sarah hoenicke flores

It began on a bright and windless morning in fall. I was dressing for the school day ahead, readying for my commute from San Francisco to Oakland, when my phone buzzed with a notification from Instagram: “Jesus Christ is now following you!”

I’d spent the last couple of years running from Jesus, and had thought—as a sexually active twenty-four-year-old experiencing none of the guilt I was raised to experience—that I was free of Jesus. I’d left him behind: I hadn’t been to church in a few years; was pro-choice; swore; and I occasionally told dirty jokes. This may seem the usual state of being for an American woman in her early twenties: free, and lacking remorse.

But my freedom was recent, and I’d been taught growing up that, if I were at some point to stray from God, He would look for me—the shepherd going off in search of his lost sheep. Still, finding atheism had given me answers, and an Instagram notification wasn’t going to derail my new sense of the world. My boyfriend walked out of our bathroom.

“Guess what,” I said. “I just blocked Jesus Christ on Instagram.”