A few years ago, I attended a writing workshop near Seattle. From the airport, I took a shuttle to a ferry. I rolled my suitcase out onto the deck to watch the ocean, the horizon line barely distinguishable as pale sky and pale water blended together. Salt spray tickled my nose and the cool metal railing felt slippery in my grip. I pulled out my cellphone and took a few photos—one of the water-horizon-sky and another the ship’s bow, an orange life preserver fastened onto the boat’s guardrail, a jot of brilliant color amid the gray-on-gray-on-gray.
Later, after I’d settled into my room in a cottage at the writers’ retreat, my phone pinged. A new email popped up from an old friend, Caroline, whom I hadn’t seen or talked to since we attended Honey Rock Camp together as teenagers. “Stina,” she wrote. “I saw your photo of the ferry on Instagram. I live just a few miles away! Can we get coffee?” She had recognized the landscape, the ferry, the blurry horizon. I wrote her back and we set up a time to meet.
On the way home from the workshop, I took the ferry again. The week had been full, with morning sessions and afternoon sessions and evening sessions. I sat on my oversized suitcase out on the deck and stared at the water, letting my mind stretch out and race over the waves. The motor of the ferryboat rumbled, making the deck vibrate softly, and diesel fumes mixed with the scent of sea, sour with sharp. My eyes went out of focus and then I closed them, listening to the other passengers’ chatter, feeling the motion of the boat beneath me.
“Look, look!” I heard someone say to my right, a little too loudly. Annoyed, I opened my eyes to squint out at the view. A cluster of people were at the ferry’s guardrail, pointing out into the ocean water. My eyes followed and then I saw it. Orcas slipping in and out of the water, their backs like horseshoes, like sea snakes, like magic. I stood up and walked to the railing, pressing my body over the side to watch. Up and down, in and out, over and under. The motion was fluid, constant, large orcas and small orcas together, staying in formation. I wished for a glass-bottomed boat—or a scuba mask to wear as I plunged my face underwater to watch their full range of movement, to glimpse their white throats.
Soon, the orca pod moved to the right, getting smaller and smaller as the ferry plowed on its route. I stood and stared until I could barely distinguish their black backs from the waves.
Caroline picked me up from the ferry dock in her black Honda Pilot. We smiled and hugged and took in each other’s appearance, registering the fifteen years since we last saw one another: the new smile lines on each other’s faces and subtle streaks of gray hair. She led me to her car, and I hoisted my suitcase into the trunk, then settled into the front seat. Apart from the occasional Facebook post and photo, I didn’t really know what was new in her life, and I was curious why she had reached out. Was it just to reminisce, or to reconnect?
“Stina, I am so glad I get to talk to you!” she said as we drove down the foggy streets toward Edmonds, the wipers swishing away the drizzle. “I’ve been wanting to connect with you since I read that article you wrote for Christianity Today. Your writing about Josh’s faith loss is my story, too. But I’m the one who lost God.”
I blinked back my surprise. At camp, Caroline had been “on fire” for God. One of her heroes had been Ruth Bell Graham, Billy Graham’s wife, and she aspired to be just like her: faithful, steadfast, and utterly devoted to Jesus. At the time, I had been a little derisive of her love for Ruth Bell Graham. Wasn’t that a bit retro? Shouldn’t we be admiring women of faith who did more than support their more famous husbands—someone like Corrie ten Boom, who hid Jews in her house during World War II, or at least Elisabeth Elliot, who went back on the mission field alone after her husband was killed? In my narrow understanding, Ruth Bell Graham was the 1950s housewife of evangelicalism and, I admit, I had put Caroline in that same small box.
We drove to a little café and, over a small table, ate salmon crepes and talked about religion, marriage, and how our post-Bible camp years were cloaked with disillusionment. She told me her story about losing faith in God, of that certainty and assurance slipping through her fingers entirely, and how it impacted her husband, Jake. She could no longer hold on to her crumbling evangelical faith and found tremendous release in finally allowing herself to let go, even though it caused tension in her marriage.
“Agnosticism was sweet relief,” she told me, a porcelain coffee mug cradled in her hands. “I never in a million years wanted to hurt Jake, same as I’m sure Josh never wanted to hurt you, but I was lost to myself during my deconstruction. We hate ourselves more for hurting those around us. That’s why people who are losing their faith often choose not to tell others, which, of course, only increases the guilt and the loss.”
I nodded, picking up my own mug to match hers, wondering if Josh felt the same way. Outside, the rain streaked down the windows.
Her eyes locked with mine. “I really scared Jake. But here is what is beautiful about our story: he stayed and loved me through it. Somehow in the midst of his wife throwing him for the biggest loop of his life, he was able to hold these opposing emotions in tandem: fear and betrayal with commitment and love.”
I nodded again, remembering Jake from camp. He was a real adventurer, participating in Honey Rock Camp’s five-week-long trip to the Canadian wilderness, and he always wore yellow bandanas. He and Caroline had been dating since high school and once planned to start a church together.
“How?” I asked her, pushing aside my fork. “How did Jake do that?”
She went on to tell about the hard and raw conversations they had soon after her faith deconstruction. When Caroline honestly answered Jake’s questions, he would leave the room and they wouldn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon. But then at night, he’d silently roll over and hug her in bed.
“I remember the first time he did this,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I almost revolted, saying, ‘How can you touch me? Have I not pushed you away enough?’ His only response was, ‘Do you see whose arms are holding you? I’m here.’ Jake’s heart is why we made it through the roughest patch. That’s the power that a spouse holds for their partner turning agnostic or atheist.”
I let go of my breath, which I’d just realized I’d been holding.
“And Jake and I, well, we are a little further along in this journey than you and Josh are,” she said. “When we celebrated our ten-year anniversary and decided we needed to do something big, we flew to Maine, just the two of us, and renewed our vows together. We even wrote new ones. It was the best thing we’ve ever done.”
The hours ticked by and we sat in that café, sharing the broken fragments of the dreams we had so carelessly built up as teenagers at Bible camp, not realizing how fragile everything was. We were once so confident that our futures would be bright, that God would give us the things we wanted: strong marriages, clear vocations that made a difference in the world, strong and steady faith to weather life’s storms. Yet, as I listened to Caroline talk through the painful years when God seemed absent and her marriage struggled, I felt a soft brush of hope. Somehow, they had emerged from the fires. “We are a little further along in this journey than you and Josh are,” she had said. “We took our hands off each other. We let our love be free of religious conditions.”
The rain was heavier when we finally left the little café. I started to pull on my raincoat, one arm at a time. “Here,” Caroline said, grabbing my hand. She pulled me under her umbrella. “Let’s share this.” We walked over the cobblestoned sidewalk to her car, sidestepping rivulets of water.
On the drive away from the café, the rain got heavier and the windshield wipers were on overdrive. I told Caroline about seeing the orca pod, about the motion of the whales’ black backs slipping in and out of water. Visible and invisible.
“No way!” she said. “I’ve taken that ferry hundreds of times and I’ve only seen orcas once. That’s really special.”
She turned the defrost on high and tiny circles of clear windshield blossomed upward through the fog. We sat companionably, listening to the whine from the AC and to the rain, which rang like pebbles on the car roof.