How the Door was Opened
You know how it is. You're going through life and everything seems like it's going just the way you expect it. Until one day, without warning...
... a mysterious man who wears sunglasses indoors and seems to know everything about you tells you that the world you're living in isn't the real world after all.
... two droids show up at your farm needing your help to get a message to some local hermit who might actually be a space wizard with the power to save the galaxy.
... an old man in a gray, pointy hat rousts you out of your comfy hobbit hole and conscripts you for a dragon-slaying adventure.
... a wardrobe that at first just looked like a good place to play hide-and-seek on a rainy day turns out to be a passageway into a world you thought only existed in fairy tales.
Or, maybe you're like me and haven't had any experiences quite so fantastic, but some that are certainly just as unexpected and life-changing.
If you grew up in the Bible belt in a generally American evangelical, fundamentalist culture, you know there are two big groups of people in the church (there's more, but these two are pretty major). First there's the ones like me. You grew up in church. You always believed in God, in Jesus, that you were a sinner, that you needed redemption, that Christ had saved you. The gospel was just the air you breathed. You believed in God's love like you believed in your parent's love. You had no more trouble having faith in God than having faith that the sun would come up in the morning. It's just all you know. All you've ever known.
But then there's the other group. The ones you always hear giving "testimonies." People who grew up outside the church and lived some wild and crazy life until Jesus saved them and now they're "on fire." Those are the "cool kids." My group is just kind of "meh" (nobody says so out loud, but if you're in it, you know it's true).
Now, of course, most church kids do have a conversion story. Even if they grew up in church, they would have still been expected ("pressured," let's be honest) to make a public confession or have a conversion experience, usually around 8 or 10 years old. But the non-denominational church I grew up in was an anomaly even in the evangelical world. It consciously didn't exert the usual cultural pressure on kids to ask Jesus into their heart, walk the aisle, declare their faith to the church, pray the sinners prayer, or anything like that. It believed that in the discipleship-rich environment it tried to cultivate, faith in God would develop in kids naturally and organically, kind of the same way kids learn or come to believe anything else. And for me at least, that's how it worked.
Of course, then there's the boomerang kids. The ones that grew up in church and then "wandered away" at some point, only to come back around to the faith after a few years. These lucky ones finally get to have a cool testimony that people care about, so they move up into the upper echelons of the real, on-fire, radical believers. But, you guessed it, at almost 30 years old, I don't even have that.
I've never even come close to "not believing" or "walking away from the faith." I didn't have a talk with my parents one night and walk the aisle the next Sunday morning. I didn't wander and then get saved at a revival meeting I wasn't even supposed to be at. I didn't even really have to consciously decide to "make my parents' faith my own" (as you will often hear some church kids say), because, honestly, I always felt like it was my own. So I missed out on all of it. But despite not having the textbook evangelical experience, over the last few years, I've had more than my fair share of visits from lost droids and bearded men in pointy hats.
They came in the form of neat and tidy systems of belief I once naively held coming unraveled by the experience of cold, hard, reality. Of confidence in religious authorities and institutions I trusted being completely undermined. Of realizing that the further I fell into God's story, the further I fell out of the American church's. Of watching the evangelical Christianity of which I was once proudly a part completely sell its soul to buy security and power through a presidential election. Of seeing men use doctrine, belief, "truth" and spiritual authority to craft a version of the gospel and a picture of God that was meant to be used only to control others and exalt themselves. Of having to confront the reality that I was often guilty of the same. Of watching the local church that spiritually mothered me for seventeen years breathe her last, but only after suffering a long illness. Of watching my marriage end and young family be torn apart. Of having the whole story of how I thought my life was going to go get completely rewritten. Of crossing paths with others experiencing the same disillusionment.
I suppose the story could easily have gone that I did lose my faith and turned away from God. It's definitely gone that way for many. But it didn't, and I sincerely take no credit for that. Peter was once almost stretched to the breaking point, but at the end of the day, there was some little divinely-planted seed of faith that told him, in however weak a voice, that there was no other place to go to find the words of everlasting life than from the mouth of the mysterious Nazarene before him. I'm sure he didn't even know how or why it was there, and most of the time, I don't either.
Instead, what happened, as best I can tell, is that the unexpected visitors at my door did just what the sudden appearance of an old, gray wizard once did to an ordinary, contended hobbit... they disturbed my comfort. Any assurance I might have had that was based on the certainty of beliefs, the stability and trustworthiness of men, institutions, and my own safety nets; or the comfort that came from "fitting in," completely turned to dust. Everything was pulled apart, and I felt as exposed and vulnerable as Job. But when the dust settled, the only thing left was a mustard seed of hope that a Galilean carpenter might still be the only thing breathing words of everlasting life.
And now I've got a front-row seat to watching how that dead grain is growing into a new shoot. God has led me to places I never would have gone on my own, especially not in the state of imagined comfort I once was in. He's also brought along some truly remarkable people coming from a similar place with whom I am making this journey (a "fellowship," you might say). From the broken pieces, He is rebuilding something truly beautiful around that seemingly fragile, but inexplicably resilient, kernel of hope. I stumbled into a dark wardrobe, groped my way through the coats, got hit in the face by some pine branches, fell down in the snow, and then lo and behold, there was a light... like a single, dim lamp-post stubbornly fighting back against the eternal winter that threatened to overwhelm it.
Nowadays, my faith, my beliefs, my world, look nothing like I would have once imagined them. But as hard as it is sometimes, I wouldn't go back to the world I once knew for anything. If you'd been able to stand by and watch Aslan breathe Narnia to life, you wouldn't want to go back to your dreary, old London row-house either. The world looks totally different to me now in ways I can't unsee, and in ways I can't keep to myself. Hence, this blog.
I'm not out of the woods yet though. I have a lot of doubts and questions and things I haven't figured out yet. I'm deeply struggling with a lot of things I can't sort out, with not being understood, with finding a place to belong, and with still trying to develop peace in many areas of life. In one sense, I finally have a testimony, but it has already proven to still not be the right kind for some people (I didn't come to the right beliefs, you know, and not in the right way either). All I can account for is that I have experienced a freedom, life, and peace that is a treasure worth selling all that you have in order to buy the field and own the pearl.
Christian feminist Sarah Bessey often reflects on the many people who have looked at her life, her beliefs, or her doubts and warned her about going down the dreaded "slippery slope."
With her, I exuberantly testify...
"HAVE YOU GUYS TRIED THIS THING? IT'S AWESOME!"
If you think you can hang on, keep reading.
... a mysterious man who wears sunglasses indoors and seems to know everything about you tells you that the world you're living in isn't the real world after all.
... two droids show up at your farm needing your help to get a message to some local hermit who might actually be a space wizard with the power to save the galaxy.
... an old man in a gray, pointy hat rousts you out of your comfy hobbit hole and conscripts you for a dragon-slaying adventure.
... a wardrobe that at first just looked like a good place to play hide-and-seek on a rainy day turns out to be a passageway into a world you thought only existed in fairy tales.
Or, maybe you're like me and haven't had any experiences quite so fantastic, but some that are certainly just as unexpected and life-changing.
If you grew up in the Bible belt in a generally American evangelical, fundamentalist culture, you know there are two big groups of people in the church (there's more, but these two are pretty major). First there's the ones like me. You grew up in church. You always believed in God, in Jesus, that you were a sinner, that you needed redemption, that Christ had saved you. The gospel was just the air you breathed. You believed in God's love like you believed in your parent's love. You had no more trouble having faith in God than having faith that the sun would come up in the morning. It's just all you know. All you've ever known.
But then there's the other group. The ones you always hear giving "testimonies." People who grew up outside the church and lived some wild and crazy life until Jesus saved them and now they're "on fire." Those are the "cool kids." My group is just kind of "meh" (nobody says so out loud, but if you're in it, you know it's true).
Now, of course, most church kids do have a conversion story. Even if they grew up in church, they would have still been expected ("pressured," let's be honest) to make a public confession or have a conversion experience, usually around 8 or 10 years old. But the non-denominational church I grew up in was an anomaly even in the evangelical world. It consciously didn't exert the usual cultural pressure on kids to ask Jesus into their heart, walk the aisle, declare their faith to the church, pray the sinners prayer, or anything like that. It believed that in the discipleship-rich environment it tried to cultivate, faith in God would develop in kids naturally and organically, kind of the same way kids learn or come to believe anything else. And for me at least, that's how it worked.
Of course, then there's the boomerang kids. The ones that grew up in church and then "wandered away" at some point, only to come back around to the faith after a few years. These lucky ones finally get to have a cool testimony that people care about, so they move up into the upper echelons of the real, on-fire, radical believers. But, you guessed it, at almost 30 years old, I don't even have that.
I've never even come close to "not believing" or "walking away from the faith." I didn't have a talk with my parents one night and walk the aisle the next Sunday morning. I didn't wander and then get saved at a revival meeting I wasn't even supposed to be at. I didn't even really have to consciously decide to "make my parents' faith my own" (as you will often hear some church kids say), because, honestly, I always felt like it was my own. So I missed out on all of it. But despite not having the textbook evangelical experience, over the last few years, I've had more than my fair share of visits from lost droids and bearded men in pointy hats.
They came in the form of neat and tidy systems of belief I once naively held coming unraveled by the experience of cold, hard, reality. Of confidence in religious authorities and institutions I trusted being completely undermined. Of realizing that the further I fell into God's story, the further I fell out of the American church's. Of watching the evangelical Christianity of which I was once proudly a part completely sell its soul to buy security and power through a presidential election. Of seeing men use doctrine, belief, "truth" and spiritual authority to craft a version of the gospel and a picture of God that was meant to be used only to control others and exalt themselves. Of having to confront the reality that I was often guilty of the same. Of watching the local church that spiritually mothered me for seventeen years breathe her last, but only after suffering a long illness. Of watching my marriage end and young family be torn apart. Of having the whole story of how I thought my life was going to go get completely rewritten. Of crossing paths with others experiencing the same disillusionment.
I suppose the story could easily have gone that I did lose my faith and turned away from God. It's definitely gone that way for many. But it didn't, and I sincerely take no credit for that. Peter was once almost stretched to the breaking point, but at the end of the day, there was some little divinely-planted seed of faith that told him, in however weak a voice, that there was no other place to go to find the words of everlasting life than from the mouth of the mysterious Nazarene before him. I'm sure he didn't even know how or why it was there, and most of the time, I don't either.
Instead, what happened, as best I can tell, is that the unexpected visitors at my door did just what the sudden appearance of an old, gray wizard once did to an ordinary, contended hobbit... they disturbed my comfort. Any assurance I might have had that was based on the certainty of beliefs, the stability and trustworthiness of men, institutions, and my own safety nets; or the comfort that came from "fitting in," completely turned to dust. Everything was pulled apart, and I felt as exposed and vulnerable as Job. But when the dust settled, the only thing left was a mustard seed of hope that a Galilean carpenter might still be the only thing breathing words of everlasting life.
And now I've got a front-row seat to watching how that dead grain is growing into a new shoot. God has led me to places I never would have gone on my own, especially not in the state of imagined comfort I once was in. He's also brought along some truly remarkable people coming from a similar place with whom I am making this journey (a "fellowship," you might say). From the broken pieces, He is rebuilding something truly beautiful around that seemingly fragile, but inexplicably resilient, kernel of hope. I stumbled into a dark wardrobe, groped my way through the coats, got hit in the face by some pine branches, fell down in the snow, and then lo and behold, there was a light... like a single, dim lamp-post stubbornly fighting back against the eternal winter that threatened to overwhelm it.
Nowadays, my faith, my beliefs, my world, look nothing like I would have once imagined them. But as hard as it is sometimes, I wouldn't go back to the world I once knew for anything. If you'd been able to stand by and watch Aslan breathe Narnia to life, you wouldn't want to go back to your dreary, old London row-house either. The world looks totally different to me now in ways I can't unsee, and in ways I can't keep to myself. Hence, this blog.
I'm not out of the woods yet though. I have a lot of doubts and questions and things I haven't figured out yet. I'm deeply struggling with a lot of things I can't sort out, with not being understood, with finding a place to belong, and with still trying to develop peace in many areas of life. In one sense, I finally have a testimony, but it has already proven to still not be the right kind for some people (I didn't come to the right beliefs, you know, and not in the right way either). All I can account for is that I have experienced a freedom, life, and peace that is a treasure worth selling all that you have in order to buy the field and own the pearl.
Christian feminist Sarah Bessey often reflects on the many people who have looked at her life, her beliefs, or her doubts and warned her about going down the dreaded "slippery slope."
With her, I exuberantly testify...
"HAVE YOU GUYS TRIED THIS THING? IT'S AWESOME!"
If you think you can hang on, keep reading.
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