00:00:01 When I gave up on religion,
00:00:05 there was such an emptiness
00:00:07 because I really wanted to believe in God my whole life.
00:00:10 I wanted to believe.
00:00:12 “Where were you? You knew I was looking for you, God.”
00:00:16 And I felt abandoned.
00:00:20 My love for photography goes way back to about age six,
00:00:25 when I got my first little Kodak Instamatic.
00:00:28 I just thought it was a wonderful way to document the world.
00:00:34 Dad was very much a give-back-to-the-community kind of guy.
00:00:39 My mom, her biggest quality is empathy.
00:00:43 So growing up with that,
00:00:46 I saw the best way to be helpful to people
00:00:49 was to become a priest,
00:00:53 because I thought that those were the best people
00:00:55 in the best position to be the most help.
00:01:00 When I was 18, I went to the college seminary,
00:01:05 and that was the road to the priesthood.
00:01:13 I left there angry
00:01:15 because we were all going through the motions
00:01:19 of ritual.
00:01:23 There was no authenticity.
00:01:26 After a few years,
00:01:28 I entered a monastery in the United States as a counselor-in-training,
00:01:32 working with alcoholic priests.
00:01:36 But again, it reinforced my disappointment
00:01:39 with the church
00:01:42 because here was the big secret.
00:01:45 Here was where all the troubled priests went.
00:01:52 I felt that everything I had believed in
00:01:55 had been a lie.
00:01:57 I tried Zen Buddhism; I tried Tibetan Buddhism.
00:02:03 I went through all of the churches, and there was nothing there.
00:02:07 Nothing.
00:02:09 And I said, “We’re done.”
00:02:15 By this point, I had a real edge.
00:02:17 I was a very, very angry person.
00:02:21 I felt that the world had done me over.
00:02:26 I noticed that was reflected in my photography.
00:02:29 There were less and less people in the pictures
00:02:32 and more and more buildings and objects.
00:02:37 As a psychology professor, as a counseling professor,
00:02:40 my mission was accomplished
00:02:42 if my students could leave that class
00:02:45 and they had learned how to think for themselves
00:02:48 —and not just to take in what they were being sold.
00:02:53 I had a thing about organizations lying to people.
00:02:57 I’d been a student of all sorts of learning,
00:03:01 but there was always something missing.
00:03:10 When Tom asked me to study with him,
00:03:12 I did feel intimidated
00:03:14 because here you had a man who was a professional in the secular world;
00:03:18 he was a teacher at college and a psychologist.
00:03:22 So, to me, that was a challenge.
00:03:25 I had a big old notebook of questions, and he sat beside me.
00:03:29 He said, “So you have some questions.”
00:03:31 And I said, “Yep. Here we go.”
00:03:34 “How does your organization handle child sexual abuse?
00:03:37 “How does the money work?
00:03:38 “What’s the check and balance?
00:03:40 Where’s the transparency?”
00:03:41 And what I noticed, what he always did, he answered them from Scripture.
00:03:46 This was revolutionary in my mind
00:03:48 because these were
00:03:50 not just some institution’s views or some individual’s views.
00:03:54 This was the very authority of God.
00:03:59 You know, studying the Bible
00:04:01 changed my life for the better
00:04:04 —completely.
00:04:08 I love the diversity of the congregation.
00:04:13 I’m learning so much
00:04:15 about how we’re all the same.
00:04:22 I have a lot more pictures of people.
00:04:31 When people lose hope, they’ve lost everything.
00:04:36 And by studying the Bible,
00:04:38 you learn why there is suffering
00:04:42 and why people die.
00:04:44 You learn that this whole world is not spiraling out of control.
00:04:52 Coming to have a real, personal relationship
00:04:56 with the Supreme Sovereign of the universe
00:04:58 gives you hope.
00:05:00 I love what I’m still learning. I learn every day.
00:05:04 And that’s the difference: I have confidence in what I’m learning,
00:05:07 confidence that it’s the truth.
