The Smile I Didn’t Ask About
November 1, 2026
The guy across the bar had the biggest smile I’d seen all week.
My friend Joel and I were grabbing dinner at our campus bar, the kind of night where you end up talking to whoever’s sitting near you. He was 27, taking classes at a community college, trying to raise his own level of education while living paycheck to paycheck, just trying to survive. He told us all of this like it was nothing. And the whole time, he was smiling.
I was stressed that night. I had exams coming up, and I’d been carrying that low hum of anxiety that makes everything feel urgent. Sitting across from him, I couldn’t figure out what I had been so worried about.
I never asked him why he was smiling. I wish I had.
I was baptized Antiochian Orthodox, but for most of my childhood, faith was something that happened around me rather than in me. The church I grew up in was solemn and heavy, with a grandmother crying quietly in the corner. I went, but I never really participated. It felt like a place where people brought their grief, and I was too young to know what to do with that.
Then I went to an all-boys boarding school in Tennessee, where church every weekend wasn’t optional. Neither were religion classes. I expected to resent both. Instead, the church there felt completely different from the one I’d known. It wasn’t about sorrow. It was about loving life and actually living it. And the classes became some of my favorite hours of the week.
I loved them because they were hard. We talked about good and evil, about why suffering exists and how anyone could justify it. I’d leave class with more questions than I came in with, and I liked that. But the questions also started to unsettle me. How can there be people who want to bomb other countries? How can someone choose something that evil? And if Jesus says to love and forgive them, just love and forgive them, what am I supposed to do with the part of me that can’t? Forgiveness was supposed to heal. When I thought about terrorists, it didn’t feel healing at all. It felt like being asked to swallow something I wanted to spit out.
For a while, I thought faith meant having an answer to that. I didn’t have one.
Somewhere in those years, something shifted. I started praying almost every night, not because anyone required it, but because I wanted to get in tune with whatever I was searching for. I started going to church because I wanted to, not because a schedule told me to. And slowly I came to a realization that changed everything: I don’t know anything. And that’s okay.
That might sound like giving up. It wasn’t. It was the first time faith felt honest. I could hold the question of evil without needing to solve it before I was allowed to believe in something.
After that dinner, I called my brother. “This guy just completely changed my perspective,” I told him. I had been anxious about exams as if my life depended on them. But it was a piece of paper. I wasn’t hungry. I had food and a roof over my head. I had a brother who picked up when I called. I was okay. More than okay.
I keep thinking about that smile. He had every reason to be bitter and wasn’t. I don’t know what he believed or what carried him, and that’s exactly why I wish I’d asked. But maybe not knowing is part of the lesson too. Even his joy was something I couldn’t fully explain, the same way I can’t explain good and evil. I only got to witness it.
Today in church, I prayed to be humbled, and to keep being humbled. I prayed to stop letting my own ego get in my way. I still don’t know exactly what I believe, or who I believe in. But I know there’s something spiritual in my life, because I’ve been given gifts, and I don’t think gifts are meant to sit unused.
I keep coming back to something a teacher said in one of those Tennessee classrooms: if everyone just followed the life of Jesus Christ, they would be noble and honorable people. As a teenager, I heard that as a nice idea. Now, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about game theory, I hear it differently. Being ethical is long-term greedy. Kindness, honesty, and forgiveness can look like losses in the moment, but over time they’re what let people trust each other and build something together. The stag hunt only works when people choose to cooperate.
Maybe that’s where I am with faith. I haven’t solved the problem of evil. I can’t fully forgive the people I can’t understand. But I’ve seen a stranger smile through a hard life, I’ve called my brother to say I’m okay, and I’ve learned to say “I don’t know” without fear. For now, that’s enough to keep showing up.