I am nearly 37 years old, and I am a Christian.. I have been 36 for a many months, and I have been able to say, off and on, that I have been a Christian for about 10 years now.
I say off and on, because sometimes I don’t want to be thought of as a Christian. Sometimes because I don’t feel like I am a very good one, and sometimes because I don’t feel like others are doing a very good job at it either, and don’t want to be associated with them.
I am talking about so called Christians who get on TV and tell you that if you send them money, you’ll get rich. Or the ones who get on TV and tell you that God only wants the best for you, but then get thrown off of a plane because they expect someone else to clean up their tray table. Or people who say that we should just nuke Iraq and get rid of all the Muslims there, because they are just followers of Satan anyway. Those kind of people make me not want to be associated with the word Christian.
I grew up in the Catholic Church. If you had asked me growing up if I was a Christian, I would have told you no. That I was a Catholic. My mom forbid me from ever going to another churches youth group or on ski trips or even VBS because she was afraid that the Baptists were going to “save” me. Save me from what, I wasn’t sure. But whatever it was, she made it sound like something that I didn’t need to be saved from. As I have grown, my view of God has changed many times, which I am very thankful for. The bible says that God never changes. But if your idea of God, or your thoughts of who God has never changed, then you are walking around with the blinders firmly fastened to your head… seeing only what you have always seen.
Probably my first idea of God was very Santa Claus like. He was this big old guy with a white beard who sat around somewhere kind of watching us – he knew if we were sleeping or awake, if we were bad or good, etc… and he was keeping score. If we were better than we were bad, he liked us. If were badder than good, he didn’t.
I don’t really know where the line, was, but I was pretty sure my mom did, and she was kind of the referee in the game of me and God.
Before I go any further into my experience in the Catholic church, I should throw out a little disclaimer.. I am no expert in theology, Catholic, or otherwise, what I am going to tell you is how I understood what I was hearing from the church. It may not even be necessarily what they were exactly telling me, its just how my semi-conscious brain translated it to me.
So anyways, as I got older, God became kind of a formula for me. I was under the impression that to get to heaven, we had to make sure that we didn’t die with a “mortal” sin on our soul. It was ok to die with a “venial” one which wasn’t as bad… but to die with a “mortal” sin was a one way ticket to hell.
This is where things got a little fuzzy again. Sometimes the difference between a mortal and venial sin seemed to be a little shaky… For instance, stealing a little bit of money, like $1, or a pencil was venial, but taking something big, like $10 or a TV was mortal. Again, I didn’t really know exactly where the line was, but like most kids, wanted to know so that I could get as close to mortal as possible without going over.
Another part of the formula was Confession. We were expected, regularly to go to confession. It was kind of like bath day… once a month whether we needed it or not.
Confession was a really scary thing for me. It was one of the few times a month that I REALLY prayed. See, there was this booth. The booth had three doors. The priest was behind the door in the middle, and there was a door to either side of him. Our Sunday School (or CCD) class would all get in line and go in one at a time, alternating between the left and right doors. Here is where the prayer came in.
The right door was the one you wanted. There was a little kneeler in there with a window that was small and not really see through that you talked to the priest through. The most important feature of the little room being a WALL. The left room had no wall. You went in and there was a chair there that you sat in, and the priest pulled open and curtain. And it was just you and him sitting there face to face.
It was very scary and nerve wracking. I can tell you, without a doubt, that I never confessed any mortal sins from the left side of the booth.
After we had told the priest all of our sins, he gave us our penance. Penance was very systematic and I always wondered if the priest had a scorecard or something where he added up all of our mortal and venial sins, came up with a score and then
that is how he decided how many prayers we had to say. A typical penance for me was 10 Hail Marys and 10 Our Father’s.
I remember that we used to say our prayers as quickly as possible so that it looked like we didn’t have many to say. I would even start praying them before I even got to the pew and kneeled to be even quicker.
Looking back on it now, I realize that it was all very silly to view God as some sort of cosmic score keeper who wanted us to be good, but if we couldn’t, wanted us to say prayers to him as fast as we could to make it right.
Notice that there was really nothing about Jesus in any of this. The way I understood Jesus then was that, before He was born, people sinned and stuff, but they really didn’t have a way to get back to God, so when they died, they went to Hell. Even Abraham and Noah and all those guys. But when Jesus was born and then died on the cross for us, he established this system that allowed us to be forgiven for our sins and one day get to heaven. After going to Purgatory, or course, which I didn’t and still don’t understand, really.
The other thing about the church I grew up in is that is was completely boring. It was very much like the traditional service that we have here. I don’t mean to say our service is boring, but to a kid…. It really can be. Doing the same thing week after week after week. And we didn’t have the little coloring pages or whatever. My mom expected us to sit up straight, stand tall, kneel with our butts off the seats and participate in the service. That got old to me really fast. The older I got, the older it got.
About the time I got in high school, I discovered that what I really wanted in life was to become a rock star. There’s a Dire Straits song that came out about that time that summed up the reasons why I wanted to become a rock star. The chorus went “get your money for nothing… and your chicks for free.” That was about it for me. Money and chicks. I didn’t really see how God was going to help me with any of this.
I surrounded myself with people who wanted the same thing in life as I did, and when I graduated high school, snuck off to New Orleans with no money and no job to pursue life as a rock star. It went pretty well for a while too, until I began to notice the seedy lifestyle that goes along with what we were doing. Drugs, alcohol, and girls were all around us, and while I had thought growing up that is what I had wanted, I realized that it wasn’t.
So, I quit.
Moved back home, and went to college and started a so-called “normal” life.
I married my high school sweetheart, we had a son, and three years later were divorced. You can read all about that in the chapter “Why I Believe… Forgiveness”. The bottom line here was that I had reached rock bottom in my life. My wife had left, taken my son, I had no job, no car and nowhere to live, so at 24 years old, moved back in with my mom and went back to college.
Then a few really cool things happened. First, I met Robyn, who is now my wife of almost 10 years. Then I took a class called Comparative Religion. I took the class, not really because I was terribly interested in religion, but because the teacher was my favorite and I had already taken all of his Literature courses.
The class started me on a path that changed my life radically. Remember, I didn't believe in God at that point of my life. As I said, I wanted to be a rock star growing up and I didn't really see how God was going to help me in that. So, it was just easier for me to not believe in Him.
I started to examine that, and I realized that that was a pretty stupid reason to not believe in God. So, I went back to church. Robyn and I found ourselves at a place called Christ Episcopal Church in Plano. We immediately liked it. Fr. Clay Lein was preaching that day, and he was talking about the movie Independence Day, which was amazing... I had never heard a priest talk about anything that I could relate to before. Then they started talking about this class they were starting up called Alpha. Fr. Clay said that if you had questions about Christianity, then this was the class for you. Boy, did I have questions.
How do you know Christ rose from the dead?
How do you know He was who He said He was?
How do you know the Bible is true?
I had these questions and much, much more. And they were almost all answered during the course. The ones that I couldn't get answered in the course I found the answers to in a book called "More Evidence That Demands A Verdict".
The claims of Christianity became so clear to me that I felt really dumb for wasting so much of my life not believing.
Thanks to a man named Bob, I eventually found myself volunteering in the Youth Ministry at Christ Church. My life has never been the same. A couple of years later I was on staff at Christ Church and a few years after that, found myself in charge of building a new youth ministry at a small church in Corpus Christi. I now serve as the Director of Youth Ministries at Holy Spirit Episcopal Church in Houston, TX.
Miles and miles away, physically, spiritually, and mentally, from where I ever thought I’d be.
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