I hurt so much, for his sake

Adam was my coworker, and an adamant atheist.  We debated on FB once, not so much about whether God existed as about whether Christianity did more harm than good in the world and how he was too arrogant in expressing his point of view to ever win anyone over to it, even were his argument better.  The things that most convinced him were most effective against the fundamentalism of his youth, and I was never a fundamentalist, so he was not very persuasive to me.  Still, I resisted another opportunity to engage him on a second occasion when he was opining about how ironic it was that a believer would accuse someone else of denying the truth in contradiction of convincing evidence.

Now he is dead.

Subsequent to our debate, I grappled with what it would mean for me if I was wrong, if Adam were in fact correct that there is no God and no good reason to believe in him given the advances of scientific discovery.  I've reflected on how central my faith is to my reasons for living, for my understanding of the person I should be striving to be and my desire to be that person.  I considered how empty I would be if I somehow concluded that there is no God, and realized that the mere existence of an other possible explanation would not be enough to cause me to abandon my faith, but that I would cling to it because it is life for me.

I did not for a moment consider that might have a frightening commonality to where he was.

And now he is dead.

I pontificated and wrote and reflected, and didn't reach out to him.  Avoided him, in fact, for fear of being further undermined myself.  And I know, because of his certainty and his arrogance and his refusal to yield an attometer, that nothing I could have said would have made any difference to him.

No one is saying exactly how he died.  They decided not to clean out his desk of his personal belongings because the police might want to look it, but there isn't any information available about any crime he might have died in conjunction with.  That all adds up to one conclusion.

Adam, a young man of 32 who should have had most of his life in front of him, died of despair.

Encountering his darkness, I failed to meet it with the only Light.

And now he is dead.

God, whose love is greater than death, (if you are real) please bring Adam home to you.