The Search for Meaning and Truth: My Theology
The Search for Truth and Meaning: My Personal Theology Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. I. The Laboratory of Necessity I did not begin my search for truth and meaning as a philosophical exercise. I began it because my life had collapsed. In the aftermath of a psychological breakdown, I lost the structures that had once held my life together—health, stability, housing, and eventually any reliable sense of who I was supposed to be. What followed was a descent that ended in hospitalization, homelessness, and addiction to street drugs. Ventura, where I had been living, no longer felt like a place I could return to. I left and made my way to Santa Barbara, not with a plan, but with a fragile hope that something like a life could be rebuilt. The early steps were basic: two weeks in detox, thirty days at the Salvation Army’s Hospitality House, then acceptance into the year-long men’s program at the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission—a structured, Christian-based recovery environment that would become,...