Sure, we disagreed, but we kept talking

Clearly, he wasn’t going to change my mind, and clearly, I wasn’t going to change his. But I respected his views.

I recently lost the friend I’d never met.

He wrote me in the summer of 2017, after I’d written a piece that asked whether the church was failing America. I explained the basic tenets of the Christian faith — to love God and people — and noted that “we’ve focused so much on what doesn’t matter and what (or who) we’re against that we’ve made the core message of our faith completely irrelevant to an entire generation.”

He called himself Bill in that first email, in which he dissected the column and introduced a term he used frequently: TIGOC, The Imaginary God of the Christians.

“I’ve been an atheist for 67+ years,” he wrote, “and have never fathomed how anyone raised in a similar ambiance could be anything but.”

I wrote him back — as I do most readers who take the time to write me about my work — answering his questions about my faith and thanking him for sharing his views.

He wrote back the next morning, railing again about TIGOC. This email was longer than the first.

“But to bring this harangue to a close: your tolerance of folks like me is both admirable and appreciated,” he wrote.

“Why, I would say it’s almost Christlike — but that would be to flirt with blasphemy — and everyone knows how reluctant atheists are to commit such folly.”

This time, he signed the email with his initials.

I wrote back again, just a short note this time, thanking him for the conversation. He had a way with prose, and reading it was oddly refreshing — even if he was basically calling me an idiot.

Two days later, another email, this time on something short I’d written about camping. Then a month passed. Silence.

Until I wrote something else about faith, and W — as I came to call him, based on how he’d sign his emails — wrote an even longer missive, in the big, bold type that was his trademark. He was fired up.

I was knee-deep in a project then and couldn’t respond to every point in his note. I wrote him to apologize for that. I also noted, sort of offhand, that clearly, he wasn’t going to change my mind, and that clearly, I wasn’t going to change his. But I respected his views.

W kept writing.

His lengthy emails weren’t always about God. He would sometimes tell whimsical stories about his childhood on an Iowa farm or pass along things he read in science magazines or the news. As he continued to write, he’d tell me about his wife’s health troubles, his kids’ adventures and the health troubles he, too, had more recently developed.

Inevitably, though, he’d sneak in something about TIGOC.

W and I couldn’t be more different. He was 83 when he first contacted me. I was not quite 38.

He refused to believe that there was a loving God. I see that God everywhere.

We disagreed on almost everything, except maybe guns.

Yet we kept talking.

He asked me about that more than once, about why I would continue to listen to him even though it was clear we would never agree. Many others had told him to give up the anti-God tirade and find something more pleasant to talk about.

I told him it wasn’t about agreeing. My job as a Christ follower was simply to love God and love others, especially those who aren’t like me.

This spring, his wonderful bride passed away. I never met her, either, but he clearly loved and respected her. She was his second wife — his first was killed in an accident many years ago — who raised his kids as if they were her own.

Knowing she had been gravely ill for some time, I told my husband about my plans to drive to the west side to attend the funeral of a woman I had never met. It was the least I could do.

But she didn’t have a funeral. W told me he wouldn’t have one either. Crying over the dearly departed was just not his thing.

I told him I wanted to take him and his daughters out to lunch. He said to wait until October, which I figured was trademark W for “thanks, but no thanks.”

Still, I persisted. In October, I reminded him about my lunch invitation. To my surprise, he agreed, and in his last email, we discussed places to meet.

W passed away just after Thanksgiving.

I wish I could have met him. Based on the stories he would tell — W went everywhere and did everything — I bet he was even more charismatic in real life than on my computer screen.

But I knew him well enough to consider him a friend.

And I miss him.