My Story (CH1PT2)

I was born into a secular home. I was raised by my mom. Her mom and step-dad helped raise me, but I called them grandma and grandpa. I noted that my grandpa was my mom's step dad, because already before my first memory divorce was embedded in my family. So was alcoholism. My grandma was drunk during most of my childhood. She raised me while my mom went to school and became a nurse.

I was sent to a Christian school, but my exposure to Christianity as a child came more from my neighbor who took me to Catholic church on Sundays then anything else. As a child, I never thought about my need for God, or even salvation. I never thought about sin, hell, or God's punishments. The only thing I really wanted was to know my Dad. I didn't know him at all. He left me and found a new family. He lived only about an hour away from me, but it was more like a galaxy. I only saw him a handful of times in my whole life, and most of those were before the age of 5. Most of my childhood was spent looking out the window waiting for him to pick me up. He made plenty of promises, but few follow throughs.

I was thirteen when I gave my life to the Lord, for the first time. I was a pretty radical Christian from the start. I would walk to local hangouts and try to tell complete strangers about the Lord. At the beach, the grocery store, or just along the street. I would also organize prayer meetings with other believers my age for the salvation of unbelievers. I read my Bible constantly, and learned much about Christianity on my own. I spiritually grew up in a fundamentalist charismatic setting.

In reflection, many of my early religious experiences were motivated by emotional distress then anything

else. When I became a teenager relationship with my mom began to spiral out of control. She had built her life around the idea of being a good mom, and when I began to push away from her, because of a need to form my own identity, she panicked and began to unwind. Her life before becoming a parent was marked by instability, insanity, suicide attempts, and alcoholism. She reformed, got a degree, and became a nurse. She truly was a wonderful mom, but she could not handle the pressure of loosing my love and affection. And I wanted more.

When I was sixteen my mom attempted suicide. I had no knowledge of her past life. From that moment on, I spent as little time as possible at home. Church was my sanctuary. And I have no hesitation in saying that during these years my relationship with God was mostly dictated out of necessity rather then volition. Because of this, I was more willing to embrace ideas and beliefs that simply made no sense, or were contrary to other beliefs. My desire for emotional well-being was more important, and it was natural for me to sacrifice good conscience in order to protect something I felt was threatened. I began to speak in tongues and show manifestations of what other believers called "signs" of the Holy Spirit.

I got married at eighteen. I believed God had a plan for my life. A literal plan that could exist in a book, or something. God had mapped out my life, and it was my duty to spiritually discern this secret plan and live according to it. This is a common charismatic belief, and it gave me comfort, for a time. It helped me disassociate the horrible things happening in my life. My mom became a gambling addict and alcoholic. She gambled away her house, her car, and her marriage. She lost her job, because she showed up drunk to work. She went from making over twenty dollars an hour to minimum wage at a gas station (This was in the 90's when such wages were really high). She got a boyfriend who beat her up constantly, and showed up to family events drunk, angry, and violent.

I believed God had a great plan for my life, and that he would use me in a special way. I believed God would provide a path for me to enter ministry and I would be a great light for Him, for others to follow. This belief preserved me from falling into the despair of what was happening all around me. The problem was that God's plan never happened. I was sure God would open a way, and I believed I had heard these special instructions in my heart. I was wrong, and I had to face a very real problem. Either I had done something to hinder God's plan for me, or there never was a plan.

I remember clearly this being one of the first great conflicts I encountered with my faith. I buried the conflict. I persisted in my faith and fought to believe that God still had a plan for me. My mom had ended her life when I was twenty. For about five years I watched her fall apart and destroy her life slowly. By the end, she came to believe she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her plan was to let the cancer kill her and during this time she would work hard to earn some money to pass unto me in her death. This would be her final act of love for me. It would be her redemption, in her mind.

By the time she found out that she did not have cervical cancer, she had let the infection eat away her ovaries, and she had to have a hysterectomy. She got into deeper debt with medical bills, and she was given what she feared most. A new lease on life. The discovery that she would live was a death sentence to my mom. She killed herself that year.

I didn't blame God for her death. How could I? But her death was a real physical manifestation of what conflicting beliefs could cause. I could not deny that. And that reality began to eat away at me. Through the constant failure of my own machinations I began to slowly become ineffectual in my own faith. Until one day I simply gave up.

I was about 25 when I fully realized that my faith was dead. I had been married for seven years and I had a child. My wife was still a believer, and I was very committed to my marriage. I still am. I began to read philosophy. Ayn Rand and Objectivism came to influence me greatly. Atheism opened up a whole new world for me. Reason simplified life. It gave me clarity. I found that I didn't need to rely on some secret plan that was impossible for me to ever figure out. I could simply do what I wanted to do, and as long as I was rational, I needed no further justification.

Naturally, I became angry toward Christianity. I began to see how much I was manipulated and how much silliness existed in the Church. This caused tension between me and my wife. She was a faithful believer, and my attitude was putting her in a position of either showing me love and acceptance or defending her faith. For a few years, I studied philosophy and debated on internet forums. I became quite proficient and confident in my ability to make rational judgments. More confident then I ever was in spiritually discerning what God was doing in my life.

But there was not one thing I could allow myself to do, and that was to tear down my wife's faith. Don't misunderstand this point. During this time, I definitely wanted my wife to be as I was. But I wanted her to see how ridiculous Christianity was, and not feel betrayed by it, like I had. I didn't want her to become an atheist in anger, but to become one in freedom. I knew that a decision had to be made. And I decided that the only way to bridge the gap would be to open myself up for criticism. I proposed that we have a meeting with a pastor and he could explain to me the merits of Christianity or explain the errors of my understanding. I thought the plan was a good one. In this process I could speak my mind and show how the arguments in support of Christianity are flawed.

These meetings were not very fruitful. I am pretty sure I showed how futile the pastors arguments were, but in order to take this plan seriously I had to genuinely invest myself in the criticism offered by the church. I did not take this decision lightly, and I did begin to see flaws in the atheist system on its own merits. I began to see how dogmatic many atheists were, and this made me question my own position. I began to see many of the evidentiary claims for the existence of God and the counter-claims made by atheists as never ending. It's not that the atheists were proved wrong. I just saw how the theists were never proved wrong either. I agreed in many ways that the case against Christianity was a good one, but in the end I still saw that there was more to everything then just the things we see. I still had to admit to myself that the universe could not explain itself. In the absence of a verifiable option, I turned to a practical one.

I didn't have all the answers when I decided to become a Christian. All I had was the knowledge that I needed to recognize something bigger then myself existed. This made me a believer, even to a nominal degree. It made me open to the suggestion that the resurrection of Jesus was powerful for the early believers. Because of this, I came to believe in the new life that Christianity was founded on, and this gave rise to a risen Lord. I didn't have any evidentiary basis to claim that God created the universe, or that Jesus walked out of an empty tomb, but I had a belief in something eternal and a hope for a new life.

When I first decided to reenter my Christian faith I had huge concerns. My first was how to cogently identify myself as a Christian without falling into the same trap I had fallen into before. If Christianity necessarily meant cognitive dissonance then I could not be a Christian. I committed myself to that one caveat, but if I could have my own caveats then could I truly be a Christian. I was very concerned and confused and I felt I had no method of finding out how to find my spiritual identity. My single determination was to avoid cognitive dissonance.

The rest of what follows in this book will represent my journey from this point forward. I began this journey with the sole determination to be able to express my faith in such a manner that would not lead me to the same place I was before. In my search to find my own Christian identity, I felt I had to begin from scratch. I looked into the historical, philosophical, and theological roots of Christianity with a clean slate, and I didn't want to take anything for granted this time. I knew that I would need to know the reasons of why I was going to believe in what I believed in, and I always assumed that my search would lead to the form of religion I was surrounded by, which was Evangelical Fundamentalism, but that did not turn out to be the case. As I began to research the Bible, Christology, Theology, and faith I began to see a much wider and approachable Christianity not represented by many churches.