Reflections 5: Does it explode?

Something else happens, I've found, when the people you hope will approve you for a certain moral life don't seem to notice you exist. You start to wonder why you bother keeping face. Sure, there are certain morals that I held personally valuable outside of societal pressures, some I felt were too imperative to my relationship with God to compromise, but when my word-view of values was shaking and my relationship with God felt so pithy, it wouldn't take much to set the bar lower.
Its not like I was alone in my flailing either. That much was apparent. Young marriages I watched die, seemingly reliable characters fall apart and pray to vice. Those standing were often self sustained within a bubble of ludicrous religiosity.
Probably my biggest motivator to live up to a certain standard came from the work with youth I had done for most of my adult life. I was kept accountable by children. I, however, was working less and less in this field, and, despairingly, I was at a point where I had seen enough of these youth come of age and throw all caution to the wind regardless of my best efforts. What did it matter what I did?
A journal entry that reflected on this past autumn adds to the sentiment in the following:

“Nothing made sense! Leave it to the philosophers to 'disprove God' in their own logical way. As someone looking at history, I couldn't see how anything added up. It was, is, and is heading for chaos. My delusions have created a mechanism for me to believe in hope, love, the soul, purpose- and now that was all slipping away. And without faith, what were morals? Without the soul or purpose, what is conviction? My grip was slipping, and I would admit that it would only take an inclined tap to say yes to [here I insert some common vices that i thought better of printing] Frankly, how different were we all....? Where God seemed absent I became more aware of a world of people affected like me, treading water, making their best guesses, and feigning altruism to hold one another up. I had denied myself access in some sense of self-righteous arrogance. Now I wanted not just to hear other stories, I wanted to join them.”