{"id":23123,"date":"2015-10-02T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T07:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=23123"},"modified":"2015-10-02T00:01:47","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T07:01:47","slug":"the-first-presbyterian-church-of-birmingham-michigan-last-stop-on-my-one-woman-road-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/the-first-presbyterian-church-of-birmingham-michigan-last-stop-on-my-one-woman-road-trip\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham, Michigan — Last Stop on My One-Woman Road Trip"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Facade<\/a>
Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

It had been\u00a0a wonderful\u00a0tour around Michigan’s lower peninsula. Just me, a full tank of gas, and my trusty point-and-shoot.\u00a0And now it was over.<\/p>\n

Grosse Pointe. Pentwater. Ludington. Traverse City. Howell. And finally, Birmingham, the suburb of Detroit that had been the scene of my personal teenage angst.<\/p>\n

I’d\u00a0sung in the choir at\u00a0Birmingham’s\u00a0First Presbyterian Church as a girl. I’d been confirmed there as well,<\/p>\n

And now\u00a0I was being given a chance to read from “Wrestling with God” to a Sunday morning gathering of twenty or so church members and their pastors.<\/p>\n

I chose a passage that described my upbringing as a Presbyterian — and the\u00a0doubts that arose when I left home for\u00a0the University of Michigan:<\/p>\n

\n
From “Wrestling with God”<\/h5>\n

When I was a child, God was very real to me. As a little kid in Detroit I loved Sunday school at our local Presbyterian church, and later as a teenager I looked forward to choir practice and youth group. The others in my family were indifferent church-goers: My father was a lapsed Methodist. My mother had been Catholic as a girl, but undertook an extended leave of absence from her church when she married my father. My brothers\u2014well, they just didn\u2019t find God all that interesting.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Stained glass window in the church’s chapel. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But I did. I believed in God, and I loved Jesus, the Galilean carpenter who walked on water and calmed the raging sea, who gave sight to the blind, who cared for the poor and the weak as well as the powerful, who died and rose from the dead, as I would someday. God was real to me in those long-ago days. God\u2019s existence was not something I arrived at intellectually. It was something I just knew . . .<\/p>\n

Things changed when I graduated from high school and went off to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. I told my first academic advisor that I liked to read, and he signed me up for a course in Great Books. Eagerly I dove into Lucretius, Aristotle, Virgil, Dante, Milton. My freshman year, instead of God, I thought about books. . . .<\/p>\n

— Excerpted from “Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith,” by Barbara Falconer Newhall. Patheos Press. \u00a9 2015 Patheos Press. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"The<\/a>
The choir rehearsed before the Sunday morning\u00a0service\u00a0in the sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham, Michigan. I spoke after church in the Fireside Room. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For\u00a0a copy of “Wrestling with God” and more about my life-long struggle with doubt and faith, go to\u00a0WrestlingWithGodBook.com<\/a>. More stories of my one-woman road trip at “Pentwater’s Antler Bar — A Beer Too Many”<\/a>\u00a0and “Wrestling with God on the Shores of Lake Michigan.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Facade<\/a>
The First\u00a0Presbyterian Church is on West Maple Road, across the street from the Methodist and Baptist churches. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Facade<\/a><\/p>\n

I’d sung in the choir and been confirmed at the First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham. And now I was invited to read from “Wrestling with God.” Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23153,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[264,887,1148,34,1564,214,55,1040,31,1540,53],"class_list":["post-23123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","tag-birmingham","tag-churches","tag-detroit","tag-dont-miss","tag-first-presbyterian-church","tag-michigan","tag-family-stories","tag-patheos-press","tag-photo-ops","tag-road-trip","tag-wrestling-with-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}