In my last post, I mentioned that I’ve been a Christian for about five years. I’ve noticed that when people find out that I haven’t been a Christian since my childhood, they want to know what happened that made me become a Christian. If you are one of those people, read on. If you are not one of those people, this post may bore you a little bit (sorry!).
I grew up in a family that considered itself Christian, because we believed in God, with business-minded me essentially seeing him as CEO of the world. God, the ultimate entrepreneur. But we never went to church. The few times I tried to read the Bible, I stopped by the time I hit Deuteronomy. I didn’t really know much about Jesus. We never shared our faith, because we had no faith to share. I grew up believing that I had to do enough good things before I died to outweigh the bad. And, while that certainly gave me a strong desire to be charitable, it was obviously very misguided.
By the time I was in high school, though, I didn’t even call myself a Christian. At this point in my life, I was an atheist. I had decided that God simply could not exist, because there was too much wrong with the world, among other things. I believed that Jesus had been real, but that he was merely a good teacher, and everything else had been made up by his followers years later. It didn’t help that several of my church-going friends were very definitely hypocrites. And let’s not forget all the scandals that were popping up in the Catholic Church at the time. I didn’t realize the magnitude of the difference between the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches at the time, so, in my teenage mind, I just thought that all Christians were hypocrites.
High school continued on like that, but finally it came time to graduate. Freedom! I had been a relatively good kid in high school. I never got in serious trouble, at any rate. But I was ready to be my own person. I would go to college. I would go to parties. I would drink (although I had little interest in getting drunk – no amount of fun was worth the hangover, even to that version of me). I might get a girlfriend, but I might also just have fun with one-night stands. Or maybe a friends with benefits would be more convenient. The details didn’t matter much to me. The point was that I would do what I wanted to do, not what somebody else wanted me to do.
But near the end of my senior year, my best friend invited me to his church. His pastor had helped design the Space Shuttle, he told me. Okay, that got me interested. I loved outer space. Still do. But I didn’t care much for the idea of going to church. But I decided it would be worth it to talk to somebody who had worked on such an awesome program. So a few weeks after graduation, I went. Of course, the one week I pick to go, my friend had to work, so he wasn’t at church. I didn’t really want to talk to the pastor one-on-one, because I just expected him to start breathing down my neck to believe in his God. As it was, the pastor was also busy that morning. That tends to happen in small churches where the pastor is in charge of basically every detail.
In the few moments that the pastor did talk to me, he introduced me to a kid named Jon. Jon was interesting. He was actually friendly to me, which would be weird enough if he knew me, but he was a complete stranger. He found out about my love of outer space, and we talked about that for a little bit. Then the service started, and so I chose a seat in the back, away from everyone else, and kind of spaced out. After the service, though, I decided to stick around, because this church offered a free lunch. Well, they certainly knew how to get people to stick around. In line for the food, this Jon kid ended up standing right next to me. I figured he would be avoiding me, but he seemed to be doing exactly the opposite. I would’ve been weirded out if I wasn’t curious as to why he would want anything to do with me. Surely by now he would have heard that I was a complete blasphemer. But, if he had, he didn’t seem to care.
I sat down at a table that had mostly teenagers. I knew some of them from school, but I wasn’t exactly close friends with any of them. I’m sure they were shocked to see me there. Jon sat down near me. We talked for a bit. He was legitimately nice, and I was officially confused. But eventually I looked at the clock, and realized I had been there for quite some time. I should be getting home.
Well, I got home and immediately had an argument with my mom. She didn’t believe me about where I had been. I insisted that I hadn’t lied, and for once I was actually being honest. (Remember, I had said I had been a relatively good kid. I was, however, rather notorious for lying…) I ranted about the argument on Facebook, because what better way for a teenager to express their emotions? My friend apparently passed the rant on to his pastor, who offered to talk to my mom for me. This also intrigued me. Caring about somebody other than oneself? That was foreign to me. In insisted that it was unnecessary, as my mom was calming down and it seemed that she was starting to believe me.
I went back to that church for a few weeks, and something in me began to change. But after a month or so, my mom and I moved to a different town an hour away. The perfect chance for me to get away from this church thing. Especially since I’d only be here for a month before going to college. But something drove me to find a church in this town. I planned on going to one I found online, but when I got there, it appeared empty, so I went to the only other church in town I knew about. While I was there, I met several young people who showed that same strange friendliness to a complete stranger that Jon had.
September rolled around, and I left that town and that church to go off to college yet another hour away. This was the best chance to get away from the church thing. There was only one outspoken Christian on my wing, and he had no way of knowing that I had ever even set foot in a church. He was my RA, and if you’ve ever lived on a university campus for even a week, you know how easy it is to find an excuse to avoid your RA.
And yet… I didn’t. I actually became pretty good friends with my RA. I joined a Christian fellowship group on campus called Intervarsity, and started going to a church that a lot of the students in that group attended. November found me spending $100, a substantial sum to a poor college student with no job, to go to a weekend retreat with Intervarsity called CrossTraining. The following weekend found me getting baptized! It hadn’t even been half a year since I had first set first into a church, thinking that this Jesus Christ was a man whose life story had been severely embellished, and now I was pledging my life to him!
The rest of the school year continued on without anything of much significance happening. At the end of the year, though, I managed to save up enough money to go to a week-long retreat, similar to CrossTraining. Not counting my week in Cambodia, that week was probably one of the best weeks of my life. I worshipped with hundreds of other college-age believers. I heard incredible stories, some not unlike my own, of God bringing people to Him. Stories that simply could not all be made up.
There is still one moment that sticks out to me from that week. My school has what we call the rock ceremony. Every year at this retreat, each person finds a rock. It could symbolize something or it could just be a rock that we happened to find that looked somewhat cool. My rock was one of the latter, and I don’t even think it looked all that cool. I just needed a rock. But at the ceremony, we gather in a circle and say one thing that God has impressed upon us that week. This was what I was stuck on. God hadn’t really spoken to me at all that week.
But as I was sitting there, looking out at the waters of Luke Huron, how the waves moved in and out at just a certain tempo, always showing a perfect order even in relative chaos, it hit me. God could not have been any clearer unless He had spoken audibly to me. In that moment, it struck me that God is in perfect control. I did not need to worry about anything, because He already had everything figured out. That moment changed my life.
The time between then and now has been full of ups and downs, but I think everyone can say that, be they Christian or non-Christian. Of course, my life is very different than it was. I’m done with school (for now), working and trying to save up for the World Race. Jon has become my best friend, and my brother in all but blood (and I have the honor of standing beside him as he says “I do” in two weeks!). Things that used to be common for me, such as swearing, have ceased. My goals and dreams have switched from the material to the eternal. I no longer desire to use my college education to get a well-paying job. I desire to use it to do what we were originally meant to do – to care for God’s creation.
This is not to say that I am perfect. Far from it. I still have issues that I struggle with. Everyone in this life does. But I don’t give up. I still have things that I don’t understand. But I never stop learning. I am not perfect. I never will be this side of eternity. But in their song, “Phoenix Ignition”, one of my favorite bands, Thrice, sums it up pretty well:
Every day tear down these walls
Til cornerstones remain
Coming one step closer all the time
And although we’ll never reach perfection
Always persist to try
In the past five years, I have made more friends, and better friends, than in the 18 years of my life before that. This hasn’t been without cost. There are people who no longer associate with me, except occasionally commenting on my Facebook posts. Maybe they think I am a hypocrite, as I once thought all Christians were. But, after these past few years, I have to say… it is they who are missing out, not me.
For I have gained one thing they cannot possibly comprehend. I have gained a relationship with the Lord of the universe, who cares about me, as His creation and as His adopted son through Jesus Christ, more than anyone else will ever be capable of doing. And I would not trade that for the world.
Soli Deo Gloria.
