If I’ve got any advice, it’s probably to ease into the revelation if possible. Like an inoculation, I tend to see benefit in dipping a toe in those waters to give each of you time to adjust. A full-on admission of atheism can be quite a shock to a person’s system, and many become suddenly revived and ready to throw themselves back into full-time devotion to Jesus as a self-preservation mechanism. Maybe the hubs isn’t there—in fact he could be teetering on the brink of a loss of faith himself. But then people are ingenious at tailoring their beliefs to the needs they feel, so he may have constructed some kind of personal “vaguetheism” which makes very few promises or demands. I feel like The Shack was written specifically for such a person, and in time almost everyone seems to go through some kind of vaguetheist phase. I’d definitely want to hear how that goes, regardless of whether or not it results in an increased ability to write openly about it. It could go the other direction and you may find that he panics, leaving you little choice but to table a lot of this until a later time…