My Spiritual Odyssey

I Become a Born Again Christian

As I remember it, the argument the spiritual recruiter made when I was an impressionable – awkward - unfashionable 16 year old chubby kid went something like this: 

1. Only perfect beings can enter Heaven.  Because of what Eve did in the Garden of Eden. After their disobedience in eating from the tree of knowledge God cursed the children that he created.  He cast them out of the Garden of Eden, and damned all of their offspring (everyone… not just the people of Mesopotamia) to burn in the fiery depths of hell as well.
2. If you want to avoid this fate you need to ask Him into your Heart.  You have to die and be resurrected here on earth as a brand new human being. 
3. Jesus came to earth as God’s son.  He died as God’s perfect son.  And He died knowing that He did this to save you.  Once you do this, (accept Him as your personal savior) you will be cleansed of your sins and become the perfect being that you need to be to enter Heaven.
4. It is this act that gets you the gold ring on the merry go round of life instead of any of your deeds.

I was later to come to consider this logic, “The Conversion Process”

For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  John 3-16

Note: I suppose there are some who will quibble with the exactness of that summary, but there are like 487 different versions of fundamentalism (which should have been my first clue that not all was right with this version of Christianity.)

I saw lots of people answer the call to the front of the church.  But there is no way that I would have taken the walk up the aisle to the altar.  I saw others do it and was struck by how this affected them.  The reason that I could not do it was that I was so very painfully shy and self conscious.  The recruiter and his minions all told me how wonderful it was to be born again.  I wanted to believe them.  I was a mess as a kid.  I was sickly and chubby and convinced that I was the crumbs in the dish of the kibble of life.

After having returned from a Young Life http://www.younglife.org/ weekend camp where I had felt totally loved and completely accepted by people who so obviously were everything that I wanted to be – popular, I crawled into bed and did it.  Now I wonder if someone will think that I did not ask for the right reason.  But I refer you back to the rules of the process.  By now I have read he bible a number of times.  If proper motivation for believing in Him is required, I have not found it.

I asked Him into my heart in the privacy of my bedroom.  And after I did I also had a very profound emotional experience.  There was no white light, no shuddering like I had seen at the churches, I did not cry or shout out.  I was just overcome with the sense that everything was now ok.  The other thing was that nobody stepped into me.  In truth He had been there all along and I had just been too dumb to notice. 

Note:  I have heard some amateur psychologists claim that this kind of thing is a sexual orgasm of sorts.  My response to that kind of thinking is, “Well…  I honestly do not think so.  I was taught that orgasms were physical.  I guess the only way you can sort that out for yourself is to ask Him to come into your life.  But I warn you.  If you do so sincerely, you will never be the same again.”

I am really glad that I had a chance to have this experience in private.  If I had done it in a church or meeting I would have been swaddled in psychic warm blankets and rushed off to someone who would help me deal with it by further explaining what the experience had meant.  I know that this is the way it works because I ended up for a time being one of the people doing the wrapping and holding.

Instead I had a chance to do the first part of the bonding process with Him all alone.  You see, I had a personal Savior while so many others that I knew had a public one.  There is a really big difference between those two approaches.  The public conversion yields a mind fresh for imprinting not on Jesus but on the pastor. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think that the recruiter really had bad intentions.  In fact, I think he had the best ones.  But, as someone said the road to hell is paved with them, good intentions that is.  And people get in the way of your actual knowledge of Christ.  Because once “the conversion process” is completed the recruiter NOW wants to be the one to tell you what you need to know to move forward in this new life you have stepped into.  I must have been pretty stupid to not see that this was exactly the same as the Catholic Church’s investment in priests.  Maybe pastors do not wear the robes and sit in boxes to hear confessions.  But they do act between the converted and God to help cement the theology in the impressionable mind.

If they would just hold you and tell you that all you have to do now is learn how to listen to Him, and how to talk to Him, that would be one thing.  But they are caught up in the system worse than you are because they have been led to believe the whole rational emotional argument.

It did not take me long to see that the evangelical church I was sent to which was typical of many fundamental non-denominational Christian churches had a different agenda than letting me sort things out for myself.

The very first thing I was taught was the difference between “us” and “them”.  It was better not to associate with “them” except to proselytize the word so that I could bring them to Jesus.  I was no longer to attend Mass with family friends.  (This posed quite a problem for me as attending Mass lead to my going to their house afterwards where I could ride horses, and there was a guy that I was sort of sweet on.  I kept quiet about that too.)  I suddenly learned that despite the fact that the Catholic Church was the original one, it was not fundamental.

I learned the books that were proscribed, that I was not to attend any dances, and that any alcohol or that might enter my body could result is something called “the backslide”.  This seemed to me to violate number 4 in the conversion process, but I was a newbie after all.  My family did not drink (my parents did smoke however), I was too low in the high school pecking order to be invited to a dance, but the part about books was, I am not sorry to say, something that I chose to ignore completely.  My reading was at the time the only thing that was keeping me sane.  I think it took me all of 4 weeks to figure out that the Youth Group was filled with the same kinds of people who harassed me at school.  In fact, they were worse as they should have known better.

What finally cut it for me with this whole Fundamental Church thing were three separate incidents. 

I was still attending Young Life, and going to Whitworth College http://www.whitworth.edu/ on some weekends.  On one visit I noticed guys clustering around the TV set in the HUB (we did not have TV’s in the dorms at Whitworth).  When I wandered over to see what they were watching I heard something about Vietnam and advisors and a suggestion of war.  You can smell fear I think. 

At home the next week I was watching the news on TV about Vietnam.  The video showed a Buddhist Monk walk into a square in Saigon with a gas can.  He sat down in lotus, poured the liquid all over himself, calmly lit a match, and turned himself into a human pillar of flame.  The camera stayed on his body, which never struggled until he finally fell over.  This image is still burned into my brain. 

http://www.uwec.edu/academic/curric/greidebe/BMRB/culture/student.work/hicksr/

I thought that the pastor of my church or some of the kids in the Youth Group might be able to explain it or help me understand it.  But they just shrugged.  I got the distinct feeling that they thought that this gentle man was one of ‘the others’.  I guess that when you figure he was going to burn forever anyway, what would two minutes of earthly agony matter?

The straw that broke me of this insanity was when I told my one friend in the Youth Group that I was going to attend Whitworth.  She was appalled.  Did I not know that Whitworth was a liberal arts college?  She promptly gave me a pamphlet of approved bible colleges.  I had been studying college catalogs for months and reading all about good schools.  I had never heard of any of the schools in the pamphlet except the one that was near my second choice (Reed  http://web.reed.edu/ ) in Oregon.  The gall of people who cast aspersions on the very school that had trained the recruiter was enlightening. 

In retrospect I was wise to keep my mouth shut about my finding that He was already inside me when I did the inviting.  I think she would have run out of the room screaming.

Last update: 4/8/2003; 1:39:28 AM.