FRANKENSTEIN GOD.
I handed the wheel to a God I had spent thirty years assembling.
Author’s note: I use capital-G God here because lowercase would be dishonest. I was not wrestling with an obscure concept. I was wrestling with the God I grew up believing in, prayed to, and thought I had handed the wheel to. This is not written as an attack on any particular faith tradition. It is written from inside my own wreckage.
I. Wet Meat
I dragged my feet into those rooms thinking I was the captain.
I was stuck in a bottle.
Like your classic ship in a bottle, but the ocean was liquor. The ship was me. The captain was me. I had been telling myself for years I was steering.
I was not.
The vessel was not sailing. It was trapped.
That part I figured out fast.
Step One was easy.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
I was in the room. Clearly I was powerless. Clearly my life had become unmanageable. I had just come out of the hospital after alcohol withdrawal hallucinations that morning, so “powerless” did not require much imagination.
No theology required.
No manuscript traditions, no Greek lexicon or ancient Near Eastern context. It was just me. And a physical system so wrecked by my routine that “powerless” didn’t feel like a doctrine I had to believe in anymore. It was now a medical fact.
I saw a small light in that first meeting.
Just a speck.
So I sprinted toward it.
At least, I tried to.
Step Two.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Power with a capital P.
Okay. God.
Yeah. God can restore me to sanity. Only God can restore me to sanity. That made sense to me. I already had a category for that. I grew up with that category.
I also had brain fog. Still do, in some ways. I mostly chalked it up to me pickling my brain. My memory was never my strong suit, but after my extensive relationship with alcohol, I was sure my whole internal filing system was trashed.
So when I first came into recovery, I literally believed God was going to restore my brain.
Not “restore me to sanity.” Whatever that turns out to mean.
My actual brain. The wet meat in my skull.
(I was still learning that expectations can rot faster than resentment.)
Step Three.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
I was already saved, by the blood of Jesus, of course.
I just had to really mean it this time.
That was how I understood it.
A mutiny had already happened. The old captain was relieved of duty. He had proven himself unfit. Fairly convincingly.
Now I had to hand the wheel to God.
The God I had been talking about my entire life.
That was the whole concept.
I thought I knew exactly who I was handing it to.
I did not.
II. Assembly Required
I came into recovery as a Christian.
Not a particularly devout one. I hadn’t “found a church I liked” in a very long time, which was a convenient little phrase for a much larger problem.
Same Sunday sermons. Same basic message every week. I visited unrelated churches, different denominations, and somehow they all seemed to be going through the same parts at the same time.
Can’t anyone come up with something new?
But there was another part I usually liked to ignore.
I hadn’t read the Bible in a very, very long time.
Like the entire thing. Really studied it. Particularly the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible.
Probably (especially) the boring parts. The genealogy chapters. That is where confident Bible-kid answers go to die.
I went to a Christian school from fourth grade through the first year of high school. It was attached to a fairly large “non-denominational” church. Most churches I had attended were non-denominational.
Later in life, I started piecing together what that meant.
Usually some kind of charismatic Pentecostal evangelical. The volume turned up and the labels turned off.
At the time, it just meant normal.
Speaking in tongues? Normal.
Spiritual warfare? Normal.
Someone getting healed on stage? Normal.
Bible teacher casually mentioning a few exorcisms he did with a pastor in the past?
Checks out. Not weird.
Why would I question that? Adults said it with confidence, and kids absorb confidence.
Going into sixth grade, I was at a camp. Big outdoor tent. Lights, fog machines, electric guitars, the non-denominational thing.
There was a kid I knew from school there. He was allergic to peanuts. Like, would die if he ate one. That was how we all understood it, anyway. I was eleven. I was not exactly reviewing medical records under the tent.
He asked for healing.
Then he ate peanut butter.
Then he ran laps around the tent.
The room lost its mind.
Seemed like he was totally healed.
Did I mention everyone was speaking in tongues while this was happening?
They had this whole part of the worship that night. If you have faith and you ask, the Holy Spirit will give you the gift. Come on now. If you want to speak in tongues, do it.
Everyone.
I was in sixth grade.
I did not question any of it. Why would I? It was normal. It was the air.
People got healed on stage in front of the whole congregation. The devil was trying to deceive you. Christians were being persecuted. Spiritual warfare was happening at all times.
All that to say, there were plenty of times in my life I could point to something I could not explain.
So it must have been God.
That was the answer I had back then for a lot of different things.
It helps when everyone around you is also collectively coming to the same conclusion.
By thirty, I had thirty years of stuff like that stacked in me.
Sermons. Songs. Slogans. Theologies handed to me. Interpretations I chose to accept as Gospel, no pun intended. Verses. Claims. Jokes. The certainty of every adult in every building.
I had built a God out of it.
I had been adding parts for so long the original was just buried.
Frankenstein God.
That is the only phrase I have for Him now.
Stitched together out of what I was told, what I needed Him to be, what I was afraid of, and what other people seemed sure of. Bible verse in one hand. Worship band in the other. Lights, fog machines, and a peanut allergy testimony in His pocket.
And I handed Him the wheel.
III. The God Who Could Not Lose
Frankenstein God could not lose.
Whatever happened, I had a story for it.
Kid eats peanut butter and lives? Miracle.
Somebody dies? Mysterious will.
Pray for something and get it? God’s grace.
Pray for something and don’t? My faith was weak. Or it wasn’t God’s plan. Or I had asked wrong. Or I needed to grow first. Or the answer was actually “not yet,” which is a very convenient answer when nothing happens and you need the system to stay intact.
I figured out how reliable that system was when I tried to use it on myself.
I asked a Christian member to pray for me after a meeting. I believed God could work through him to heal my brain because he also came from a flavor of Christianity that believed in modern miracles, had faith, seemed spiritually qualified, and I was apparently operating with the theology of a desperate man at church camp.
Nothing happened.
Just my same foggy head, standing there after a meeting, trying not to feel embarrassed for needing something that badly.
I told myself it must not be God’s will.
I told myself I had done this to myself, so it was my burden to bear.
Maybe healing was spiritual, not physical.
Maybe God was busy with someone else’s hamstring.
Whatever.
That answer was already prebuilt.
I did not have to think about it for one second.
The system was foolproof. The system never lost. Frankenstein God could not be falsified because every outcome had been prewritten to confirm Him.
That should have been my first clue.
It was not.
A God who cannot lose is also a God who cannot show up.
The system was so perfect that it was useless. If every outcome confirms Him, no outcome is Him. He is whatever I decide He is in the moment I need to decide something.
It was not a relationship. I was playing both parts of the conversation.
Unfortunate development.
IV. No Voice in the Box
I picked my sponsor partly because he was a Christian.
He had pieces of his story I could relate to, and he seemed like he had actually changed his life. I did not know him in his drinking days. I only knew his sober self. His sober self looked like evidence.
Christian. Man of God. Nice dude.
Good fit.
He is still my sponsor.
Love the guy.
The men I was reading the Big Book with on Monday nights, the ones taking me through the steps, were the same way. The 12 step book, not the Bible (although if you say “Big Book” around certain circles, they do get the same look in their eye).
Varying levels of Christianness, if that is a word. Devoutness feels wrong. Churchiness doesn’t fit either.
But Christian.
Real Christians.
They live out their faith. They do their best to walk like they understand Jesus would have wanted them to walk. Great men.
These men fed me. They sat with me. They took me through the work. They told the truth as they understood it. They lived better than I was living, which at the time was not a high bar, but still.
The men in the room were not the problem.
The problem was already inside me.
Anyway.
I worked through the steps with these men. One other guy going through the steps for the first time with me. Dinner, conversation, and reading.
The other guy and I would talk on the side about certain parts of Christianity we had questions about. We didn’t chat a ton, but enough to where I knew he was not exactly fully aligned with what both of us would have called traditional beliefs.
I was slowly starting to realize, so was I.
Then Step Nine started getting close.
Step Nine was not theory.
Step Nine was the end of the theory. The list was finished; now I had to go find the people on it. This wasn’t about ‘surrender’ as a concept in a meeting. It was the actual sweat on my palms as I dialed numbers I’d deleted years ago. It was the reality of direct amends. It was looking people in the eye and admitting what I’d done without looking for an exit or a drink to dull the shame and drown the anxiety.
And Step Nine scared the shit out of me.
By then I had been sober for months. Long enough for people to congratulate me. Not long enough for my head to become safe.
The men around me said you do it by giving it over to God. Relying on God to give you strength. Trusting God with the weight of it.
They described their relationship with Jesus the way I had heard it described my whole life.
A relationship.
Talking with God.
Walking with God.
Letting God guide you.
You’ve probably heard the language. Warm. Certain. Familiar. Like Jesus is close enough to grab the other end of the couch when life gets too heavy.
I wanted that.
I needed that.
And I could not get back to it.
I had felt close to God once, or what I thought was close. Tuesday youth group, Saturday service, Wednesday chapel, Bible class daily. The whole world arranged to make God feel near.
Then I got older.
Then I drifted.
Then I drank.
Then I collapsed.
Then I crawled into the rooms and tried to find the God I used to think I knew.
The line was dead.
I went to church when my sponsor invited me, because it helped him. I did things I did not want to do because people told me they worked. I did not do what I wanted, because what I wanted to do was drink until my brain stopped thinking.
So I did everything else I didn’t want to do, to the best of my ability, because people told me it worked for them.
I had no other options. Fine. 1,000% effort from me.
But as the sober months went by, I started to understand something I had not expected.
I was sober.
I was also a “dry drunk.”
Oh shit.
That realization was not good.
I had stopped drinking, but everything else was still there.
The noise was still in my head. The shame was still burried in my chest. The resentments were still backlogged. The fear had not moved.
I had taken away the only tool I had ever had for shutting any of it up.
Now I was just sitting in the room below deck with all of the rot.
Awake.
Sober.
I thought God was going to handle that part.
That had been the whole deal. That was the trade I thought I was making.
Hand over the wheel, get peace.
Hand over the wheel, get rest.
Hand over the wheel and finally get whatever many people in those rooms kept describing. The relationship. The serenity. The presence. The thing I had been hearing described my entire life and had never actually had.
The wheel was handed over.
The peace did not come.
So I went looking for Him.
And I was not casual about it.
V. Down the Rabbit Hole
I became OBSESSED with finding God, knowing God, doing it the right way.
I wanted the truth.
Not “God has a plan” Hobby Lobby decor truth. I wanted to know what was actually real.
Because if I was going to turn my will and my life over to God, it seemed important to know who the hell I was handing that to.
Apparently, trying to identify the God I had surrendered to did not exactly restore me to sanity.
Strange.
Nobody ever gave me a good reason why we all read the New International Version in school. It just was like that. But my friend’s family had King James Versions. His church had KJV Bibles.
Why are they different words?
Is that important?
The “Word of God” is the “Word of God,” most non-denominational types would tell me.
“The KJV is the uncorrupted Word of God,” other people would tell me.
KJV-onlyists, let’s call them that.
Very normal thing to base eternal certainty on. Which English translation has the least suspicious font.
What I am trying to say is, I did not care much about the debate as much as I cared about knowing what was right. What was true.
I did not want to put words in God’s mouth.
Seemed important to me that I not accidentally do that by reading, learning, quoting the wrong translation.
That led me down the rabbit hole.
Manuscript traditions. Which manuscripts conflict. Which verses appear to be later additions.
Greek. Hebrew. Semantic range. Ancient context.
How people decide what a word most likely meant.
Sounds easy enough, right?
Problem is, “most likely” starts looking different depending on who needs the answer.
An atheist translator may not land where an evangelical translator lands. A Catholic may not land where a Baptist lands. A Muslim scholar may not be protecting the same conclusion a Christian scholar is protecting.
Which led me to: shouldn’t the Holy Spirit be able to clarify this somehow?
Why is everyone claiming to be led by the Holy Spirit and coming to different conclusions?
Then I looked into Islam. Then Judaism. What I noticed was this: everyone points back to a tradition of their choosing. An interpretation of their choosing. You repeat what other people say, the way other people said it, and that becomes your answer.
Great news for a man trying to stay sober.
I could find confidence everywhere.
I was looking for honesty.
The harder I tried, the worse it got.
I read about Yahweh, El, the Demiurge. Whether early Israelites were even monotheistic in the way I had assumed. The Trinity. Baal. Asherah.
Very normal search history.
I was not picking a denomination.
I was trying to understand who was actually holding the wheel.
VI. Panic on a Spinning Rock
Where are you, God?
Silence.
For months.
And months.
I did not know how to make a decision without turning it into a theological emergency. I did not know how to pray without checking whether I was praying to the right idea of God. I did not know how to read the Bible without wondering which sentence had been translated through someone else’s fear. I did not know how to sit in a meeting and hear someone talk about God saving them without feeling like God had changed His number and forgotten to tell me.
The Frankenstein God I was looking for did not answer.
Not the God of my imagination.
That would be impossible.
Whoever I thought I was praying to, my demands were impossible to meet.
Even for God.
I was not asking for a Moses / burning bush moment, although I would have happily accepted that experience. I am not above theatrics when my life is falling apart.
I was asking for relief.
Relief from the noise in my head. From the thoughts I swore could only be from the devil himself.
No answer.
Other people in the program had stories of God coming to them in their darkest hour.
One of them told me he had a gun in his mouth when it happened.
I was not planning a reenactment. But I knew that kind of dark. The kind where a person starts wondering why some people get interrupted and some people do not.
Let’s just say this was a time where I met the criteria for divine intervention and none came.
Instead, I spiraled into a panic attack as I stared at the fucking stars.
I am just a fucking animal, on a rock, in a solar system, in a galaxy, full of fucking rocks.
There is no greater purpose.
That was the thought.
Not poetic.
Not profound.
Spiritually defeated.
Terror with astronomy in it.
I prayed for at least four to six hours as I tossed and turned in bed. Panic attack. No booze to drown out reality. No bottle to make the universe smaller. No chemical mercy.
Just me, sober, trying to get God to answer before my own mind ate me alive.
Nobody is coming to save me.
Not even God.
That was where I landed.
Not as a slogan. In my chest.
What I had to admit later was simpler.
The God I was praying to could not answer.
Not because God is not real. I cannot make that claim. I do not know what is real.
The God I had built was not equipped to do what I was asking Him to do. I had asked an idea I had been carrying around since I was a kid to bear the full adult weight of a man trying not to drink himself to death.
I had asked a stitched-together childhood diorama to part the Red Sea.
Ideas don’t answer.
That God did not answer to me.
He could not.
He was made of lights, fog, sermons, peanut butter, and the certainty of every adult in every building.
He did not have a mouth.
I had handed the wheel to a God of my own construction.
And then, when the new storm came, I was furious He wasn’t steering.
VII. Emergency Broadcast, Maybe
I slept maybe two hours.
Made coffee. Sat at the desk.
Started watching a YouTube video.
It was July 8th, 2025.
At the time, I had 240 days without a drink.
I do not remember what video I was watching. Something about Yahweh or Canaanites or whatever other topic I had decided might finally explain God to me if I just destroyed my mind hard enough.
And then something happened.
I still do not know how to fully explain it.
A voice came into my head. Rapid-fire sentences. As if they were thoughts, but not my own voice.
You will not know me.
You cannot know me.
Do not put me in a box.
Seeking me is enough.
Was that God talking to me?
Lmao.
One of my pet peeves is when people say God talks to them. Normally, God seems to tell them things they already wanted to hear, and it reinforces conclusions they already arrived at.
Heaven apparently runs on confirmation bias.
Maybe these were my own thoughts.
That is where I tend to lean now. My body had been running on panic and bad sleep for months. This was probably a last-ditch effort by my subconscious to save my ass.
To help me survive.
That is the answer I would give people now.
It was probably that.
But in that moment, for at least a few days, I believed it was God talking to me.
Maybe it was.
Maybe it wasn’t.
But you know what was real?
The effect.
The effect was real.
The weight in my chest lifted. My lungs opened. I could breathe for two seconds.
There is a line in the book about comprehending the word serenity and knowing peace.
That is the closest I can get to describing it.
What came apart that morning was not God.
It was the demand.
The demand that I had to figure God out before I was allowed to live.
The demand that I had to know which translation was correct, which doctrine was right, which manuscript was uncorrupted, before I could move forward without drinking.
For the first time in months, the demand let go.
Not because I had found the answer.
Because I finally stopped pretending I could find one.
The fear that God was waiting for me to verify Him before I was allowed to keep living cracked.
VIII. The Patchwork Savior
I did not have to come to a conclusion.
I did not have to believe the Trinity made sense.
I did not have to believe Jesus was literally the Son of God.
I did not have to believe He was born of a virgin or literally resurrected.
I did not have to keep calling myself a Christian to keep breathing.
I am probably not a Christian.
That sentence still feels dangerous to write.
Good.
It probably should.
I still look. I still read. I still follow the question farther than is probably good for my sanity restoration application.
But the weight changed.
See, my expectation was that if I did not figure out the God thing, I would relapse. Or worse.
I thought I could not maintain sobriety, or live life, without God.
Specifically, without my God.
The God I had built.
But it turns out I had made it thirty years of my life, although with some pretty rough patches, believing in a Frankenstein God I had assembled out of whatever I decided was the right answer at the time.
A Sunday sermon arm.
A youth group leg.
A worship-night heartbeat.
A Step Three brain.
A Step Nine panic attack.
A God made out of parts I did not know were parts.
And I had called that surrender.
IX. No Permission to Drift
The stitches finally popped.
People call it deconstruction, but that sounds like I was the one with the scalpel. Like it was a project I had control over.
I was not in control.
It was like watching a structure I had been living inside collapse one wall at a time, while I was still inside it.
Now I live somewhere between agnostic theist and agnostic atheist, depending on the day, the book I’m reading, the weather, the meeting, etc. Sometimes God feels possible. Sometimes God feels like a word people use when they want their own voice to echo louder. Most of the time, I am somewhere between those two rooms.
Most days, I am mostly content with not having an answer.
Mostly.
Some days I pray like someone is listening.
Some days I think I am talking to the ceiling.
Some days the ceiling is still better company than my own head.
If God is not the captain, at least not the Frankenstein God I built, and the old captain me is not allowed back on the bridge, then who is steering?
Maybe the new captain me.
Maybe God still. The real one, if there is one. The one I cannot describe. The one that does not fit inside a box I built.
Maybe nobody.
Maybe it is the group. The men. The calls. The work. The lighthouses that cut through the storm whether I can explain who lit them or not.
I do not know.
I will not pretend I do.
But not knowing does not give me permission to drift.
Doubt does not get to become another bottle.
Uncertainty does not get to take the wheel just because certainty failed.
I handed the wheel to God.
Then I realized that God was covered in my fingerprints.
That did not end the question.
It made the question honest.
Who is steering this ship?
Look down.
Something always has its hands on the wheel.
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What has helped you stay honest when you did not have clean answers?