I dithered around the subject of whether to be a Christian for years, and the evidence that Christianity is true kept piling up. Finally in response to a strange experience (which I’ve described on CAF), I went for a walk with a Baptist, a family member, whom I knew to have suffered for his faith from our own family, which encouraged my belief that he had reasons for that faith. He said many things, including, “When you die, that day will be just as real as this day,” and, “You can’t control the supernatural things, because they’re more powerful than you are, and the evil ones can hurt you, but calling on God, you can have His protection (and) love; God
is love, and you need to know God; He’s the only One who can reconcile the different parts of you,” and, “When you die, you’re committed. You might as well commit while you have a chance to think about it.” Out of all these, and more, statements that went right to the heart of what I’d been thinking and hadn’t said, he said, “God gave me my (impaired faculty of) memory back.” I liked the matter-of-fact way he said it. He wasn’t the kind of person to say things he wasn’t factually sure of in such a tone. If he said a thing that simply and plainly it meant he had strong, reasoned, empirical, good reason to think of it as the truth. Maybe it was.
Still, I put off really deciding, for a few days while I tried to find some way to be both a Christian and something else. But after more discussion and prayer with that man I decided that my years of experiment, reading, reasoning out what I knew to be true, looking for a way out of it… all led to one conclusion: The Christian Bible is the truth, and there is one God, whose only Son, also God, is Jesus of Nazareth, circa 10’s BC-30’s AD give-or-take, the crucified Messiah predicted in the Old Testament, whose followers preached throughout the Roman Empire in the First Century, and they preached accurately and honestly.
It took about two years to decide I needed a church. i got into Evangelical Friends after trying a few, because they seemed to know what they weret alking about and were politically acceptable to my old friends compared totthe other churches I has looked into, but I soon found that the reason they were politically acceptable was that my friends didn’t knwo what Evangelical Friends are. They had them mixed up with Unprogrammed Friends, though it’s Evangelicals who inherited the church system and terminology and doctrines of George Fox, or most of them. Also a majority of Friends according to the latest information I could find were Evangelical. I set out expalining the difference and discovered that my old friends were not likely to accept my actually being a Christian. They shouted and hissed and stormed around. My boyfriend patted me on the hand and smirked at me. An old, old friend said, “How can you?” A line was drawn, but not by myself.
All this while scary, intense things were going on in my surroundings for a few years. I needed my old friends, family and neighbors to survive the times, probably literally. Community was survival, and everyone knew it. But to most of them, my existence among them was OK and I was trustworthy to pretty much the extent that I was “just doing this Christian thing to irritate my boyfriend” and would soon outgrow it. Not me.
So the line widened to a ditch, a gorge, a sea. Much later one approached me on the street with big eyes and someone there for backup (I guess), hands folded on abdomen, and asked whether I were “just looking for community and acceptance”. I had walked, at a difficult time, away from intense community and long-time acceptance in my home town, to embrace the truth. I was a little bit sarcastic to her, I have to say.
Y2K, environmental fears, 9-11, and a lot of frightening things in my personal life, as well as the lack of information on spiritual matters in my church, led me to read a lot of Christian books with no concept of the number of different worldviews they represented or the starting point to find out how credible the authors were. Unemployment led me to take work and other situations with people who had a lot of confusing answers. A friend asked me, begged, eventually, for the reason I had such peace. I was scared to say, “Jesus died for me,” because I was tired and intimidated by the anti-Christianity I live in the middle of. Rather than say it anyway and deal with the consequences, I brushed him off. I saw him later and dodged him, figuring I would find out what to say and rehearse adn tell him next time. He was dead by the time I heard about him again.
I decided my fearfulness and cowardice had to go.
I finally got baptized. Suddenly I was bolder and more confident in my faith. The fact that my church didn’t see a need for water baptism started bothering me. I became one of the stream of congregants leaving that church. I was on the street awhile, where I learned to go ahead and say what I thought and take the lumps.
Some Pentecostals picked me up and helped me get on my feet, and soon I was in their church. I did public outreach. It was nerve-wracking, and later I realized it was done a little dishonestly the way we went about it, but it washed off some more of my shyness, leaving me free to develop a more devout life with no worry about looking different or seeming strange.
