A very practical reason I found to believe in God again is that by having faith I am free not to worry about myself any longer. God is in charge, not I.

Which frees me up to protect so many more things than just myself. Which gives me a feeling of deep meaning and purpose. Because living for yourself is a miserable existence.

This is what Kierkegaard called the “leap of faith”. If the ultimate outcome isn’t on your shoulders, you’re freed to act with a kind of boldness and generosity that pure self-reliance can make difficult.

For me this experience of surrendering reveals something real about how life works best. Some would push back and say you don’t need God specifically for that reorientation.

That secular commitments to others, to justice, to creative work can achieve a similar outward turn. But Dostoevsky, argued that without a transcendent grounding, those commitments eventually lose their anchor.

I think we’ve seen in our modern world that he was right and so back to Christ I go.