u/snowglowshow

My point of view about Christianity changed 10 years ago. Since then I have been in discussions with probably hundreds of Christians. They seem to have all learned about and demonize the word "deconstruction." It's almost always within the first few exchanges we have, some form of, "What made you deconstruct?"

The difficulty I have with this is that the word deconstruction, if I take it literally, is the exact opposite of what happened to me.

I didn't deconstruct things from my understanding; I added to them.
I didn't walk away from Jesus; I walked toward him.
I don't hate God; I have a richer understanding of what that means.
I am not in rebellion; I am fully open.

To me, my entire journey has been marked by taking one step forward, consistently over 5 decades. It reminds me of Interstate 90: you start in Boston but are told that the road doesn't extend beyond the city. But because you love the road, you decide to actually get up and travel it.

It's there that you discover that it is much longer than you were told. There are new things all along the way that increase your experiences and discoveries. And you keep reading blog and social media posts from people in Boston telling you that you never loved Interstate 90 in the first place; otherwise, you would have never left Boston.

You're sitting there, a thousand miles down the road, reading people tell you what a place is like that they've never been to themselves.

So my question is: What is this kind of journey called? We have a nice, tidy single word with deconstruction, but deconstruction would be the last thing you would call a journey down I-90.

Edit: I wanted to add an excerpt from a message I sent to somebody a few days ago...

"I think one thing I would really appreciate being better understood by others would be that I didn't deconstruct anything. I didn't deconvert. I didn't leave anything behind. It was the opposite. To me, the experience has been like and felt like one of moving farther up and further in, farther up and further in. It feels much, much larger. More complete in comparison. If it's a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, I was working with 100 pieces before, now I'm working with 500. It doesn't make things perfectly clear, but it lets you see over time what looks to be more true and less true. I've also come to notice that the people who told me what it would be like at this stage are people who had never been here before, so how would they know? Back then when we were more alike, we all wanted to truly know Jesus. I think that is the same still. But you can't unsee what you've seen. If Jesus isn't like who you thought he was when you were much younger, it's not your fault, it's just the acceptance of a reality."

Complete opposite of what we were taught

Not sassy, just real

Verifying Free Model Limits as of August 2026

A scholar in a recent post here said, "the modern canon had reached its present form by the end of the 4th century." What writings are in "the" modern canon of the Bible?

Would you guys want this if it was a t-shirt?

Alternate term for "Deconstruction"