“These two girls came up to me and asked if I read the Bible,” she said.

She’s an atheist. She’ll tell you she’s not abrasive or pushy or otherwise rude about the matter, but I think she’s just lost faith in something more, as much as she might hope there’s something more out there.

So when the girls came up to her, of all people, she didn’t yell or shove them or engage in some deep-seeded argument about her lack of a religious denomination.

“I felt bad,” she said. “I didn’t want to be like, ‘No, I don’t think I’ll ever read the Bible.’ ”

She told them she’d consider it, nodded, and went on her way to study Middle Eastern printing methods during the Ming Dynasty.

I imagined that scenario playing out plenty of other ways, none of which ended in a civil manner. And then, almost unintentionally, I found myself thinking of my own reaction.

I am not an atheist, but if approached in transit to the library or the bus stop or the dining hall, I’d probably respond the same way she did — with honesty and a hint of skepticism, but certainly not anger or violence.

But more and more, I haven’t found the in-between that the two of us are working with. It’s hiding somewhere behind the books on the shelves labeled King James Bible, Qur’an and Torah. It’s the number in the Dewey decimal system that went missing when we went from 201.9 to 202.0.

And lately that number has been plugging itself into my head in the form of an IP address — my Twitter homepage.

In the last four months, I’ve had dozens of people find me on Twitter with the words Jesus and God in their bios, talking about how Jesus is the only man in their life or how they are daughters of God.

And I thought, “You can’t be serious, right, God? I don’t even really know you that well anymore. It’s been five years since I spent every waking Sunday morning lighting candles in white robes and holding books slipping beneath my small fingertips.”

It’s been so long since I last said Catholicism was a big part of my life. Five years since I turned away from regular masses in favor of sorting out my life in college.

And now, as things wrap themselves up on college, these people are flooding into my life and my in-between.

What scares me is not their love of Christ or their willingness to be so open about it on our Quad or in their tweets. It is that there still exists a big divide between those who believe and those who are turned off by the very mention of religion.

That is the in-between.

The space that we need to fill. The space our generation forgets to find important in favor of one side or the other.

But we are not kids playing a game of Red Rover. We are not squeezing hands together in favor of an unbreakable barrier between those who want something more in their lives and those who choose to walk this world content without that.

We are supposed to let you find your way inside those two boundaries, let you wander from sureness to worry and worry to sureness. Apathy to acceptance. Adoration to disinterest.

Aren’t we?

As I let the little sliver of religion dance upon the pages of my blog posts and let the word “God” plant itself inside my commonly used tags, I am finding few others standing in that middle.

And yet I am so firmly planted there. Certain that I am not the only one who has been granted something more, because I want to save lost college students across the nation. Certain that this project I’ve undertaken to write my heart and those of others nationwide is not the only project that’s opened someone who was once closed off to the idea.

I am so firmly planted in my not knowing, my hope is that I’ve maybe found a way to string myself along the laundry list of religious beliefs.

Now, though, I am just hoping the openly religious and closed-but-apathetic find a way to acknowledge the middle. The in-between. The point where us twenty-somethings find ourselves discovering what it is we want to believe.

Isn’t that the whole point of these years?

The post Religion for Twenty-Somethings: In the Middle appeared first on NextGen Journal.