. One thing that brought me back to questioning however was, interestingly enough, Facebook. Through the wonders of this feature on the digital landscape we are able to connect with long lost friends of the past. Here I found many old acquaintances who had left the church or who no longer seemed to believe. Out of a sincere desire to understand why, I began to delve back into the old issues. For many, once the curtain had been pulled away, they seemed to completely leave their beliefs behind. For me, my faith is like a pendulum. I'm always going back and forth between having faith and being a skeptic. I hear good arguments against the metaphysical that make a lot of sense. However, what brings me back are those personal experiences, which while I understand how they may be explained away, still have had an emotional impact on me that I can't or perhaps don’t want to let go of.

The LDS church has a pretty strict interpretation of tithing, which paradoxically, leaves room for interpretation. It goes something like: you pay 10% of your income to the church. That's the church. It doesn’t count if you pay to some charity you like. "Income" is pretty much open to however you want to define it and there are no hard fast rules for how you should interpret income. That said, culturally, it is understood by most to mean 10% of your gross income.

I never had a problem paying my tithing and it’s always been on the gross... generally because my wife pays the bills. She always sets aside the money for it before paying our other bills. I've heard people tell stories about how they paid their tithing when they didn't know where the money for rent was going to come from and out of no where, an unexpected check would come and save them because of their faith. It makes sense that we would hear these stories and not the ones where the family doesn't get that unexpected check and they lose their house, but that's for another post perhaps. I never had one of those stories… well at least not until 2007 and the Writer's Guild of America decided to strike for several months.

Working as a freelance artist on a television show, I was paid a salary based on a productivity scale. During one rather productive period, I was bringing in a lot of money. Our bank account was filling up quickly and we began to think about what we should do with this small windfall. We had some pretty heavy bills and thought maybe there would be enough for some new purchases. Perhaps even a vacation. We stopped this kind of thinking when rumors of a strike began rumbling in the distance.

You can't have a story without a writer so when the WGA made the decision to strike, the entire industry just shut down. Perhaps you remember when all your favorite shows abruptly stopped mid-season? This is due to the fact that no writers would have been coming up with new story lines and the studios were not going to continue to pay wages when no work was being produced. With this in mind, my wife and I went into saving mode and felt relieved we had some extra cash to extend our survival if necessary.

On December 13, 2007 the work stopped… right before Christmas. Up to this point we had paid our tithing in full. We continued to pay on whatever money came in but the inflow was dramatically less. I like to compare it to flying an airplane and suddenly the engine stops. All you can do is coast. I did find scraps of work here and there and Wendy's job helped a lot but the engine was just sputtering. We were descending monetarily and the ground was fast approaching.

In the middle of February the strike ended, but it was another month before work started trickling in. Three months without work. All the extra money we saved was completely gone and spent on living expenses. I remember praying a lot and trying to trust that we would be taken care of during that time. Some will say that it is during the difficult periods that you have the most faith. That your prayers are sincere, that you try and get close to the spiritual. Sometimes it takes losing a lot to get serious about what you believe in. This was definitely true of us.

The very week we were about to empty out our account was the very week we got the first paycheck after the strike. We had been saved! All the praying and faith had paid off. We never went in the negative monetarily nor did we go further into debt. It was such a blessing. But we weren't out of the woods yet, because that very same year the actors' contract was also up for renegotiation and they were fairly slow in reaching an agreement. I worked for three months and then we went through another two months of no work. I did have a few side jobs, which helped, but for a second time the week we were about to run out of money we got a check from work. We were doing all we could do, but in the end, it seemed as though we were saved by grace. Okay, if the first time was just a coincidence, how do I explain it happening a second time?

That time felt as though I was just flowing down rapids in a river with no control over where I was going or whether I would drown or not. Something external appeared to keep me afloat. Whether its rational or not, experiences have an effect on our beliefs and that experience had a powerful effect on me. I felt close to God. I still had doubts and I still had questions but I they didn’t seem so daunting anymore. Perhaps that is why I allowed myself to explore them again. This time would be different …and it was.