When you hear the word fall, you probably think of a downward motion.
Fall is almost always followed by down. Gravity, which causes objects to free fall, is intuitively understood as a downward force. Even our Fall season takes its name from the annual phenomenon of dead leaves falling down from trees.
Paradoxically, we can describe the journey of Deconstruction as falling upward. Falling Upward, by Richard Rohr, provided a framework for understanding my deconstruction journey.
As I began my deconstruction journey, I started asking a lot of questions. I had so many that I organized them with a Trello board. As I studied the board, one of the questions leaped from the screen:
Is the Bible inerrant and infallible? Preachers and teachers had answered “YES!!!” my entire life. But for a brief summer encounter with wonderful people who practiced what the same preachers and teachers called “demonic religions,” it was difficult to hear anything else.
I remember sitting in London City Airport at 5:00 AM, watching TV through a coffee-fueled haze as the 2016 U.S. presidential election returns scrolled across the chyron.
The impossible was now something I had to accept.
A world that I thought I knew. That I thought I understood, was no more.
A worldview that I had fortified for fifteen years, in an instant, had disintegrated.
A worldview that had been instilled in me by my parents and the church in which I grew up.