For a long time, the calendar used to scream this date at me.

March 5th.

It would arrive with a heavy, thudding resonance—a day of defiance, of grief, of righteous anger.

It has always been my day of marking the “Before” and the “After.

And I have always marked it with the kind of sharp, jagged intensity that only religious trauma and a shattered identity can produce.

But this year, something remarkable happened.

The date didn’t scream.

It didn’t even whisper.

It snuck up on me

I didn’t even remember until someone else gently pointed it out.

Today marks fifteen years since I left The Salvation Army…..

Well, actually, today marks fifteen years since I was unceremoniously thrown out of The Salvation Army.

Tossed out on my ass with my horn in it’s case, two suitcases, a large trunk, and $11 in my pocket.

Banished from the fold for “chronic non-conformity.”

Yup.

Now, it’s a badge of honor.

Then, it was a mantle of shame and grief.

To anyone outside of that world, fifteen years is just a stretch of time. But for someone who was literally born into the movement, it’s a lifetime and a half. I was steeped in that theology before I could even speak. I took my first tentative, wobbling steps in the Batavia Corps sanctuary. I grew up knowing every crevice, every hiding place, and every echoing hallway of the Cincinnati Center Hill Corps. I knew the theology just as intimately as I knew the back of my hand; it was the map I used to navigate the world.

I was a Cradle-Roll-To-Commissioning Salvationist Success Story.

I did all the “right things.”

I checked all the boxes of a “good Salvationist”—Junior Soldier, Senior Soldier, first sermon, seminary. I became a commissioned officer.

And the truth that is hardest to sit with sometimes is that I was good at it.

I could lead the prayers, I could preach the word, and I could manage the Corps Programs. But beneath the uniform and the polished performance, I was a fish out of water, gasping for air in a tank that was never meant for someone like me. I tried so hard to fit, to fold myself into the shape they required, but my soul was built for chronic non-conformity.

I just had to be me.

And fifteen years ago, being “me” felt like a death sentence.

On that day in 2011, I truly thought my life was over.

I was losing my career, my community, my history, my housing, my healthcare, my vehicle, and my sense of purpose all at once.

I felt like a sheet of stained glass that had been shattered into a thousand useless pieces.

But looking back from the vantage point of a decade and a half, I can see that the breaking wasn’t the end. It was the necessary score of the glass cutter, allowing something new to be shaped.

This year, the feeling isn’t anger.

It isn’t even the lingering sting of rejection. I don’t feel any of that.

It is simply, profoundly, Peace.

And oddly, gratitude.

Because growing up in the Army shaped my soul. William Booth’s call to see people’s humanity, to meet them where they were, sitting in the sometimes literal shit with them as they figured out their lives, it radicalized me. I learned a crazy amount of odd little skills as an officer – skills I pull out at the strangest, but most perfectly needed times. I’m HELLA resourceful, and developed a really creative way of approaching problems that I still utilize every day in my work with unhoused people, and at the theatre.

To borrow and bend a line from Come From Away, today I honor what was lost, but I also celebrate what I’ve found.

I am finally, fully, and unapologetically myself.

A fat, queer, chronic non-conformist who isn’t wearing their shoes any longer. [iykyk]

I have spent these years healing, growing, and changing, often in ways that would have terrified my younger self. I have traded the rigid maps of my childhood for a theology that is truly mine—a Humanist Universalist Mystic path that honors the questions as much as the answers.

When I stand in the pulpit now, I don’t feel the weight of a performance.

I feel the solid ground of a ministry I am incredibly proud of.

I can sit comfortably in the silence of my own company without the frantic need to be “useful” to prove my worth.

I have learned that my value isn’t found in how well I follow a manual, but in the simple, beautiful fact of my existence.

Fifteen years ago, I thought the book was closing.

Turns out, I was just finishing the prologue.

Today, the sun is out in my soul, the air is clear in my mind, and for the first time in a very long time, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Whole.

Healed.

And just getting started.