As a teenager, I could have ended up in all sorts of trouble. I'll save the details for another time. Anyhow, the faith showed up and stopped me [from getting into big trouble]. A reckless version of me never happened.
I mean that simply. It wasn't just a feeling. My whole path turned. People who say religion only does harm have never been the kid it pulled back from the edge and a dark path. I was that kid. I owe it that, and I'm not going to act like I don't just because I left the faith in the end.
The thing that kept me out of that trouble kept me out of all of it.
I wasn't allowed to make mistakes. Not the big ones I'd been heading for. Okay, I'll give them that one. But also not the small ones. I never went to a party, drank too much, and woke up embarrassed and a little wiser about my own limit. I never tried the dumb thing the other boys were trying just to find out for myself that it was dumb. I never got to chase the wrong person, crash, and learn that I'd survive crashing. The small, survivable mistakes everyone uses to work out who they are. I skipped all of them, because something always caught me first. So I came out safe, but only half-grown.
And you can't pull those two apart. It's not that the church helped me here and hurt me there, like two things on a list you add up. It was one thing. The same wall that kept me from the cliff also kept me from the ground I needed to fall on. You don't get the safe part without the trapped part. It was one building, and I lived in it for years.
So I've stopped trying to add it up. Some days I think a man who never learned to fall is worse off than one who fell and got back up. Other days I remember what path I was taking before I joined the church, and I'm just glad someone built a wall. I can't hold both of those at the same time and come out with an answer. I've stopped trying to.