Towards the end of 9th grade, I was attending a decently-sized, all-girls school in the heart of downtown when my mom decided to move us across town to Littleton, Colorado.

I was elated to move, because I hated the city life, and I hated living in Green Valley Ranch. By moving to the western side of Littleton, Colorado from northeast Denver, I felt like I was ditching everything that made my life a living hell. 

I needed a fresh start; a clean slate. Or, so I thought. 

In reality, Cystic Fibrosis was what made my life a living hell, especially towards the end of 9th grade when it became apparent my health was declining at an alarming rate. I got sick way too often, I was significantly smaller and weaker than most of my peers at Girls Athletic Leadership School, which made me quite self-conscious, and overall, I just felt like shit. 

Running out of options to keep me healthy, my parents decided to look for smaller, private and/or charter schools in the Littleton area in hopes of protecting me from catching so many germs. Through this search, they discovered Truth Christian Academy; a very small private school taught at the Columbine Hills church of the Nazarene.

Truth Christian Academy advertised itself as a non-denominational school, and it felt as such when I shadowed a student there for a couple hours. The fact that the entire high school comprised of nine students was alluring to me: it meant I wouldn’t get so sick so often. 

However, like all things that are too good to be true, there was a catch: Truth Christian Academy was anything but nondenominational. In fact, they were very conservative and fundamentalist. 

For example, on the first day of chapel (which we had every Wednesday, wherein I was forced to wear a skirt), the pastor proclaimed that the King James version of the Bible was the only trustworthy translation. Every other translation had been corrupted in some way or another, and was thus invalid and violated the very last verse in Revelations. I remember looking down at my camo green New Living Translation bible, and feeling my heart sink a little. 

My faith in any God, especially the Christian God, was barely hanging on by a frayed thread. I had many more reasons to disbelieve in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God than to believe in one. As days turned to weeks, and weeks into months, my faith continued to slip. 

In October of that year, Front Range Christian School invited my school to a science symposium, wherein an evolutionary Biologist and a creationist scholar debated whether or not humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees live. Mind you, both guys were staunch Christians, and both started and ended the discussion with a prayer. 

But, when I got back to Truth Christian Academy a couple days later (the symposium was held on a Friday), my teachers and peers immediately went into “attack mode”, openly expressing scorn towards the soft-spoken evolutionary Biologist, and even questioning the validity of his faith. 

However, I felt my faith literally snap within me a few weeks later, when we were studying Exodus, and came across Exodus 9:8-12,  where God commanded Moses to take soot from a furnace and throw it by Pharaoh to unleash a plague of boils on Egypt. My teacher (and principal of the school) looked up from Scripture and flat-out said, “Clearly, God uses illness sometimes to punish those of us who are not following His commands…” while staring directly at me. 

Even then, I knew what my teacher said was wrong, both morally and scripturally. However, it would take years for me to discover passages like John 9:1-12, which is the story of Christ healing the blind man. Until then, I couldn’t refute what she so confidently claimed while staring daggers into my soul. So, I ditched my faith right then and there; I became a full-fledged, Dawkins-style atheist. 

I know that my teachers took many more jabs at me for being a liberal atheist (at least, compared to them) over the course of the school year. But, nothing has stuck in my memory quite like the time Mrs. Asshat implied that my Cystic Fibrosis was a personal punishment from God. After all, her remark hurt me deeply. So deeply, in fact, that I decided God had to be evil if He existed at all, and was therefore not worthy of my adoration.

My departure from faith wasn’t permanent.

It would take me quite awhile to come back to God, but when I did, the faith I now had was entirely different from the faith I'd left behind. Plus, while I may’ve turned my back on God, He never turned His back on me. In fact, I firmly believe He’s the reason why I survived my bout with Pseudomonas virtually unscathed, despite the severity of my condition. 

Nowadays, my faith in Christ is stronger than it ever was, and it continues to strengthen every day. I’ve reconciled my faith with science and Epicurus’ famous Problem of Evil and Suffering, among other issues. Of course, I’ve still got a mountain of bones to pick with the Lord, and I don’t always trust Him or like what He has to say. But in my heart, I know He can handle my scathing questions and criticisms. My faith is not so weak that Bill Nye the Science Guy can topple it with a few scientific facts. 

But, I can’t say the same for the private Christian school I once attended, or the church it was housed in altogether. 

In 2018, just a year after I left Truth Christian Academy for much greener pastures, the two principals retired and the whole school fell apart. Church was still held at the Columbine Hills church of the Nazarene on Sundays. However, the church closed abruptly during the start of the pandemic, and the building’s since fallen into severe disrepair. 

I didn’t realize that church was abandoned until I started picking up Eric for writer’s group, which meant I got to drive right by the church on Coal Mine Avenue every Monday evening. At first, I noticed that the lawn and parking lot surrounding the church were overgrown, and the sign out front of it never changed. Then, I noticed that a cop or two liked to park in the empty lot, at least for a few weeks. After that, the cops stopped parking there. 

Then, I started to commute to CU Denver every weekday, which meant that I got to drive past the church every morning while hauling ass down Kipling Parkway. On one of those mornings, I noticed that several of the windows towards the back of the church were broken, and nobody came to board them up. 

With my curiosity piqued, I decided to look up the church online and discovered that it had been listed for sale in 2022, then bought by a developer in 2024. Then just today, I decided to Google it again out of boredom while I was thinking of something to write, and discovered that it has become a favorite hangout spot for “urban explorers” (AKA bored teenagers who like to trespass abandoned buildings and break shit), as it awaits demolition. 

There’s a metaphor somewhere in this, though I can’t quite put a finger on it.