Are You There God? It’s Me, Lily
Vignettes on faith––lost, then found again
Book One: Genesis
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
Age: 7 - Community
I met God on Sundays in Fremont, California.
With other Chinese immigrants who fled the CCP1 for faith and a better life, my family congregated at a Bay Area Protestant church. We crammed into a dingy, narrow building with flickering lights and frayed carpeting, sidestepping cracks all over the sidewalk. Once, my baby brother tripped on a big one and cut his knee clean open. The church ladies cooed over him with bandages and antiseptic. We found care, and care was God.
To a kid, God wasn’t the boring adult sermons read aloud from a chunky black-bound Chinese translation. He wasn’t the kiddie versions of Bible stories, fun as they were. He wasn’t the verses I memorized to win cute stickers for my binders of printed hymns. No, God was a glass noodle dish brimming with wood ear mushrooms, carrots, and cabbage. He lived in the potluck line, in every steaming bowl families brought as a show of care. Those communal lunches were my Eden. Better than stickers.
A few years later my life began to echo Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Like Judy Blume’s heroine, I swapped a city apartment for a suburban house, and soon I was church-hopping across Phoenix with my family, testing altars and aisles the way Margaret sampled synagogues and steeples. We joined one congregation twice a week—Thursday nights as well as Sundays. It was everything our dingy Fremont church wasn’t: a sprawling campus of new buildings wrapped around a pristine playground. I didn’t realize it then, but we already had one foot out of Eden and the other edging into Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. In retrospect, twice-weekly services at a gleaming chapel were less about devotion and more about overcompensation.
We soon traded the megachurch for a modest Latin-American Catholic parish, where we were the lone Asian family and more crucially, the only ones who couldn’t speak Spanish. I just shrugged and raced with the other kids; God had no language barrier. But my parents saw only the Tower of Babel and balked. The language gap soon grew into an excuse to slip out of church life altogether.
Book Two: Job
“I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.” Job 30:20
Age: 10 - Prayers
A dinner plate smashed against the tile, rice splayed across the floor. My parents were fighting again. According to the Bible, I just needed to pray every night for help, and help will come. So I kneeled by my bed, hands tight in prayer. Are you there God? It’s me, Lily. Margaret had asked, and her parents stopped shouting.
But my parents never stopped. And my father kept breaking every object in sight—mom’s cooking, the air conditioner, a clothes hanging dryer. On my birthday, he destroyed my brand-new bicycle that I’d excitedly picked out the day before. When objects ran out, the beatings began.
I prayed harder, but nothing came back. I was no Margaret. And I was no Job, rewarded two-fold for unwavering faith. I realized that if I’d been cast into Hell, then I must be wicked. I didn’t beg to uneat the fruit of knowledge. Instead, I concluded that for evil children like me, birthdays weren’t real and God wasn’t real. In God’s absence came a voice telling me to kill myself. That voice stayed with me for over twenty years. And to this day, I can’t stand my birthday.
Age: 14 - Debate
In the early 2000s, Christian Conservatives wielded ironclad power. A Constitutional ban on gay marriage was in the cards, and members of the Bush administration branded Harry Potter as witchcraft.2 But in a parallel universe called the Internet, New Atheism was a swelling spring tide, a backlash that echoed like my own hollowed out faith. I didn’t own a computer yet, but I could feel the undertow of that other world, churning with heretics and arguments I had yet to understand. The day I got my own laptop for debate, the current claimed me. I slipped into the stream and atheism swept me away.
In the flesh I was still the odd kid out, so I fought on AIM and Gchat.3 There I unleashed torrents of Facts and Logic like a baby Ben Shapiro; Science(™) was my new holy book. I laughed at Pascal’s Wager, clearly a rigged gamble—because even if he won his wager, God would never honor it. After all, the Problem of Evil is simple: if God exists then He must be evil, or else He is incompetent. Why else would He let so many children suffer? My sparring partners were Asian Christians, so I’d also lambast the colonial nature of Christianity. “Religion is the opium of the people,” I’d say, quoting Karl Marx. “And Chinese people were literally destroyed by opium! How could you side with our oppressors?” Unsurprisingly, my chat windows grew quiet as we drifted apart.
I had just one friend who also stopped believing in God. I was eager to chat with him about why. But Ryan said he stopped believing because he prayed for his crush Brittany to like him back, and it didn’t happen. What a stupid reason to lose faith. I told him he should keep believing.
Age: 18 - Yearbook
Even without the God debate, my best male friend and I were destined to split like the Red Sea, leaving him on solid shore, me to drown in the waves. Tom was everything I wasn’t: wealthy, sophisticated, and gratingly popular—the lone cool Asian kid. No miracle arose to bridge us; after freshman year, we hardly spoke again. Yet on the last day of school, he found my yearbook and scrawled a somber note into a corner: You were right, God does not exist. For someone who hated God, this victory strangely struck me like a gut punch.
Book Three: Ecclesiastes
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1
Age: 19 - Violence
On the microblogging platform Tumblr, I found my revolution. There I also found Jamila, a razor-tongued, atheist Palestinian-Venezuelan; quite a cursed ethnic combo. She served searing blasphemy while I blogged Nietzsche/Lana del Rey (“God’s dead, I said baby, that’s alright with me.”). But soon, our teenage rage was directed away from religion and towards more worthy scapegoats: white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.
Through Tumblr, I surfaced the full splendor of Marx’s quote that I’d once mangled:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Opium, I learned, was medicine in Marx’s day—he used it to soothe the pain from his skin lesions. Faith was not poison, but poultice for the suffering masses. And faith, tempered by righteous rebellion, could forge itself into a spear against tyranny. No figure better captured gospel-turned-guillotine than John Brown, the devout Christian who slashed slavers to pieces under God’s banner. When John was caught and sentenced to death, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, “He will make the gallows glorious like the Cross.” For the first time, I found myself admiring the sharpness of faith; Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek, but John Brown taught us to slice it.4
Age: 20 - Steps
Suicidal ideation had kicked me out of college freshman year. Nearly twelve months later I returned, running on Escitalopram.5 The pills sanded every edge; I felt nothing, good or bad. Being zombified helped get the ball of life rolling again, even though I was just shuffling through the motions. I was only barely, technically alive.
One day, I was descending the stairs of the Honors college when a great presence struck me with lightning precision. I froze on the steps. Time dilated; terror and wonder braided together and poured through me. SSRIs6 can shoot chilly electrical tingles called “brain zaps” as a side effect, but this surge felt different. It wasn’t numbing static, but warm and radiant. Effused in golden light, I was almost certain it was God speaking to me.
Age: 24 - Iceland
Summer 2017 was post-Master’s graduation, pre-full time job in Silicon Valley, and a spiritual reckoning. In Edinburgh, fueled on a whim from the fading afterglow of MDMA, I booked the cheapest ticket to Reykjavik. Each day serendipity was my travel guide. On the first day, a gay Brazilian fashion photographer and I started chatting while steeping in the Blue Lagoon hot springs. On the second day, we parked at a small town off Route 1 to photograph a stunning church. A sermon was in progress, so we slipped quietly into the back pew. I closed my eyes.
The priest’s lolling tones sent me into a trance; I lost all sense of time. I swore I could understand the sermon, as though the Icelandic words dissolved and reformed as pure meaning, ringing in my mind. An effect of the MDMA?, I thought. After the last amen, I turned to my equally dazed Brazilian friend. He asked if I could understand the sermon. “It seemed like the priest was speaking in English,” he murmured.
Age: 25 - Stanford
I hadn’t set foot at Stanford since leaving Fremont, and all I recalled was its ocean of green. Now back in the Bay for work, I often strode through those lush grounds whenever I needed some soul oxygen. One afternoon, I stepped out of Cantor Arts Center and saw an old ghost. Tom. My former friend.
We hadn’t spoken in seven years. He’d chosen Stanford; I stayed in Arizona. I called his name and he raised a sheepish hand. We traded small talk and penciled in a proper catch up in San Francisco. His yearbook message played on loop in my mind. Surely this was divine providence, handing me a chance to admit sorry, actually I was wrong.
But when I texted to confirm coffee plans, he ghosted me. I told myself it’s okay; I would also ignore some silly girl who helped lead me astray from God.
Age: 28 - Discord
By now Jamila and I had logged a decade of friendship. We had long abandoned public Tumblr banters for private Discord DMs. When Silicon Valley coincidentally brought us together, we also laughed at our former antics while walking through Redwood City. We’d both come a long way from our keyboard crusader days.
One night while DM’ing about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she tossed off that it was stupid anyone still believed in religion. Ayaan had been mutilated in the name of Islam; no sane person should defend such institutions. My cursor blinked for a beat before I hit the thumbs up emoji. I didn’t fear this emerging discord between us. I just no longer cared to debate God.
Book Four: Psalms
“He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.” Psalms 40:2
Age: 29 - Joshua Tree
January 2021—a full year into COVID-19—rendered even I, a perennial introvert, completely touch-starved. When some friends booked an Airbnb at Joshua Tree for a weekend, I practically vaulted into my car to see them. By day, we laughed at the Teddy bear cacti and by night, roasted s’mores under desert stars. It was over too quickly, and sadly, I never hung out with those friends again. The pandemic had scattered us for good. Still, at least I had the wilderness, my cathedral without ceilings.
At 5 a.m. I began what should have been a simple four-hour drive back to Phoenix. An hour in, the sunrise dyed the sky so beautifully that I veered into the sand to admire the view, missing signs declaring WARNING: SOFT SHOULDERS. When I tried re-entering the road, my tires spun and spun. One bar of reception winked in and out; no other cars were in sight. Even in my best case, the nearest tow truck would cost a small fortune and a long wait.
I’d barely begun to berate myself when a gray van appeared on the empty road. Great, a witness to my stupidity. But maybe they’ll let me use their phone. The van braked near me, its driver leaning out his window. “Stuck?” I confirm yes. To my astonishment, six Marines piled out with ropes, hooks, and traction pads. With pads beneath my wheels, a tow-strap between bumpers, gentle taps on the gas, and six pairs of arms against the trunk, my car climbed out of its forlorn ditch in five minutes.
“God is a nice idea,” Judy Blume writes. “He belongs to everybody.” I recall the Fremont church ladies with their potluck dishes, and years later, the Marines with their roadside rescue. God in every bandage, every ladle, every rope. Semper Fidelis—Always Faithful, the Corps official motto—had been drilled into those Devil Dogs7 for years, ready to be loaned out to any stranded, faithless soul.
When I got home, I wrote in my journal that God was real.
Thanks , master of vignettes, for inspiring the structure of this piece.
Thanks for the feedback: , , , , , Danny Yoon, , , and
Chinese Communist Party
AIM is AOL Instant Messenger and Gchat is Google chat. They were the dominant messaging platforms of the early 2000s.
I may be stealing a line said by fictional serial killer of serial killers Dexter Morgan
Generic Lexapro, an SSRI used to treat clinical depression
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, a type of antidepressant that increases brain serotonin levels
A nickname for the Marines. Ironic!
So beautiful.
This bit has broken my heart a bit, each time I’ve read it: “I realized that if I’d been cast into Hell, then I must be wicked. I didn’t beg to uneat the fruit of knowledge. Instead, I concluded that for evil children like me, birthdays weren’t real and God wasn’t real.”
The relationships people have with religion is more interesting to me than religion itself (is that even possible? Another time…) and this is the best reflection on it I can recall reading.
Ngl, got choked up in a few spots here. Respect for putting this down. Thank you. Helped me think about some things I wouldn’t be able to put into words.