Functional Atheism on Wednesdays

How I Forgot I Knew God Somewhere Between the Paper Gown and the Parking Lot

There is a spot on me.

I’m not going to tell you where.

The doctors found it three years ago on a scan I was getting for something else entirely — which is how they always find these things, by the way.

You go in for a sore knee, you come out with a spot.

That is the deal you make with modern medicine.

You will never leave a radiology department with fewer concerns than you walked in with.

For three years now they have been watching it.

Monitoring it, surveying it, studying…whatever!

Every 6 months or so, my doctor sends me to get it scanned again.

And every six months I go in, get scanned, and wait.

And Tuesday night — last Tuesday— I went in for the latest scan.

The Paper Gown Theology of Pastor John

If you have ever sat in a radiology waiting room in a paper gown, you know the rules.

Rule one: the gown is engineered by NASA to ventilate areas you did not consent to ventilate.

Rule two: the chair is cold.

Rule three: the television in the corner is playing HGTV at a volume slightly too low to follow but slightly too loud to ignore, and a couple from Indiana is touring a third house in Asheville and they cannot decide and you have time, friend. You have time.

Rule four: they tell you “it’ll just be a few minutes” and they do not specify whose minutes. Earth minutes? Heaven minutes? Pre-rapture? Post-tribulation? Unclear.

So there I sit, private waiting room, waiting for the Radiologist to come back in.

Pastor John.

Thirty years in ministry.

Author of two books on hope.

Substack subscribers in the four figures.

The Hope Dealer himself.

Trained at one of the finest seminaries in the country, SMU!

Has preached the Twenty-Third Psalm at funerals so many times he could do it from memory in his sleep.

Could quote Romans 8 forwards, backwards, and in three translations.

And what was I doing in that chair?

I was making a movie.

In my head. From scratch. With a full crew.

In the twenty minutes between when they handed me the gown and when the technician knocked on the door, I had:

Cast the funeral. Renee in the front pew. Both boys on the front pew. Lexy my dog, at home missing the only one who let her get on the bed, miserable.

Selected the music. “It Is Well” for the processional, obviously. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” for the closing. And I want it on the record, right here, right now, in writing — if any of you play “In the Garden” at my funeral, I am haunting you. All of you. Renee included. I have heard “He walks with me and He talks with me” approximately nine thousand times in thirty years of ministry and I would like to walk into glory with a different hymn ringing in my ears, thank you very much.

Drafted the homily. Three points. Started outlining the third one before I stopped myself. It’s long, trust me, a solid 35 minutes…

Run the family finances. Will Renee be okay? Did I update the life insurance after the move? Where did I put that folder?

Negotiated with God. “Lord, if You let this be nothing, I will…”

Imagined the Substack post. The brave one. The one where I tell everybody what I just found out. The headline. The subtitle. The pull quotes.

Twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes of pure, undiluted, self-generated catastrophe.

And not once — not one single time — did it occur to me to do the thing I have spent three decades telling other people to do in exactly this kind of moment.

I forgot to pray.

The Vending Machine

The technician came in. Did the scan. Was kind in the professional way technicians are kind — calm, efficient, telling me nothing because they are not allowed to tell me anything, which my brain interpreted as she has seen the spot and she pities me.

Then she left.

I sat there. Got dressed.

Went back to the suite and tried to shower the whole experience off of me. Ever taken one of those showers?

A week or so later I go into my doctor’s office.

He looked at the spot.

Nodded the kind of nod doctors nod when they are about to say a sentence that contains the word fine.

And he said it.

Everything’s fine.

The spot has not grown.

The spot is behaving.

The spot is nonspecific, which is medical for we don’t know what it is and we don’t care because it isn’t doing anything.

And on the drive to back to Suite 214, somewhere around the H-E-B on Saratoga, it hit me.

I had treated God like a vending machine.

I had walked into that exam room without Him. I had spent twenty minutes catastrophizing without Him. I had cast the funeral and selected the hymns and drafted the homily without Him.

And then — the second the news was good — I had thanked Him.

Like He was a Coke machine.

Like I had put my prayer in the slot and out came my desired outcome and I was grateful for the transaction.

Here’s the Yelp Review: Thank you, Lord. Excellent service. Five stars. Will use again.

I went functionally atheist for the entire crisis and rediscovered God exactly when the crisis ended .

What Parker Palmer Called It

The Quaker teacher Rev. Parker Palmer has a phrase I have not been able to shake since I first read it. And I been reading the Puritans lately.

He calls it functional atheism.

He says it is the unconscious belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with me.

Not stated. Not declared. Not believed theologically. If you put me in that paper gown and asked me, “Pastor John, do you believe God is sovereign over this scan?” I would have said yes before you finished the question.

But ask me how I behaved for twenty minutes in that chair?

I behaved like an atheist.

I lived as if the outcome were entirely on me.

The strategy was on me.

The catastrophizing was on me.

The worst-case scenario was on me.

The contingency plan was on me.

The funeral, and long homily, including some funny stories, was on me.

And then the moment the news came in good — I remembered God and thanked Him for the favorable transaction.

That, friend, is vending machine theology.

And if I — me — the Hope Dealer, the guy who literally gets paid to believe in God on Tuesdays — can sit in a paper gown and forget I know Him for twenty minutes...

What do you think you do on Wednesdays?

Sunday Believers, Wednesday Atheists

Here is what I am starting to see in myself and in the people I love most.

Most of us are not unbelievers.

Everyone worships something, trust me.

Most of us who read this Substack or attend Grace, would never call ourselves atheists. We have the bumper sticker. We have the cross necklace. We have the Bible on the nightstand with the bookmark we have not moved in nineteen weeks.

We believe in God on Sunday.

We sing the songs. We say the creed. We put the check in the plate. (Grace needs you to start putting two checks in the plate on Sunday.)

And then we get up Monday morning and live the rest of the week as if the outcome is entirely on us.

The promotion is on us.

The diagnosis is on us.

The kid who has stopped calling is on us.

The marriage that has gone quiet is on us.

The retirement account is on us.

The aging parent is on us.

The mortgage is on us.

All of it. Every bit of it. On us.

And then on Sunday we come back and put it all on the altar for an hour, ok an hour and 20 minutes, and on Monday we pick it right back up.

We are not unbelievers.

We are part-time believers with full-time problems.

The Renee Test

I told Renee this story when I got home Tuesday night.

I confessed it all: The gown, the HGTV couple from Indiana, the funeral I had cast, the hymns I had picked (and the one I had banned), the deal I had tried to cut.

I told her about the vending machine moment.

And Baby Doll — God bless her, because she has been doing this for 33 years and she knows me — looked at me with that one raised eyebrow she does when she is about to say something I will remember for the next decade.

And she said:

“Honey, you forgot you knew God for twenty whole minutes? In a robe? Try a Tuesday at Lowe’s.”

Reader. Reader. Reader.

She was not wrong.

If I forgot God in twenty minutes of a paper-gown crisis, what am I forgetting Him in during the ordinary twenty minutes of an ordinary Tuesday?

The Lowe’s run.

The traffic on SPID.

The email I should not have sent.

The thing I said to the Elder I have not apologized for.

The conversation with my son that I did not pray about before I started.

The ninety percent of my life that is not a crisis at all.

If I am a functional atheist in crisis, where I should know better, what am I in traffic?

What Scripture Knew Before Parker Palmer Did

Here is the thing about the Bible. Every diagnosis a modern psychologist or Quaker mystic can offer was scribbled in a scroll three thousand years ago by somebody who did not have a research grant.

David, the man after God’s own heart, wrote this:

“In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

— Psalm 4:8

Not, “I will lie down and sleep because I have a great strategy.”

Not, “I will lie down and sleep because I have run all the variables.”

Not, “I will lie down and sleep because the scan was clean.”

Because YOU.

Because you, Lord, make me dwell in safety.

And Paul, writing from a prison cell — a prison cell, where if anybody had a reason to catastrophize it was him — wrote this:

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” — Philippians 4:6

Notice what he did not say.

He did not say, do not be anxious about the big things.

He said, anything.

The scan. The bill. The kid. The marriage. The career. The parking spot at H-E-B that the man in the Suburban took from you on Tuesday.

Anything.

And then the verse most of us memorize but very few of us live:

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” — 1 Peter 5:7

All of it. Not the highlights. Not the emergencies. Not the Sunday morning ones. Not just the paper-gown ones.

All. Of. It.

The Honest Confession

I want to be honest with you about something, because if I am not honest about it I have wasted your reading time.

I do not have this fixed.

I am not standing at a finish line waving at you from across it.

I am sitting on a curb in the middle of the race trying to retie my own shoes.

I went functionally atheist for twenty minutes on Tuesday.

I will probably go functionally atheist for twenty more minutes sometime today.

The difference, I hope, is that I am starting to notice when I am doing it.

And noticing is the first move.

Because functional atheism does not get fixed by trying harder.

It gets fixed by remembering more often.

Remembering God is in the paper gown.

Remembering God is in the Lowe’s parking lot.

Remembering God is in the email draft.

Remembering God is in the 2:47 AM ceiling stare.

Remembering God is in the conversation you do not want to have.

Remembering God is not on call. He is on scene.

In two words: Ruthless Trust!

So Here Is What I Am Asking

Three things. Like always.

First — Name your paper gown.

What is the situation right now where you are running the whole movie in your head with no co-producer?

The diagnosis you have not told anybody about.

The kid you cannot get to call you back.

The marriage that has been quiet for nine months.

The career decision you keep moving from one mental folder to another.

Name it.

Then ask yourself the question I had to ask myself in the truck on Tuesday:

Have I prayed about this — or have I just strategized about it?

If the answer is strategized, that is functional atheism. And the cure is one sentence.

Lord, I forgot You were here. I’m sorry. I’d like You back in the room now.

That’s it. No formula. No fancy language. Just an honest re-invitation.

Second — Stop using God as a vending machine.

The way you know you have done it is simple: did you only thank Him after the news was good?

If you only call on God after the spot turns out to be nothing — He is your insurance company.

If you only call on God after the kid finally calls — He is your concierge.

If you only call on God after the promotion comes through — He is your HR department.

He is none of those things.

He is your Father.

Talk to Him before you know how the story ends.

That is what changes a transaction into a relationship.

Third — Practice noticing.

Set a watch alarm. Put a sticky note on the dashboard. Write it on your hand.

Three times a day, somewhere in the ordinary middle of your Wednesday — pause for ten seconds and ask:

Am I living right now like God is in this room, or like I’m the only one in it?

That is it.

You will be amazed how often the answer is I forgot.

And you will be more amazed how quickly the answer can become He’s here.

A Prayer for the Vending Machine Christian

Lord,

I have been a Sunday believer with a Wednesday problem.

I have lived as if the outcome was mine to carry. I have catastrophized in paper gowns and parking lots and 2:47 AM ceiling stares and forgotten that You were in the room the whole time.

Forgive me for going to You only after the news was good.

Forgive me for treating You like a vending machine.

Teach me to remember You in the ordinary. In the traffic. In the Lowe’s run. In the doctor’s waiting room before the doctor walks in. In the conversations I dread and the conversations I avoid.

Make me a believer on Wednesdays.

Not just on Sundays. Not just at funerals. Not just when the scan comes back clean.

On Wednesdays.

In Jesus’ name, amen.

The best is yet to come.

— Your Hope Dealer, John 2.0