Faith was never a straight highway for me. It moved more like an old radio dial at midnight, catching pieces of gospel through the static before drifting back into guitar solos, movie scores, and questions nobody around me seemed comfortable answering. Born on June 6, 1986, with an unknown father and deep Roman Catholic roots lingering on my maternal side, I entered the world carrying labels before I even understood language. In the eyes of certain religious circles, I was already flawed on arrival. An unbaptized “bastard baby.” A child born outside the lines they drew in permanent marker. Some people wear religion like armor. Others wield it like a courtroom gavel. Growing up, I felt both.
The thing is, belief does not always bloom inside stained glass windows. Sometimes it grows through headphones, flickering television screens, and the safety of music playing softly in the living room while your mother tries her best to survive life herself. My sanctuary was never traditional. It was the soundtrack my mom filled the house with as I grew up. Journey teaching me longing through melody. Foreigner teaching vulnerability. Celine Dion singing with the kind of emotion that made pain feel survivable. Michael Bolton, Richard Marx, Shania Twain, George Strait, Peter Gabriel. Every artist carried a different sermon without ever standing behind a pulpit.
Film became another form of scripture for me. Tim Burton’s worlds showed me that outsiders could still be beautiful. Disney stories whispered that broken people still deserved love, purpose, and belonging. Looking back now, those movies and songs probably shaped my morality more than organized religion ever did. They taught empathy before doctrine. Feeling before fear.
Church itself did not truly enter my life until right before basic training. About a month before leaving for Fort Leonard Wood, my mother brought me to North Beaver Creek Lutheran Church. At nineteen years old, after already graduating high school and spending most of my life spiritually untethered, I was finally baptized. Some people are baptized as infants before they can remember the water touching their skin. I remember every second of mine. Not because lightning struck from heaven or because I suddenly felt reborn, but because for the first time I felt like maybe I was being allowed into something instead of judged outside of it.
Then came basic training.
Ironically, one of the most peaceful places in a military environment was Sunday church service. For one hour, the screaming stopped. Drill sergeants faded into the background. Boots stopped stomping long enough for exhausted souls to breathe again. A handful of us battle buddies would sit together and sing hymns, not because we had all become perfect Christians overnight, but because we needed relief. We needed humanity. In a place designed to strip you down and rebuild you, church became less about religion and more about emotional oxygen.
That feeling followed me through annual training for a while after I returned home. But eventually, the weight of expectations attached to religion began crushing the experience for me. Faith started feeling less like healing and more like performance. At home, there were standards and pressures that never aligned with who I actually was. The deeper I searched for authenticity, the more I realized I could not force myself into somebody else’s blueprint for salvation. By the time my unit was activated for Operation Iraqi Freedom, my relationship with Christianity had already begun unraveling into something closer to agnosticism, mirroring the uncertainty I grew up with.
War changes the architecture of belief.
You start asking questions that Sunday school pamphlets cannot answer cleanly. You witness fear, survival, grief, loyalty, and human contradiction all occupying the same room at once. You see people pray before missions and curse God afterward. You learn quickly that faith is not always this polished halo people post online. Sometimes faith is simply getting through the next day without emotionally collapsing.
For me, music and film became spiritual therapy in ways religion never fully managed to accomplish. Songs became prayers without needing labels. Movies became meditations on humanity. Art allowed me to wrestle with morality, grief, identity, love, queerness, war, abandonment, and healing without pretending I had all the answers. That mattered more to me than forced certainty ever could.
Even now, I do not think my story fits neatly into one denomination, one doctrine, or one political interpretation of God. My belief system looks more like a record store at midnight than a church bulletin. Pieces of Lutheran hymns. Pieces of Catholic guilt. Pieces of rock ballads and poetry books. Pieces of military silence. Pieces of Disney hope stitched together beside Tim Burton shadows.
But maybe faith was never supposed to be linear.
Maybe some of us find God in choirs. Others find something sacred in distortion pedals, cinema screens, roadside conversations, or the quiet drive home after midnight when the world finally stops demanding explanations.
And maybe surviving long enough to keep searching for meaning is its own form of prayer.