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Chapter 1, Sarah: The Impossible Choice

Chapter 1, Sarah: The Impossible Choice

Last updated on: October 26, 2026 at 11:51 am by Dorian Scott Cole

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Chapter 1, Sarah: The Impossible Choice 2026-10-26T11:51:15-06:00 Dorian Scott Cole

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Open and Relational Theology & Social Psychology

About this series: This series is intended to help individuals who have hit an obstacle in their spiritual journey and feel that a shift in their spiritual life is necessary. It is intentionally inclusive and applicable across all faiths, personal beliefs, spirituality, or non-religious perspectives. It may challenge some deeply held beliefs which is spiritual growth.

This resource is not diagnostic, prescriptive, directive, or therapeutic. Rather, you may find concepts that resonate with you, meditations that prove helpful, and insights to spark your spiritual growth. You are encouraged to approach this material prayerfully.

If you find yourself unable to resolve your challenges or move forward, professional counseling is strongly recommended. Catholics may want to speak with their priest or spiritual director. Others may want to see their pastor or religious leader. Those of all faiths may benefit from a counselor in psychology, or may find help moving forward with a life coach.

Spiritual growth deeply intersects with personal and social psychology. The author, Dorian, is a former pastor with university training across multiple disciplines.

If you are new to this spiritual counseling series, you can begin your journey with Chapter 1: Help, I’m Spiritually Burned Out. Or if you are new to spiritual things and agnostic to religion, follow Elena’s journey in Chapter 2: The Quest for “Does God Talk?”

Additional information on spiritual counseling may be found at Dorian’s Website: Spiritual Counseling.

If you are new to this spiritual counseling series, you can begin the quest with Chapter 1: Help, I’m burned out.

▶ A Personal Note on Deconstruction

Deconstruction started for me when I was 16 and has been a lifelong process. It’s actually spiritual growth. I’ve experienced hell fire versus love preaching, new age philosophy, fundamentalism, philosophy, and several religious beliefs.

When what you are being taught conflicts with the God you know as love, this sets us up for spiritual growth. Something in you screams, “That isn’t right. I know enough about love to understand that isn’t how God works.” And growth begins.

A Note on Rationality and Emotion

God is beyond our ability to know everything. Understanding love is a complex journey. But divine love, while not divorced from emotion, is not based in emotion. Emotions can be very misleading — just as misleading as trying to rationalize everything with philosophy. The spiritual journey is experiential and uses intuition.

The incident with the nuns is from my own experience in college during which time I was also a pastor.

The 60-Second Read
Chapter 11: The Impossible Choice

The Crisis of Deconstruction: Questioning a high-control religion is rarely a casual intellectual exercise. Because identity, family, and salvation are tied to the institution, stepping away can feel like psychological and spiritual death.
Rules vs. People: Institutional religion often demands we sacrifice our love for others to maintain its boundaries (choosing the rule over the person). The spirituality of Jesus consistently chose the person over the rule.
Felt Meaning (The Body’s Compass): When faced with toxic theology, the body often reacts with the “weather” of anxiety and panic in the chest. We must learn to bypass that noise to find the “bedrock” of the Spirit—the quiet, heavy resonance of pure love deep in the gut.

Counseling Office. Gemini Generated Image

Chapter 1, Sarah: The Impossible Choice

Sarah practically collapsed into the chair in Thomas’ office. She was clutching a balled-up tissue, her eyes red and swollen. She looked exhausted, as if she had been carrying a physical weight for days without sleep. To Thomas, it seemed like an unbearable burden for a twenty-six-year-old to carry.

Thomas didn’t ask for intake forms or rush her to speak. He sat back in his chair, maintaining a calm, anchoring presence in the room until her breathing slowed.

“I’m going to hell,” Sarah whispered, her voice cracking. “Or I have to kill my best friend.” She paused and her eyes met his. “Not literally. But I have to cut her out of my life like she’s dead. And it feels like death.”

“Tell me what happened, Sarah,” Thomas said gently.

Her eyes returned to the floor, full of grief she didn’t want witnessed. “My best friend, Chloe… she told me she’s gay,” Sarah sobbed. “She’s the kindest person I know. But my youth pastor told me that God requires us to make difficult decisions. He said continuing to associate with her is an endorsement of sin, and if I don’t set a hard boundary, I’m compromising my own soul. He actually prayed for me to have the ‘courage’ to abandon her.”

Thomas knew he was entering treacherous water. Spiritual counseling often challenged a deeply held belief, but what Sarah brought was a spiritual crisis wrapped in layers of theology, church tradition, and family relationships. Unwrapping those could place Sarah into a limbo situation where she could no longer believe anything and would no longer have good relationships. That was a very vulnerable place to be. Every instinct reminded him to tread very carefully.

She looked up at Thomas, her expression a mix of terror and deep despair. “I couldn’t sleep. The stress was so bad I went to a regular counselor at the clinic yesterday. He told me my church was toxic and I should just leave.”

“And how did that advice sit with you?” Thomas asked.

“It doesn’t work!” she cried out. “He doesn’t get it. If I leave the church, I lose my family. I lose my entire support system. And worse, I lose God. I’m abandoning my salvation. I’m so trapped…” Her voice dropped to a hollow whisper. “Honestly, Thomas, sometimes I think… just not being here at all would be easier. Taking my own life feels like an easier answer than making this choice.”

The atmosphere in the room shifted instantly, going from treacherous to mortal danger. Thomas leaned forward, his entire demeanor focusing squarely on her. He didn’t panic, but the casual ease in his posture was replaced by a sharp, compassionate intensity.

“Sarah, look right at me,” Thomas said, his voice steady and deeply grounded.

She met his eyes.

“I need to ask you directly,” Thomas said. “When you say not being here would be easier, are you seriously considering harming yourself?”

Sarah blinked, tears spilling over. She shook her head slowly. “No. No, I don’t want to die. I just… I want the crushing weight to stop. I can’t bear the thought of existing if I have to choose between God and love.”

Thomas exhaled slowly. “Thank you for being honest with me. What you are feeling is a completely natural reaction to an unbearable amount of pressure. You have been handed an impossible, devastating choice. But I want you to hear me clearly: your life and your soul are safe in this room.”

He paused, letting the silence do its work, letting the panic in her chest settle just a fraction. As he did so, he reflected on the roles of psychological counseling compared to spiritual counseling. Psychologists tried to be neutral when it came to religious beliefs. It was rare for them to explicitly call a religion toxic. He remembered his college days when he was in a seminar sponsored by the religious studies department. A couple of nuns declared they were counseling a person whose religion was fundamentalist. He had informed them that the client’s church likely would not recognize the nuns as “saved” or reliable counselors. It was a tough area for them to get involved in, and he had wished them luck and the grace of God.

His own policy was to respect the religion of others even if he had grave doubts about it. People believed what they needed to believe at different stages in their lives. Communities of faith, similar to Catholicism, were often communal, so that the community was the arbiter of what constituted salvation. People often developed their own beliefs privately and were able to live with the cognitive dissonance in order to stay among those important to them. But just as in psychology, the difficulty arose when theology became an obstacle in their lives. And for Sarah, this theology had become a life-threatening obstacle. He had to work with it. Delicately.

“The psychologist you saw gave you advice for preserving your mental environment,” Thomas continued. “But spiritual counseling has to address the theology that is actually harming you. We have to look at your beliefs.”

“My beliefs are what are tearing me apart,” she admitted.

“I know. And this is where I must urge caution,” Thomas said, his tone turning serious. “Sarah, if we start examining these teachings—if we pull on this thread—your theological framework is going to unravel. You are going to discover that what the institution teaches, and what Jesus actually taught about love and acceptance, are often two very different things.”

She stared at him, her hands trembling.

“If we go down this road,” Thomas warned gently, “it will likely damage some of your relationships. Your family and your pastor may not understand. It’s a terrifying wilderness to walk through. I will not push you into it. The choice to explore this has to be entirely yours.”

She looked down at the floor again for a moment. “My pastor would say to me that if you invite the devil in, he will destroy you. So I shouldn’t do the inviting.” She looked up at him.

He nodded. “I understand the frame of reference, and I agree with your pastor.” He smiled politely. “I’m not exactly comfortable being cast in the devil’s role, but I understand. Here is a way to handle this: you don’t have to accept anything I say as absolute truth. I would never present it that way, anyway. I’m not God. I’m not Jesus. No one has perfect understanding. What I can offer are different interpretations, backed by facts. You are perfectly welcome to walk away from them without accepting them. I believe you should only accept what resonates with your soul.”

Sarah looked away, staring at the painting of the forest on the wall. She was quiet for a long time.

“Is it really God telling me to abandon her?” Sarah asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “Or is it just them?”

“What does your intuition tell you?”

“It tells me that abandoning someone who needs me is wrong. It feels very wrong in my gut.”

“In my experience,” Thomas said softly, “God is rarely in the business of destroying love. But religion sometimes is.”

Sarah took a deep, shuddering breath. The profound terror in her eyes seemed to recede just a fraction, replaced by the smallest spark of will.

“I can’t live under this threat anymore,” she said. “I can’t live worshiping a God who holds a gun to my head. I need to know the truth, even if it hurts.”

Thomas nodded slowly. “Then we will take it one step at a time. And you will not be walking alone.”

Sarah wiped her eyes, though a new wave of doubt immediately washed over her face. “But how do I even know I can trust my own gut? The moment I tell my youth pastor that it ‘feels wrong’ to abandon Chloe, he’s going to tell me that the heart is deceitful. He’ll say I’m just acting out of human emotion and sentimentality, and that emotion isn’t the voice of God.”

“He will say that,” Thomas agreed gently. “And he is half-right. Human emotions can lead to danger. But there is a massive difference between a surface-level emotion and the deep bedrock of the soul. We have to learn to tell the difference between the ‘weather’ and the ‘signal.’”

Sarah looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“Psychologists and spiritual counselors recognize that our bodies actually process truth before our conscious minds do,” Thomas explained. “Think of panic, guilt, and sudden fear as ‘emotional weather.’ It’s loud, it’s urgent, and it usually sits high in your chest or tightens your throat. It’s a reaction to a threat. Right now, when you think about disobeying your pastor and being condemned to hell, where do you feel it?”

Sarah put a hand to the base of her neck. “Right here. My chest is tight. My throat feels completely choked up.”

“That’s anxiety. That’s your nervous system reacting to a threat of tribal rejection,” Thomas said softly. “Now, I want you to take a slow breath. Put the pastor’s voice out of your head for just ten seconds. Imagine sitting on a park bench next to Chloe. Just sitting there, loving her exactly as she is, without trying to fix her or leave her. Where do you feel that?”

Sarah closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed slightly. She moved her hand down from her throat to her stomach. “It’s… quieter. It’s deeper down. It feels heavy, but not in a bad way. Just… solid.”

“That,” Thomas said, pointing gently to where her hand rested, “is the bedrock. That deep, persistent resonance in your solar plexus isn’t just ‘sentimentality.’ It is a profound spiritual intuition. It is what we call ‘felt-meaning.’ When the Spirit of God speaks, it doesn’t usually sound like a frantic voice strangling your neck and screaming in your head to abandon people. It feels like a quiet, enduring anchor in your gut.”

Sarah opened her eyes, staring at him as the realization washed over her.

“The religious leaders of Jesus’s day were furious with him,” Thomas continued quietly. “They had strict rules about who was ‘clean’ and who was ‘unclean,’ and who the Jews could associate with. Non-Jews, the sick, foreigners, they were all relegated to the garbage heap. They feared being contaminated. And they told Jesus he was breaking the law by healing people on the Sabbath and eating with outcasts. They consistently chose their self-made rule over the person. It’s understandable that they thought it protected them even though it prevented them for loving others. But Jesus always chose the person. He knew that genuine Agape love—active, compassionate connection—supersedes any institutional boundary.”

“They chose the rule over the person,” Sarah repeated, the words hanging in the air. “We are taught that the rules are the most important.”

“Your throat is choking with the fear of breaking their rule. But your gut is anchoring you to the truth of love. You have to decide which signal you are going to follow.”

Sarah let out a long, shaky exhale. She looked exhausted, but the frantic, panicked energy had drained out of her, replaced by a quiet, determined exhaustion.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted.

“You don’t have to know how to do it all today,” Thomas smiled. “Today, you just have to go home and get some sleep. The theology will wait. But I do want to give you a tool to use this week whenever the panic sets in.”

Thomas handed her a small card. “When the voices get loud, use this to find the bedrock.”

Meditation 5: The Weather and the Bedrock

We are often told not to trust ourselves, that our intuition is just “emotion” leading us astray. But God designed us to resonate with the truth. We simply have to learn the difference between the loud weather of anxiety and the quiet bedrock of the Spirit.

Find a quiet place to sit. When you are faced with a terrifying choice or a voice of judgment, close your eyes and do a physical inventory of your body.

Identify the Weather: Notice any tightness in your throat, a racing heartbeat, or a fluttering high in your chest. This is the “weather.” It is fear, guilt, or the pressure to conform. Breathe deeply and say, “I acknowledge this fear, but I will not let it make my decisions today.”
Find the Bedrock: Now, shift your focus deeper, down to your stomach and solar plexus. Recall an image of pure, unconditional love—loving someone without needing to change them. Notice the heavy, quiet solidity that rests there. This is the bedrock. This is the space where the Spirit speaks.

As you breathe out, say to yourself: “I will follow the quiet anchor of love, not the loud wind of fear.” Rest in that quiet space for as long as you need.

Next: Sarah continued.

Our answer is God. God’s answer is us. Together we make the world better.

Author’s Website with life and spiritual resources: Dorian Scott Cole .com