How Does God Speak?

In a recent post, Michael Halcomb expressed his skepticism about claims to have heard a personal message from God:

The thing is, people can rarely ever prove that God spoke, it's like, well, you just have to take their word for it.... But then, I really think that there are legitimate instances where God speaks to people. So, I guess I'm wondering, are there any bloggers out there to whom God has spoken or speaks? If so, how does it happen and how do you know?

I responded there:

God's voice has always seemed to me less like a source of information and more like a rather forceful and focused form of conscience, persistently (sometimes even uncomfortably) pointing toward or away from certain specific decisions. It's not always been there (in fact, ignoring it is a pretty sure way to make it disappear!), but when I have experienced it, it's unmistakable.

And Michael responded:

I'm still wondering just how. Your notion of a "source of information" is interesting but still, how did you hear it? Did you "feel" more than "hear"? What?

My answer grew a bit too long for the comment thread, so I’ll post it here:

The first thing I should say is that I think God’s primary means of communication are scripture and the church, but I don’t think those are the only ways he speaks, and unless I am completely nuts, I think I have occasionally heard his voice in other ways. In my own experience, those latter cases always seemed a mix of thoughts, feelings and "coincidence," like everything in my life was pointed towards a particular choice, and usually one that I did want to make (thus, almost every time it has happened I fought God on it for a long while). At such times I always found that, if I obeyed, things turned out for the best but, if I disobeyed, they very much did not. I’ve given a number of examples in other posts, so here I'll give just one more (omitting a few personal details):

When I was a sophomore in college, for several months I strongly felt that I needed to end a certain relationship, but I had no desire to do so. There wasn't anything immoral about the relationship, but every time I prayed--heck—even when I didn’t, this persistent thought/feeling kept intruding. But I kept pushing it back, giving excuses, arguing with God that it would hurt the other person too much. This went on for months, until finally I got so fed up that one night I went out to the "Back 40" of our campus and prayed/yelled (I don't normally pray out loud, let alone at a shout!) that I didn't understand, I didn't think I could do it, and how could I even know it was God I was hearing and not just my own twisted mind? There was no voice from heaven (if that ever happens, I've not experienced it), just that persistent feeling. So finally I said: "I give up, if this is really you, God, if you really want me to do this, you're gonna have to do something drastic. Hit me over the head with a 2x4!"

I know, I know, that's not how you're supposed to talk to God (I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I did at all, but then again, it'd be nice to have that kind of passion again). Well anyway, I stood there for a few minutes, half expecting some crazed student to jump out of the woods and hit me upside the head, but nothing happened. So I sighed and turned around to walk back to campus, and immediately (I kid you not) I smacked my forehead on a big block of wood.

In all the time I was standing there, I had entirely forgotten where I was. Our campus had a raised set of railroad tracks that ran through the back 40, which the path crossed through a low walking tunnel. I happened to be standing just outside the opening of that tunnel, a bit closer than I realized, I suppose. So when I turned around I slammed my head right into the center brace holding up the roof. I think it was actually a 4x8, but I got the message, and a bad headache. ;)

But I didn't listen. After all that, I went back to my dorm intent to break it off, but I didn't follow through. In fact, I stopped arguing with God about it at all. I knew what he wanted, but I wasn’t willing to do it. So I just ignored him until finally the feeling disappeared. As it turned out, the decision (or indecision!) led to one of the most difficult years of my life. Worse, after so blatantly ignoring God, I never again felt that tug in the same way I once did.

I realize it all sounds a bit unbelievable, but there were many times in my life when similar things happened. Moreover, what convinces me that it was not just my subconscious playing tricks on me is that, when God’s voice was there, it was always unmistakably persistent and very specific--something particular I needed to do or stop doing, not a replacement for conscience, free will or critical thinking--but when it was gone, I couldn't manufacture it no matter how much I wanted to.

Ultimately, then, I do think God occasionally speaks in a more personal way, and it should never be taken lightly when he does, but I'm not convinced this is something we should be seeking as Christians (and I remain deeply skeptical of people who claim God gave them a message for someone else). There are much more important things to our relationship with God, and more important means of ascertaining God’s will, which (I think) should always be sought in the community of faith and in consultation with scripture. To center your life on seeking some private manifestation of God’s voice will seriously distort things. After all, Christianity is not supposed to be about us at all, but about loving God and neighbor. So in the end, if you want to know God’s will for your life, don’t hide in your prayer closet; start with Micah 6:8. For if you were to truly live this out, you could hardly go wrong:

He has told you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

Paul's "Conversion" and the Life of Faith

This past week I've been fighting off a bad cold and busily preparing for a graduate seminar on "Israel's Faith, Paul's Conversion or Call, and the Speaker(s) in Romans 7," huge topics, all three. I taught the class this afternoon, and it seemed to go very well. I can't say we reached too many firm conclusions, but we did clarify the issues in important ways. In case anyone is interested, I've uploaded the handout, though I can't say how helpful or unhelpful it will be without the discussion which supported it. If any of my biblical studies-inclined readers would like to comment on it (or point out gross errors, omissions, etc.), however, I'd be grateful, as this is part of my research for a fuller paper on the subject due later in the semester.

In any case, the other reason I bring this up is to say that, as I have been thinking about Paul and the dramatic change which he experienced, I can't help feeling that there is much more here than just the academic questions discussed in the above seminar. And it turns out that Carmen has been thinking about this as well. As she writes:

Sometimes these experiences are dramatic and stunning, but more often they are quieter and less noticeable. Either way, these encounters are integral and constant in the lifelong process of entering and living in kingdom life. “Conversion is more than just an event,” says Scot McKnight in Jesus Creed, “it is a process. Like wisdom, it takes a lifetime. Conversion is a lifelong series of gentle (or noisy) nods of the soul. The question of when someone is converted is much less important that that they are converting.”

When I look at Paul, I see a man who was not only powerfully transformed by his experience of the resurrected Jesus, but did something about it. He didn't just hide out in a cushy office in Jerusalem writing learned treatises on the relation of Jew and Gentile. He didn't sit in some ivory town offering high-minded but impractical moral advice. He took his faith out, into the world; he shared the good news, raised money for the poor, and helped real people to allow God to transform their lives. He did this on his own dime, and in return he was beaten, ridiculed and imprisoned, yet he kept at it right up to his death.

Paul was, by no means, a perfect man. Even his letters strike me as variously puzzling, profound and profane, but not only are his words part of Christian scripture, but he provides a remarkable example to which I need to pay more attention. Like him, I need not just to talk but to live this faith to which I'm in the process of converting.

How I Became a Christian Part IV

Responding to recent posts, commenter Hugh has been emphasizing the absurdity and danger of uncritically seeking “God’s will” for every detail of one’s life. It may surprise him, but I agree. As I have told my story, I have described a handful of points in my life when God seemed to be guiding me down certain paths, mostly ones that I wouldn’t have chosen on my own. These have only been examples, highlighted because they were significant for the course of my life, but if the impression I have given is that this guidance is only occasional, that is the correct impression. Unlike the conscience, which is pretty much always there if you take the trouble to listen, God’s voice is much more elusive.

John’s Gospel compares God’s spirit to the wind, unpredictable and uncontrollable, and this has certainly been my experience. Though it is possible to stifle God’s promptings, just as it is possible to deaden one’s conscience, it is not possible to force God to speak. Most of the time, we are left to think and decide for ourselves, in dialogue with scripture and the community of fellow believers. Though Christians believe God’s providence encompasses the whole of our lives, trusting in God does not mean expecting him to plan out every detail thereof, nor does it mean giving up your responsibility to make wise decisions. As I recently argued concerning the Bible, Christianity does not expect unthinking conformity, but calls us into a dialogue. Above all, it calls us to an outward-focused life, which is the antithesis of obsessing over one’s own needs and desires.

I suspect that one important reason for this, as for why God doesn’t always answer prayer, is because he intends us to grow into spiritual adulthood. He intends us to be the kind of people who choose rightly on our own, who can be genuine partners with God in the world, and not remain spiritual and moral children indefinitely. I think this is also why new converts tend to see even their foolish prayers answered more directly. At the least, I can say that the promptings I have described have steadily decreased in frequency the longer I have been a Christian, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. As a parent, I can understand the principle very well: I will do many things for my one-month-old son that I expect my two-year-old daughter to do for herself. Though God may make his presence especially known at first, he doesn’t intend to take over our decision-making process for us, nor does trust in “God’s will” excuse you from critical thinking, though it does mean stepping out in trust without knowing how things will turn out.

But if this is how God works, then like immature children, we can sometimes react badly to God’s refusal to coddle us. For instance, while God expects us to grow into responsible, decision-making adults, it is possible to take this take this too far and convince yourself of God’s sanction and approval of your own self-serving and destructive plans. Oppositely, it is possible to become so obsessed with knowing “God’s will” for every detail of your life that you become utterly indecisive. Over the years, I’ve at times been guilty of both extremes.

For example, one summer in high school I felt like God was calling me to fast. Now if done right, fasting can be a very healthy practice, both spiritually and physically, but I didn’t take any trouble to learn about how to do it right; I just stopped eating, thinking God would tell me when it was OK to eat again. Well after a few days and no such signs from God, I gave up and ate a meal. I then felt guilty about it and started the fast over, this time obsessing over every meal, whether it was “God’s will” for me to eat. As you might expect, after a few days I broke down and ate again, felt guilty again and started over. This very destructive cycle of eating and not eating, obsessing over God’s will, but really just inconsistently following my own desire, continued for several weeks.

Eventually, my pastor discovered what I was doing and advised me to stop, emphasizing that this was not the proper way to do a fast, and I took his advice and gave up on it. In truth, the affair did me no good, but it does provide a helpful illustration of the danger of treating what we think is God’s will as a license to stop thinking. Perhaps if I had approached it critically from the beginning, and stuck with it, it would have done me good (after all, I've known plenty of people, that pastor among them, who have found fasting to be a very helpful discipline), but my immature and inconsistent approach had no such positive effects. Indeed, to this day the very thought of fasting makes me uncomfortable, and I've never tried it again, which is a shame, really.

In any case, a more significant example involves my decision on where to attend college. I mentioned that I met the woman who I would eventually marry just two days after my family moved. We hit it off right away, and it wasn’t long before we became very close (though I told myself that we were “just friends”). She was a year ahead of me and the next fall she went off to the local liberal arts college while I started my senior year, fully intending to go to the same school the next year. So when the time came, I applied, was offered a scholarship, and accepted.

By that point, however, I couldn’t shake the fact that I was breaking my commitment not to date in high school, and that we needed to take a step back from our relationship. Like with the fasting incident though, I wasn’t very thoughtful about it, nor did I seek out anyone's advice or guidance. I didn't even discuss the matter with her; I simply informed her that we shouldn’t see or talk to each other for a while. And from March through May of my senior year, we didn’t.

It was a very difficult time, particularly for her, but despite my foolish and insensitive approach, it wasn’t for nothing. Not long after the break up that old feeling came back (for the first time in a long while), and quickly it became clear that I had chosen where to go to college based on her, and this was not where I should be going. This was extremely hard for me to accept, but I trusted God and went looking for other options, eventually settling on a school in Canada, and withdrawing my application from the first school. I was extremely disappointed that I would be leaving the woman I loved, but the new school looked to be a good fit and I felt comfortable with the decision, though I dreaded telling her about it.

Little did I know that over those two months she had been going through much the same process, and when I finally told her what I had decided, I was shocked to discover that she too had come to the very same decision. Soon after, I graduated high school and we began dating (“again”). But that was when I started to second-guess myself. Though the decision to attend the school in Canada had been made for good reasons which had not changed, and I didn’t even feel any prompting that it was a mistake, I wanted certainty about “God’s will” in the matter, and kept asking for some kind of sign to confirm or condemn my decision. None came, and by July I had no choice but to make the decision for myself, and went ahead and confirmed my registration.

Perhaps God wanted me to grow up and be decisive, or perhaps he just didn’t feel like repeating himself. Who knows, but despite all the subsequent obsessing, the decision turned out to be the right one. That fall we headed off for the new school, which (thanks to an excellent exchange rate) ended up being cheaper without a scholarship than the first would have been with one. In the end, the program I majored in (Biblical Studies) was not even available at the first school, and the new school ended up being just what I needed. But I had also learned an important lesson: Like any relationship, following God requires both trust and decisiveness. Neither obsessive hand-wringing about his wishes, nor uncritical acceptance of one’s own will do. He’s not looking for unthinking drones who expect to be told what to do with every detail of their lives; he’s looking for partners in his work in the world.

How I Became a Christian Part III

Commenting on the last segment of my story, Hugh questioned why God would waste his time focusing on such “paltry” matters as a high schooler’s social life. I must admit that on the face of it, it does seem preposterous, like a king worrying about the petty concerns of a beggar. But that is precisely why Christians insist on God’s goodness and love because, preposterous as it may be, he does seem to take an interest even in such trivialities. If God is infinite as Christians claim, then he is in no way hampered by the time constraints that force us to limit our involvements, but that doesn’t change the loving and compassionate nature of the matter.

That said, if I am anything like typical, I suspect social matters are the most important to most teenagers. I know for a fact that my teen-aged self would have been more willing to be killed for my beliefs than to be thought uncool, and I don't think I was alone. For that matter, I'm not sure how much things have changed: how many of us wouldn't more readily accept a grand sacrifice than the small and daily sacrifices which are in fact far more important? Perhaps that is precisely why God does focus on such small matters in our lives, for he recognizes that fixing the world is not so much a matter of solving the “big” problems, but of changing us, making us into the kind of people who live selflessly in community and love. After all, history has constantly revealed the terror and violence that attend all attempts to enforce morality, even for society's own good. True justice can only be established on a person-by-person basis, through the free choices of individuals, and my own long experience with God confirms, for me at least, that this is how God does in fact choose to work.

Nevertheless, not every aspect of God’s role in my life can be reduced to such small matters. I could name many examples of God’s work at significant points in my life, but as this story is already growing long I’ll skip to the most important: The next fall, during my Junior year of high school, my dad was informed that his company needed him to move to a different office in Denver (several states away). As you might expect, I had no desire to leave my friends (and church) just a year and a half before finishing high school, especially considering how much I was enjoying my life there. In deference to my concerns (and likely his own as well), my dad went looking for options and found job opportunities at two start-up companies, one of which would have allowed us to stay where we were, and the other which would require moving, but only across the state. All three jobs (including the original) were roughly comparable in pay and responsibilities, and I was adamant that he take the one that didn’t require moving.

It wasn’t long, however, before that now familiar nudge began telling me something quite different. Though I had no additional information to suggest that it would be better to move, and outwardly I continued to insist that we ought to stay where we were, deep down I couldn’t shake the feeling that we actually needed to take the job across the state. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I knew, and I hated the idea. For weeks I held to my line that my dad should take the job nearby, knowing full well that this was a lie, until finally, with just three weeks to spare, I admitted the truth. I suspect that my parents were already planning on taking the job anyway (though they have never admitted this), but in respect of my wishes they had not done anything to pursue it. So when we moved, just three weeks later, the delay forced us to live in a rental house until we had time to buy one. It also meant much more abrupt goodbyes for all of us than it would have, had I not stalled for all those weeks.

Yet once again, when I did obey, I found that God knew what he was doing far better than I did. My dad was much happier with his new job. I ended up at a far better school than I had been at previously. My parents marriage, which had been in a very poor state, improved dramatically, as did my own with my brothers. We also found a new church that I not only liked as much as the previous, but that reinvigorated my parents’ own faith, which had (particularly for my dad) long since grown cold. And to top it all off, I met my future wife on the second day I was there.

In time, however, I discovered that the most important thing about the move was what it saved our family from. Within a year of our moving away, we learned the start-up for which my dad would have worked had we stayed had gone bankrupt. Worse, the group of friends my middle brother had been hanging out with before we moved had since taken a dark turn towards drug addiction and my brother, up to that point always the rebel of the family, would almost certainly have joined them had we stayed. On that score, it was probably my brother who most benefited from the move, for later that year one of his previous friends shot another and then killed himself, at a party that he may very well have attended had we stayed.

Nor was this the first time that our family had such a near-miss with tragedy. When I was in middle school, my dad’s company had once before tried to move us to Denver, and we actually visited and looked at houses in the Littleton area. That time, my dad took a different job nearby (though eventually the old company wooed him back), which postponed the move until, as I said, my Junior year. But my life might have been very different if he hadn’t. For it was only a few years later that the Columbine massacre occurred in the very school in Littleton that I would have attended.

I remember reading the newspaper the day of after the attack and being so angry at God that he would allow such a terrible thing to occur. It was only much later that I realized how close my own family had come to being there. Sometimes, I can now see, we are so eager to blame God for “failing to act” when people use their God-given free will to do terrible things, that we fail to consider the possibility that he has acted to limit the damage as much as he could without violating our freedom. As it turned out, when I got to college I discovered that one of my roommates had been there at Columbine, and was himself spared when the bomb under his table (miraculously?) failed to detonate. Perhaps God was there, even at Columbine, after all. In any case, I can now say with confidence that he has saved my family from far worse fates than the petty concerns of a self-conscious teenager.

Continued in Part IV

How I Became a Christian - Part II

It has been said that if a man talks to God, he’s pious, but if God talks to him, he’s schizophrenic. If that is true, it bodes ill for me, but I suppose I’ll have to let you judge for yourselves. As described in the first part of my story, though I was raised in the church, it was a long time before I was willing to admit that fact to my (mostly non-Christian) friends. When I finally did so, in ninth grade, it was revolutionary. Of course, simple honesty with oneself and one’s acquaintances accounts for much of the change, and would likely have done so regardless of what religion (or lack thereof) I had finally admitted.

But the change went deeper than that, as I stopped looking for my identity and validation in what others thought of me, stopped worrying (as much!) about being well-liked or popular. Ironically, the very act of deciding to care more about my relationship with God than my relationship with others in fact improved my relationships with others as well. As it turned out, not only did my relationships deepen but, quite unexpectedly, I found that my two circles of friends (“church” and “school”) begin to coalesce in a way I could not have thought possible.

But I also found, not for the last time, that God was not satisfied to improve my lot in life; he wanted to improve me. It wasn’t long after that I first became aware of God’s promptings, his “still small voice” (as it has been called), which rather insistently began to demand that I live my life better than I had been doing. It is difficult to describe this “voice,” and those who have not experienced it will be forgiven for finding the notion strange, if not absurd, but it will become central to my story so I must try to explain it. In truth, it’s not really a “voice,” at least not an audible one, but neither is it simply an amorphous “feeling.” As I said in my review of The Shack, the closest thing I could compare it to would be the conscience, but it is distinct from the conscience, and not quite the same.

While the conscience will leave you feeling guilty about certain moral choices (real or potential), God’s promptings are deeper and feel, for lack of a better word, more foreign. The conscience is, after all, just another part of your own mind, and expresses values you already hold, even if you would prefer not to at the moment. The voice of God is like having another mind altogether, simultaneously more elusive and more persistent than the conscience. As I said before, it is not (at least in my experience) a source of information so much as of direction, and it isn’t always limited to strictly moral choices. I’m certain I’ve done a poor job of explaining it, but hopefully the rest of my story itself will clarify what I mean.

In any case, in this subtle but unmistakable way, God began helping me to recognize a few of my worse qualities and begin to move beyond them. For instance, I had a very short temper and could sometimes get violent over very minor things (just ask my younger brothers), and this was one of the first things that God began working on. I came to recognize that television, film and video games were particular problems for me in this area. I would become inexplicably enraged playing even the most innocuous video games (I was a sore loser, I guess), and watched some extremely violent movies.

Looking back, I can see that the problem wasn’t always the shows or games themselves, but simply my own immaturity, but in order to recognize that I had to get away from them for a while, and one of the first things God convicted me of was to take a break from them. And for nearly a year I did so, and apart from a few weak moments, I didn't watch or play any of them. This made a huge difference, beginning me on the path that has led to my current mellow self. Heh. Other issues God took up were my pride and vanity, odd though they might seem for a geeky teenager, and a perennial struggle with lust (made worse, no doubt, by the nudity in some of those movies I had been watching).

But while feeling pressed for moral progress is one, and perhaps the most important, aspect of intimacy with God (I said his voice is very like the conscience), it is not the only one. The summer after ninth grade was a particular turning point for me on that score. My youth pastor had started a program called Summer Servants, which was essentially an extension of small group I had been attending, except that it ran all day, every day, for eight weeks. Only five of us were crazy enough to sign up, but that summer changed all of our lives. There is much that I could say about it—how I made some of the deepest friendships I’ve ever had, experienced for the first time how overwhelming an experience prayer and worship can be, and faced my first serious challenge to my faith, among others—but I’ll limit myself to one point:

I’ve said that before I became serious about my faith the only thing I wanted was to be popular, but that isn’t exactly true. There was one thing my teenaged self wanted more: to have a girlfriend. As I was a shy and unattractive pre-teen (or do them call them “tweens” these days?), you wont be shocked to hear that my one relationship during that time consisted almost entirely of passing notes. The one time I worked up the nerve to call, her dad answered the phone, told me it was too late to be calling—it was 8pm—and hung up on me. Finally, I asked her (by note) to a dance, at which we stood ten feet apart and said not a word. A week later, a mutual friend informed me that we had broken up. The only reason I’d even call it “dating” is because it led to a fistfight with her next boyfriend (there was that temper I mentioned), but it sapped any nerve I had to ask another girl out.

Despite that utter failure (or perhaps because of it), however, dating became my dearest wish. Thus, even after I gave up to God my desire to be popular, it took until that summer for God to convince me to give up my obsession with finding a girlfriend. Though no one, that I can recall, ever suggested such a thing to me, it became clearer and clearer that God wanted me to give up dating. Not just to stop worrying so much about it, mind you, but to consciously choose not to date. You might think that a kid who hadn’t managed to ask a girl out since the sixth grade wouldn’t have been too opposed to the idea of giving up for a while, but you would be wrong. The fact that it seemed an unattainable goal only made it harder to give it up, and I fought God on it all summer. Slowly but surely the feeling built that this was what God wanted me to do, but just as steadily my own resistance to the idea grew as well.

By the end of the summer things came to a head. It seemed like every time I opened my Bible I’d stumble on some text like Matthew 19 or 1 Corinthians 7. At one point I even went cliff-diving with the youth group, decided to try a swan dive and instead landed, well in a very uncomfortable position, and got to spend the whole bus-ride home listening to my friends chanting the Beatles’ song Yesterday, especially the line: “suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be.” I actually became quite distressed about the whole affair, as I continued to hold on to what I thought I wanted most, but God was very persistent, and finally, the last week of Summer Servants, I gave in and handed that area of my life over as well.

Once again, and quite immediately, it was startling how freeing it was to let go of the issue. The funny thing was (God’s sense of humor?), just as I decided to give up dating was when I finally got a new hair cut, grew into my feet, and (if I’d have known it), actually did have the chance to go out with the girl I liked. But I stuck with my decision and soon discovered just how valuable refusing to date could be. While all my friends were coupling off, I was able to maintain much closer relationships with our female friends than any of my other guy friends did (the girls called me “as good as gay,” which I guess was a compliment). Freed of sexual tension, some of my best friends during that period were female, and we were able to talk with remarkable candor. Yet the greatest benefit I found was in avoiding the pain caused as my friends who dated inevitably broke up, usually on bad terms, causing divisions and rivalries among their own circles of acquaintances. For those of my friends who had gone further, sexually, this naturally led to worse grief, including at least one pregnancy, and I was spared all of that.

The truth is, God knew exactly what he was doing when he called me not to date, and the next couple years were among the best of my life. I generally found that I knew what it was God wanted of me, though I didn't always succeed in doing it, but as often as I obeyed things worked out better than they would have otherwise. Yet the most significant examples of this pattern will have to wait for the next installment.

Continued in Part III

How I Became a Christian

A while back, commenter N. Adam responded to my post on “Why I Am a Christian” by suggesting that, if I was raised on the church, that post could have been a lot shorter. I took him to mean that if the “real” reason I am a Christian is because I was raised that way, then all the other reasons I give are invalid, or unnecessary. N. Adam, admirably, clarified that he was just trying to raise questions, and he was right to do so, for that post did leave out the most important reason I am a Christian: my history. With apologies, however, I must say that he was quite mistaken about how much “shorter” the post would have been. Belatedly, therefore, I will tell that story now, but I’m afraid that even an abbreviated account will take several posts to describe. Here is the first:

Though I was raised in the church, my family was never particular religious. We weren’t the type to do family devotions, we rarely even ate meals together. In truth, my dad was often gone on business trips, and I was never very close to my mom. Nevertheless, one of my earliest memories is “asking Jesus into my heart,” at five years old, which must have made an impression on me, though you’d have never known it from looking at me. I was the problem-child that all the other church kids were warned to avoid. By 6th grade I still attended church every week, but none of my school friends were Christians, and I did everything in my power to hide from them that I was. I would have said I wanted their approval more than anything, but in truth it wasn’t them I cared about; what I really wanted was to be liked, not just by my small circle of (generally nerdy) friends, but by the whole school. It was a silly, if understandable, wish for a goofy kid with a bad haircut, thick glasses, and a pair of feet way too big for my body, but my whole school life was built around that dream.

When I was in 7th grade, our church hired a new youth pastor who started a small group which met weekly on Tuesday afternoons. Since I had always attended church, I joined the group more out of obligation than interest, and was horrified to learn that we would be picked up in the church van right in front of my school. I remember my desperate, and ridiculous, lies to friends who would ask who I was waiting for each week, as I stood there pretending not to associate with my “church friends.” But ashamed and deceptive as I was, I kept going to the meetings. If I’d been honest with myself, I would have realized that it was usually the high point of my week (which is probably why I kept going). We’d play a game of Ultimate Frisbee if it was sunny, or go to a fast food restaurant if it was rainy, then talk about our week, about the Bible, or whatever was on our minds. We were also expected to do a certain amount of reading each week (mostly from the Bible), answer some questions, memorize a verse of scripture or two, and occasionally do “service projects” like cleaning up trash around town (which I again found immensely embarrassing).

For two years I lived like this, hiding my growing interest and enjoyment of church activities from my friends at school. Looking back, I can only say that God was working on me (I guess he must have heard that five-year-old’s prayer, childish though it was), and by ninth grade I slowly and apprehensively came to recognize the foolishness of trying to live two lives in that way. I finally realized that if God truly was who I had always been taught, he couldn’t be just one part of my life, hidden in some corner where no one could see it. My faith, small and fledgling though it was, either needed to be the center of my life, or I needed to give it up entirely. Thankfully, I chose the former, and in the fall of ninth grade I decided (rather audaciously) to stop worrying about what anyone else might think, and concern myself only with what God thought of me.

For a nervous and self-conscious freshman, this was no small step—it meant giving up everything I had built my public identity around, all the “safe” barriers I had erected to protect myself from rejection. When I finally admitted my Christianity to my “school friends” (which they had of course known all along), it was incredibly freeing. But more than that, I found that what I had taken for friendship was really a pale reflection thereof, as I had been so worried about being liked that I hardly actually loved anyone. When I stopped looking for my self-worth in them (for I had already found it in God), I was free to love and be loved in ways I never previously imagined.

But that is not the end of my story; it is only the beginning, as continued in Part II.