Kicking and screaming all the way to saying yes

God let me ask the difficult questions as long as I wanted to, and then asked me, "are you ready now?"

My commitment to a serious Christian faith walk is quite unlike that of most Christians I know or meet. I don’t know how representative they are of how Christians come to their devotion (or how representative I am, for that matter), but they fall into two categories: those who are basically lifelong believers, having taken to heart their instruction as children and usually consistently stayed with it, and those who came to it via some sort of personal crisis, usually an addiction that caused them to hit bottom.

I’ve kind of envied both kinds, as they seem so unshakable in their faith, where as I’m constantly asking myself if my moments of doubt aren’t really an indication that I’m a phony who’s kidding himself.

I was raised in a Presbyterian (PCUSA) congregation, but my instruction didn’t take worth a darn. I was the quintessential middle-class kid of the late 1960s, caught up in the pop-culture flourishing of the day. I wasn’t the most absorbent student in public school, either, but I sure didn’t retain any of the Sunday school lessons about Paul’s travels setting up churches around the Mediterranean, or the Protestant Reformation or John Knox.

It didn’t help that the PCUSA’s drift away from sound theology, and preoccupation with contemporary “social justice” concerns, was evident in my local congregation. The first time I ever heard of Saul Alinsky was when I was about 13 or 14. A high school girl had gone to one of his workshops in Chicago and was given time during the next Sunday service to get behind the pulpit and give a report on her experience. My parents quit going around that time, and my dad had been an elder and a deacon. He took the minister out to lunch and explained that the final straw was the PCUSA’s contribution to Angela Davis’s defense fund.

I won’t get in the weeds regarding the next few phases of my “spiritual search,” except to say that it was pretty typical for a snot-nosed product of my time and milieu: flirtations with the Baha’i faith, Hinduism and Buddhism, psychedelic drugs, and pop-psychology fads of the day, such as Transactional Analysis.

By the time I was well into adulthood, if I’m honest with myself, I was a secular agnostic. My position was something like “I guess there’s an overarching creative force in this universe, but it’s not a very high priority on my list of things to think about.”

Still, I found myself observing that the most grown-up, caring and content people I knew were serious Christians, so I looked into it. I attended Catholic mass for about a year to see if that was for me, and then some community churches (which didn’t appeal much to me due to the contemporary-praise-band music, which struck me as pretty vapid).

I found the little Methodist church I still attend through a friend, and one day I realized I was on the road to a serious relationship with God.

I was still kicking and screaming all the way to the point when I said yes, though.

I had several final sticking points. One was the role of women. I finally made my peace with that one on two bases. One, I decided that, for all the passages that require years of study and still invite various interpretations, it was necessary to acknowledge Scripture’s unshakable authority. Everything falls apart without it. I thought about how thrilled people in oppressive societies are to receive shipments of Bibles, how it meant everything to them to be able to immerse themselves in the Word. Two, I considered the overall sweep of human history, and how it reveals an undeniable pattern of societies being organized patriarchally. Even lower species are organized thusly. Another sticking point was the invisibility of God. Yes, there was the historical fact of the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that was one 33-year sliver of the overall history of humankind, and something in me still insisted on something tangible. Again, deferring to Scripture - in this case, particularly, what Jesus has to say about how a Holy Spirit, an advocate, is with us always, as well as Psalm 139, written centuries before the earthly life of Christ - opened the door for me.

Then there was the one that I still occasionally wrestle with: how Christians should engage a world that pretty much instantly turns away from anything remotely resembling Judeo-Christian teaching and instead relies on human faculties alone to sort out everyone’s notion of how to achieve a livable world.

In a word, the constant turning back to the simple message that God is praiseworthy and that He loves us struck me as escapist. As I said earlier, I am an academically trained historian as well as a voracious observer of current events. The pressing developments of this world - economic twist and turns, the rise and fall of nation-states and empires, the role of culture in defining a society - seemed inadequately addressed by study of the Bible and simple worship. My position amounted to, “What has declaring that God is awesome to do with the matters that comprise the front page of today’s newspaper?”

Ironically, my immersion in the issues of the day, as well as my observation of what the countercultural revolution had done to our society over the course of my lifetime, have proven to be the very platform from which I’ve been surmounting this sticking point. Our society is now so brittle, so polarized, and has so thoroughly obliterated basic assumptions about human sexuality, individual sovereignty and the very existence of a transcendent realm that I can now see that if the Gospel is not the absolute truth, none of this means anything.

If truth is not relative, and if there is a kind of real love between humans that isn’t contingent on anyone’s being a certain way (if there is, to paraphrase Robert Frost, a home where they have to take you in), if there’s an unfailing justice inherent in the way the cosmos is constructed, it has to hinge on the grace shown to us on that grisly afternoon at Calvary.

There’s something at the core of our beings that knows no satisfaction other than God’s joy at our saying yes.

In fact, it’s our only safety. No mortal, fallible human being is going to give you the absolute truth, or truly unconditional love. There is nothing in this realm that is truly sacred.

Quite simply, I became a Christian because everything else came up short in being able to quench my thirst.