Everyone wants a transformational moment.

A flicker of good, or even a miracle. A transcendent experience you can look back on and say with absolute confidence – God did that and I am forever changed because of it. We are taught in Sunday School the Holy Spirit will come to comfort us, that God will reveal himself to us, and that Jesus will take the wheel when life is out of control. We only have to believe, and transformation will happen in a moment, in a prayer, or in a song. When I look back at transformation in my life, I don’t find many of these God moments, instead I find events which have evoked serious consequence upon my ego.

Here, I’m talking about experiences of tragedy, crisis and loss, where one has to drag themselves out of bed and force their legs to move forward. Where hope is lost, and transcendence is impossible to grasp.

The unexpected death of a classmate in High School, the tragic death of my friend Josh Lantz in a canoeing accident, the loss of another friend, Randy Bister, taken by cancer at the age of 25. These and other macabre experiences have plucked me out of the clouds of this American existence and thrown me against the grounding shores of life. I guess what I’m trying to say is that yes, summer camp in 8th grade where I felt a tangible relationship with God at the campfire was a transformational experience, but not the most effective one.

Before I move on, one caveat – transcendence found in positive moments can be life changing, not to be brushed aside or casually dismissed as fake or inauthentic. What I am cautioning against is a pursuit of transcendence as a panacea, that is, a pursuit of the next big high to permanently pull you out of the depths of your current despair.

In looking back at the tragedy in my past, I can see clearly why hardship is transformative – I am numb to the good. Financially, I’m categorized in the top 5% of wealth in the world. Physically, I’ve been pretty healthy — some broken bones and a couple surgeries but no debilitating diseases to struggle through or disability to hamper my swagger. Truly, comfort is all I’ve known. I am not threatened by detainment or death if I proselytize my beliefs from the street corner, nor do I worry about negative market impact if I spew my inner monologue on Twitter. I’ve lived in relative ease compared to those living in the throes of poverty and the grip of oppression.

For me, transformation was not coming via bible study or worship experiences. Instead, I found it at the expense of my comfort, in experiences forcing me to dramatically revolutionize my beliefs and corresponding actions.

Some context. When I was 9 years old, I experienced the trauma of a near-death experience.

The story starts out rather adventurous. I was a passenger in a U-Haul truck my grandfather was driving. Co-piloting a cross country move from our old home, in Hayward, California to a new farm in rural Iowa. My father was already in Iowa working and my grandparents were helping my mother and my siblings move our stuff across the country. My mother, grandmother, brother and sister were behind us in my parents’ Jeep Cherokee. The move was exciting, and the journey had just begun.

We were three hours into the 2000-mile trip when my grandfather started to act rather odd. He began speaking of angels and the power of God to do things we could never imagine. His emotions became erratic and his voice increased in volume. It was worrisome and I tried to think about how I could signal my mom that something was wrong, as there was no way to text her; it was 1988 when cell phones were carried around in bags or in car consoles and texting was not yet a thing. My plans to signal my mom were interrupted as my grandfather escalated his words into action as he began to let go of the steering wheel for moments of time, raising his hands to the sky, assuring me that Jesus would take the wheel.

As we weaved in and out of Sacramento Interstate traffic going 70 miles per hour, we narrowly missed a large semi-truck, and then abruptly careened right up an off-ramp through a red light and back onto the on-ramp. Even in recollecting these events, I remember being fully aware of what was happening. It was like the membrane between life and death was torn and I had a moment to decide my fate. As we entered the interstate traffic again, everything slowed down. I realized my life could end at any moment. I began to wiggle my small frame out from under my grandpa’s stiff arm in an effort to take control of the steering wheel. When my grandpa registered my movement and intention, he snapped completely – pinning me to the bench seat with his powerful arms, leveraging his full body weight against my chest. Now with his hands completely off the steering wheel and eyes crazily locked to mine, he began to scream, “JESUS WILL DRIVE THIS VEHICLE, SAM! DON’T INTERFERE, JESUS WILL STEER, JESUS WILL TAKE THE WHEEL!”

Side note: I’ve never liked the country song “Jesus, Take the Wheel” by Carrie Underwood for obvious reasons.

As my Grandpa continued to scream and lean his body weight onto me, I was becoming frantic but unable to move. I could do nothing. My grandpa then raised his hands to the sky in spirit- crazed wonder and yelled, “THE ANGELS WILL PROTECT US, SAM... JESUS WILL DRIVE.” At this point I was able to lift my torso. Craning my neck, I got a glimpse of the road ahead — we were headed toward a bridge overpass. If we kept up our speed and path, we would inevitably launch over the guardrails and down 40 feet into the traffic below. Time stopped and I told myself, “Now, Sam!”

Wiggling and squirming, I got out from under my grandpa’s weight and stomped with all my might on the brake, sending my dog into the windshield and crumpling my grandpa into the steering wheel and dashboard radio.

As vividly as I remember those frantic seconds in the truck, bobbing and weaving through midday traffic, I cannot, for the life of me, remember anything divine. Just confusion, terror, panic, and pain.

Once stopped, I realized what had just happened, and I don’t remember much else. There are snippets: I remember being curled into a ball under the dash with my weight on the brake, the smell of smoke and burnt tire. I remember a fireman telling me if I hadn’t stepped on the brake, I would be dead. I remember the look of the front end of the U- Haul, precariously balanced with a smashed and twisted front wheelbase on top of the now destroyed sheet metal that was once the overpass guide rail. I remember it was my brother’s birthday. I remember the realization that Jesus did not take the wheel and the angels did not guide us safely to the next rest stop. I realized if I hadn’t acted, we would be dead.

Now, that’s a heavy story, one that took me quite a while to finally write down as I had not revisited those moments since they happened all those years ago. It was by definition a transformative experience – the naive little boy who had gotten into the truck that morning was no more. He was changed. It may have taken years to surface and still more years to understand. But transformation had occurred.

Sam DuRegger
Des Moines, IA
November, 2009

November, 2019

I wrote the above essay exactly 10 years ago, a few months before I got married. I was 30 years old.

I vividly remember writing this, sweating profusely, seated in Mars Cafe in Des Moines. It was about one month after I moved out of a tent in rural Oklahoma after spending six months living a life unplugged.

In October, I had resigned my product lead position at a life.church where I was working on the Bible App and other applications to move to Iowa to prepare for my new life as a married man. I wrote this because I knew that Candace needed to hear this story before we got married.

I had not discussed this event with anyone since the day it happened on October 14, 1988.

Over the past ten years, Candace and I have carried out our own adventure living in three states and four different cities, bringing four girls into this world in the span of 5 years. We have, wherever we’ve lived, committed ourselves to the local church, leading small groups and volunteering our time to the benefit of our community. In 2018, we were both asked to preach at our church in two separate sermons:

May 27, 2018 - Head, Heart, and Hands by Sam DuRegger

November 4, 2018 - Prayer of Relinquishment by Candace DuRegger

I post these sermons as a reference to our theology and a testament to our beliefs at that moment in time. I don’t think we could ever be tagged as zealots or as evangelists — just a couple who has experience in ministry and education in theology, having lived in community focused on striving towards a righteous life (always falling short, but striving nonetheless).

Shortly after Candace preached her sermon, I found myself frustrated and irritated listening to the sermons on Sunday. I couldn’t identify the source of my anger, and because I love the community and the pastoral staff so much, I decided to step away for a season. It was at this time that the coffee and tea shop I founded here in Oklahoma City, Woodshed Coffee & Tea, was exploring being open on Sunday. I spent the next couple months soft launching the shop on Sunday mornings to see if we had customers interested in us being open seven days a week. We eventually opened up full hours on Sundays and found it to be the right choice for our small business, especially for those non-churchgoers who need caffeine on Sunday mornings.

During my sabbatical from church, I noticed a shift in my belief framework. I began to evaluate my own frustration with religion and found this distance from weekly sermons allowed me to disassociate my cynical self from environmental triggers. The space allowed me time on Sunday mornings to investigate the roots of my chronic anxiety, recurring dreams, and panic attacks that had plagued me for over 30 years. After the shop was officially open on Sundays, I began to journal and write in-between conversations with our customers and baristas. Sunday mornings at the shop gave me the space I needed to process my week and my choices. I was getting healthier, with space and time to process my chronic anxiety and mental health, though I didn’t yet have the tools to deal with my triggers, an oversight which would lead to one of the biggest panic attacks of my life.

On the weekend of my fortieth birthday I suffered two anxiety-induced panic attacks brought on by an unhealthy work environment and penultimate argument with one of the executives in my organization. Ultimately, I resigned my position, throwing a grenade in my life based on short-term stressors without much regard to my family’s long-term stability. Luckily, I had a great relationship with the COO who knowing a bit of my journey graciously allowed me to move under him in a strategic consulting role, giving me room to breathe and reflect.

During the next 3 months I sought holistic health, shedding 20lbs with a large change to my diet and exercise program while also seeking treatment for the physiological complications that arose from my recent panic attacks. Finally, I identified a large stressor foundational to my chronic anxiety — the unprocessed experience from my near-death experience 31 years previous. Ignoring the signs and signals of my PTSD, I had an oversensitive fight or flight response to certain triggers, mainly found in authoritarian figures and institutions like the Church. Through my doctor’s office, I was directed to a local therapist who specialized in therapy for those who had experience childhood trauma. I began therapy with two goals in mind:

1. Work through the issues and anxiety relating the near-death experience.

2. Process out-loud my rapid loss of faith in God and Religion.

During the first few sessions, my fears began to surface, and I discovered the two goals were intertwined — my rapid loss of faith was spurred by the memories of my near-death experience, and more specifically the recollection of those events written down ten years previous.

Ten years ago, my essay began with the notion that transformation mostly happens through experiences of tragedy and loss, not shutting the door on individual transformation through a positive spiritual experience but questioning the motivations of such a pursuit. I walked away from the unfinished essay because in re-living the experience, I realized God was absent in my past trauma as Jesus, who I had trusted with my life, did not take the wheel.

In therapy, I also realized I had been living the past 30 years in guilt and shame. When I decided to stomp on the brake, I took my life into my own hands, not allowing Jesus to perform a miracle and save me and my grandfather’s life. I had preempted a chance for transcendence, and the faulty dogma I had grown up under chastised me for it.

My health changed enough that my Cardiologist took me off of the prescribed Bystolic which controlled my high blood pressure and reduced my heightened resting heart rate. I was getting healthy in my eating, in my activity, and in controlling my anxiety through breathing and meditation. Finally, I was ready to confront my past and see if we could find a way to re-process the trauma from all those years ago with an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) session.

My therapist was recommended through her work facilitating EMDR, a form of therapy that helps people work through trauma or other distressing life experiences. By using outside stimulus, the therapist triggers eye movement through sequences of alternating left-to-right touches on the knee or sometimes small electrical shock via the hands to stimulate rapid eye movement (REM) found in deep sleep. During the conversation, the therapist asks questions and takes you through the event in the past needing processing. A good way to describe EMDR to someone who hasn’t experienced it is that it takes all the unprocessed memories scattered in your mind and finds a way to file those memories away within an appropriate folder. It declutters the overwhelming nature of the experience and makes it accessible to you without the reactionary fight or flight response.

I can undoubtedly say the session was one of the most transformational 45 minutes of my life.

I wept and shook with grief. I relived the entire experience and recalled details in sounds, sight and smells I had previously forgotten. In the session, you as the adult observer to your childhood experience, are encouraged to interact with and influence your younger self during the event. It was in that EMDR session that I found some closure to my past trauma.

In the aftermath, I saw my grandfather crumpled on the bench seat of the U-Haul, bleeding from a gash in his head, confused and feeble from the violent crash. As an observer at the scene, I reached out and embraced my 9-year-old self, wedged beside the brake on the floorboard. I told my younger self that he was brave and should be proud of the action he took. I told him he saved the life of his grandfather, himself, and maybe others down below. This new experience added color and context to my traumatic memories and helped me find clarity in my misplaced guilt and shame.

The next few days were difficult. I was raw... emotionally short and quick to anger. But also, I had a new found hope in my future, the recurring dreams stopped and my chronic anxiety lessened to an extent that my tools of meditation and breathing helped stave off any rush of panic and anxious feelings. I was in the present moment, mindful of my triggers, and no longer surprised by them. In the past, I wouldn’t realize I was escalating in anxiety until my heart rate was sufficiently high, my breathing shallow, and my adrenaline pumping — my physiological response to threats was indication of a trigger. But since my EMDR session, I can see the trigger coming and utilize my meditative and mindfulness tools to control my breathing and deflect my emotional response.

The first goal was achieved, and I was able to find some time and space to begin working through the second goal — to process my deteriorating faith in God.

Before I get into this portion of my journey, I want to begin with a caveat — I’m still in process. These thoughts are better defined as my current conviction. Most likely, I will be one of those individuals unable to land on a permanent faith model, as my past does not lend itself to a rootedness in faith or religious tradition. I’m not in a position to critique the last sermon I preached as false or claim that I was preaching something I did not believe, because in the moment of my preaching, the words were as true as I knew them to be. I was present in it, just as I am now present in the writing of this essay. While some believe writing creates a testament to live by, I’m of the guild that sees the written word as a glimpse into an ever-changing story—a permanent record of a particular season or moment in time.

I am an authentic person, and in the pursuit of wholeness and health it’s time to admit my belief system has changed quite dramatically – I no longer believe in a God who saves.

Even writing this last sentence was difficult, as I still fear the eternal repercussions of this particular heresy, that is, as an apostate (one who knowingly turns their back on God), I will be condemned to eternal torment in Hell. But this too I am moving past, as I remind myself that the eternity is a mystery and my fate after death is an unknowable proposition. Words prayed aloud or an immersion in water does not make one righteous, nor can we prove the infinite repercussions of our finite actions.

God may exist, but who am I to know.

If you were to label me, I would be an agnostic. But labels do not travel with the nuance or complexity my non-belief warrants.

I will admit to struggling through anxiety in this belief. My wife may leave me because we are no longer “equally yoked,” my church community could disavow our family and withdraw their support and friendship, and my kids could grow up to be dysfunctional recreants without direction or purpose. My anxiety tries to heighten these potential reactions to my newly stated beliefs, but then I remind myself to stay in the present and be mindful of today. A day in which I’m still in conversation and relationship with Candace, where my loss of faith in a God who saves is not a loss of faith in each other, in our love, or in our vows. Candace and I can coexist with distinct beliefs as long as we stay in conversation, and in time, we will figure out how to raise our children in this new context. As for the church, we cannot control how others will respond. It will be whatever it is; friends will fade, and others will stick.

At this point, I am leaning into who I am. Not trying to fit myself into some form or another but living a distinctly original life. I refuse to be labeled as broken and in need of a Savior. Rather I am someone who was, at the age of 9, transformed by trauma and who is now, at the age of 40, finally processing this experience. It is true to say the belief system of my youth has deteriorated, but surprisingly so, my faith in people is growing and my hope for a better future is expanding. In this dichotomy I see Religion as a dogmatic system, buffeted by institutions built around exclusivity where you are either on the inside or on the outside — going to Heaven or to Hell. But when the constructs of eternal reward or punishment are gone, when God becomes something unknown, and when the infinite becomes a mystery, responsibility shifts to us. We must right the wrong in our world. There is no scapegoat, no Messiah for us to anoint or crucify. Just you and I deciding today to embrace each other in love. As we do this, we find transcendence from the day-to-day offenses, choosing righteousness over evil, life over death, and order over chaos.

I found transformation along the edges when the veil between life and death was lifted in those brief moments on the California interstate.

In resurrecting these memories some 30 years later, I was able to transcend the trauma and in the aftermath what I found was profound. Jesus didn't take the wheel, the angels didn't drive, rather it was my own voice spurring me forward telling me it was time to move, time to take responsibility, as I yelled out “Now, Sam!”

Now.