[Our church has been studying the "Seven Sayings on the Cross" during the seven Sundays of Lent. To help the cross become more personal, our pastor asked seven different people to share their stories, one each Sunday of Lent. Here is mine...]
I don’t remember a time when church wasn’t part of my life. Don’t get me wrong though—that didn’t mean I enjoyed it. To me, church was an inconvenience; God was a cosmic kill-joy who was watching to make sure I wasn’t enjoying myself too much and who would step in and punish me if he thought that I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t want God to be a part of my life; it was more that I didn’t want my life to have to change because he was a part of it. And so I spent my childhood stuck in this awkward place of wanting to know Jesus on one hand, and yet being afraid of what that would mean on the other.
I read the Bible with my family every day, went to Sunday school each week, and attended a Christian school for all but two years of my schooling. By the time I got to college, I was really good at giving the right answers when anyone would ask me anything remotely spiritual. I knew how to deflect questions, and I knew how to debate anyone who believed differently than I did. My junior year of college, I studied abroad in England and the girls in my house there were from all parts of the religious spectrum. We had a couple Charismatics, a devout Roman Catholic, a girl who was “figuring things out” and has since become an Orthodox Jew, a Mormon, an atheist, and me—who got more and more confused as I listened to everyone talk about what they believed and as I realized that I, actually, didn’t have a clue.
When I got back to my college after that semester, I went through pretty severe reverse culture shock. Most of my closest friends couldn’t relate to my struggle, which made it an intensely lonely time for me. And I just couldn’t stop wrestling with the confusion that had begun during my time in Oxford—what did I personally believe? I knew what I believed because my parents had told me. But what did I actually believe for myself? And so, for the first time, I started reading the Bible in earnest as I tried to escape the loneliness and make some sense of the confusing thoughts swirling around in my brain.
That summer I hit rock-bottom, and I finally admitted to Jesus that I didn’t actually have any of the answers—even though I’d always known the right words to say. I realized that I was tired of fighting because I’d been fighting to earn my salvation, and that the truth of the matter was that I was never going to be able to do it on my own. I asked him to forgive me for all the ways I’d disobeyed him, and I asked God to accept Jesus’ sacrifice on my behalf.
God’s been teaching me a lot since then. I still struggle with those childhood impressions of God as a cosmic kill-joy. I struggle to believe that he loves me more than anyone else has ever loved me, that his love doesn’t give up and that it doesn’t depend on anything I do. And as I fight to believe the depths of God’s love for me, I’m learning that he isn’t just a supreme being, but he is a personal Father. A father who cares about each detail of my life and that he has plans for me—plans for good and not for evil.
The more I experience God as my father, the more I understand how his heart breaks for the fatherless in the world around me and how he wants them, too, to know God as their father. I’m learning that he is giving me a gift by allowing me to share his love with some of those children and to tell them about how intensely he loves them. This past week I led an outreach for children in the South Bronx, and one of the themes that came up again and again was how God knows each of us by name. The kids loved listening to us try to get their names right, loved it when I guessed how to spell the name to write it on their nametags. On the rare occasion that I guessed correctly, their eyes would get big, and they’d whisper “How did you know that?” But as the week went on and we remembered their names from day to day, they were surprised and thrilled. And we were able to tell them how God had known their names all along and how he is calling each one of them personally—by name!—to himself.
Working with those kids in the Bronx was a fresh reminder that, so far from being an impersonal, harsh, cosmic kill-joy, our God cares about the details of our lives. He calls us by name to believe in him. And sometimes he lets us be the ones who say others’ names out loud—lets us participate in calling others to believe in Jesus too.
