Right after college I saw a Christian counselor for a few sessions. I felt stuck in my current situation with my job, but I mostly went to talk about my past. She asked me right away about my conversion experience, and I told her my story. Beginning with the, "Well, I uhh... you know... 'asked Jesus into my heart' when I was four, I remember praying that prayer on my parent's bed, but it's been a long process. God has always been very real to me, but I have had to learn and unlearn things along the way. Especially about grace. It wasn't until college that I stopped trying to follow all the rules and learned to accept his love."
"So, you didn't become a Christian until college, then?" she asked me. "No, no," I told her assuredly. "I've been a follower since my earliest years." She looked at me with a confused expression and said, "If you were modeled a Christian lifestyle that was hypocritical or based on lies, as you were, then you could not have known Christ as a child. You would not have really known him. You would be living out the lies taught by your mother--in your case, that God's favor is earned by following rules."
It was my turn to look confused. I said, "Despite what I was taught, I still feel like God was very real to me. There are times when I undoubtedly felt alone and without community and I felt I was betrayed by all the other believers I had known, but God and Jesus were very real to me."
She pressured me again--to put a date on "when I became a Christian." And said that the Jesus I had experienced as a child wasn't really Jesus at all. I left feeling discouraged. Not that I had been essentially "living a lie" for the majority of my life, but that I couldn't communicate to this woman and convince her of my sincerity. I felt like Cassandra from mythology, who, I thought, had the worst of fates--to always be telling the truth, but cursed so that no one would believe her.
I used to have a recurring dream as a child. It felt more like a nightmare. I would be playing outside at my great-grandmother's house and would eventually wander indoors to see the rest of my family. But when I got inside, they were not human anymore, they had all morphed into cockroaches (my biggest phobia as a kid) and were in a circle, holding hands (legs?), looking at me as if I were a stranger.
I think that dream was foretelling of my future in some ways. When my mother became an addict and my life got turned upside down (all over again), it felt like no one was real anymore. The rules and laws that governed our very existence as Christians no longer applied. And no one seemed all that bothered by this fact. My extended family didn't really communicate the severity of this. The flippancy with which they noted the drug use and infidelity and lies was astonishing to me. Plus, the ultimate betrayal by my mother of her family, felt deeply and personally, meant that she no longer believed the truths she had taught me. (And had she ever? And what did it mean? And if I could just say the right thing in the right words then surely things would snap into place in her head and we could get back to doing things the "right" way.)
We no longer played by the rules. Thus continued my decade of obsession with following them. And making sure everyone else followed them. Because I saw firsthand what happened when we didn't abide by the law. The shit hit the fan. The world turned over. People were crushed and hurt and families were devastated.
The sermon this Sunday was so encouraging to me. Eric talked about how true conversion is a life-long process, and how we are formed by all manner of things: knowledge, experience, a community of other believers. And he talked about how God really does work in mysterious ways sometimes, through dreams, through unexplained events, through feelings or emotions. The big thing, I believe, is that we don't get stuck in the infancy, that we continue to grow. That we are growing still.
When friends of our church from the Standing Rock Reservation in Wakpala, South Dakota were visiting, Eugene was asked about his conversion experience. And maybe this is unique to him personally, or maybe it is a cultural perspective, but he didn't answer with a date that he responded to an altar call. He began by talking about God protecting him, and being with him as a young child, riding horses, staying in the woods for months in the summer, foraging for his own food. He said Jesus was with him then and throughout his whole life. Seth remarked later how much he liked that perspective. How it wasn't a focus on a personal decision, but it was focused on God seeking after him and always being with him, protecting him from things seen and unseen.
This is one of the major reasons that we baptize our children as infants. Because it puts the focus on God's sovereignty and his love for us.
And it is how I feel, too. I spent a good majority of my life afraid. Afraid of losing God's love and making mistakes. But overall, I see the love of God, arching over my years, beginning when I was very young--incapable of understanding, but not without experience, not without hope and longing for him. Gracious with my misunderstandings, but faithful to teach me the truth. And not everything I was taught was wrong. Teachers are human, too. Sinful people can still teach you. And God can rise above all the circumstances to teach you in any way imaginable. I see him faithful through it all, everything I had to learn and unlearn, hard lessons and easy ones that brought tears for his gentleness. And I am grateful to the kind teachers I've had who taught me about grace, and to the ones who teach me now.
"So, you didn't become a Christian until college, then?" she asked me. "No, no," I told her assuredly. "I've been a follower since my earliest years." She looked at me with a confused expression and said, "If you were modeled a Christian lifestyle that was hypocritical or based on lies, as you were, then you could not have known Christ as a child. You would not have really known him. You would be living out the lies taught by your mother--in your case, that God's favor is earned by following rules."
It was my turn to look confused. I said, "Despite what I was taught, I still feel like God was very real to me. There are times when I undoubtedly felt alone and without community and I felt I was betrayed by all the other believers I had known, but God and Jesus were very real to me."
She pressured me again--to put a date on "when I became a Christian." And said that the Jesus I had experienced as a child wasn't really Jesus at all. I left feeling discouraged. Not that I had been essentially "living a lie" for the majority of my life, but that I couldn't communicate to this woman and convince her of my sincerity. I felt like Cassandra from mythology, who, I thought, had the worst of fates--to always be telling the truth, but cursed so that no one would believe her.
I used to have a recurring dream as a child. It felt more like a nightmare. I would be playing outside at my great-grandmother's house and would eventually wander indoors to see the rest of my family. But when I got inside, they were not human anymore, they had all morphed into cockroaches (my biggest phobia as a kid) and were in a circle, holding hands (legs?), looking at me as if I were a stranger.
I think that dream was foretelling of my future in some ways. When my mother became an addict and my life got turned upside down (all over again), it felt like no one was real anymore. The rules and laws that governed our very existence as Christians no longer applied. And no one seemed all that bothered by this fact. My extended family didn't really communicate the severity of this. The flippancy with which they noted the drug use and infidelity and lies was astonishing to me. Plus, the ultimate betrayal by my mother of her family, felt deeply and personally, meant that she no longer believed the truths she had taught me. (And had she ever? And what did it mean? And if I could just say the right thing in the right words then surely things would snap into place in her head and we could get back to doing things the "right" way.)
We no longer played by the rules. Thus continued my decade of obsession with following them. And making sure everyone else followed them. Because I saw firsthand what happened when we didn't abide by the law. The shit hit the fan. The world turned over. People were crushed and hurt and families were devastated.
The sermon this Sunday was so encouraging to me. Eric talked about how true conversion is a life-long process, and how we are formed by all manner of things: knowledge, experience, a community of other believers. And he talked about how God really does work in mysterious ways sometimes, through dreams, through unexplained events, through feelings or emotions. The big thing, I believe, is that we don't get stuck in the infancy, that we continue to grow. That we are growing still.
When friends of our church from the Standing Rock Reservation in Wakpala, South Dakota were visiting, Eugene was asked about his conversion experience. And maybe this is unique to him personally, or maybe it is a cultural perspective, but he didn't answer with a date that he responded to an altar call. He began by talking about God protecting him, and being with him as a young child, riding horses, staying in the woods for months in the summer, foraging for his own food. He said Jesus was with him then and throughout his whole life. Seth remarked later how much he liked that perspective. How it wasn't a focus on a personal decision, but it was focused on God seeking after him and always being with him, protecting him from things seen and unseen.
This is one of the major reasons that we baptize our children as infants. Because it puts the focus on God's sovereignty and his love for us.
And it is how I feel, too. I spent a good majority of my life afraid. Afraid of losing God's love and making mistakes. But overall, I see the love of God, arching over my years, beginning when I was very young--incapable of understanding, but not without experience, not without hope and longing for him. Gracious with my misunderstandings, but faithful to teach me the truth. And not everything I was taught was wrong. Teachers are human, too. Sinful people can still teach you. And God can rise above all the circumstances to teach you in any way imaginable. I see him faithful through it all, everything I had to learn and unlearn, hard lessons and easy ones that brought tears for his gentleness. And I am grateful to the kind teachers I've had who taught me about grace, and to the ones who teach me now.
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