Writing My Story With God

Note: I know I’ve shared my testimony in some capacity here on the blog before, but I had to re-write it as part of a recent story assignment. No matter what has happened to me before or what will happen in the future, this remains the most important part of my story. And your story written with God is the most important part of yours. It will have different details than mine, but I believe you have one written on your soul nonetheless.

Somewhere between Knoxville and Gatlinburg, I stare up at the star-studded sky out the back window of our van. My siblings have fallen asleep, and my parents quietly converse up front. My mind returns to the expansive tabernacle with a white-painted altar and pulpit. My daddy is a pastor, and we always go to church, even on vacation.  We are driving the hour or so return trip from the camp meeting this Wednesday night, back to our hotel.

The stories the evangelist had recounted trip over each other in my mind. About decent, church-going people who get angry enough at home to kick the cat. About the saintly-singing woman who expressed her displeasure with her husband by taking a frying pan to his head. For some reason, this stirs questions in my heart. For nine years, I’ve gone to church every Wednesday and twice on Sunday not counting revivals and church camps. I’ve always followed the rules, mostly. Is slapping my brother the same as kicking the cat? My heart thuds. Maybe it’s worse.

The preacher with dark hair and crinkles around his eyes had told us these people were saved, but they were still carnal. I know a little bit about carnality being a preacher’s kid where theology is served up with the mashed potatoes at dinner. I know about being saved, about Jesus dying on the cross, about the Romans Road. Then I see the red-faced man in the preacher’s story, and my heart thuds again.

What if following the rules, knowing the stories and earning smiles for my sweetness from the church members isn’t enough? Am I carnal? Deep down, I’m sure of it. But a more horrifying thought grips me as I bury my head in my arms and whisper it to Jesus: “Am I even saved?” My spiritual journey doesn’t begin here, and it stretches for miles ahead of me. But I pray myself to sleep, until Mom gently shakes me and helps me into our hotel.

Three Years Later

I can still smell the musty smell of the brown paper-covered book. I had foraged my dad’s library again, in my desperate hunger for new reading material. The books that line a pastor’s study may have stories, but they are often tales of another time and place. I remember nothing of the plot of that book or why it haunted me late that night.

I lay in bed, eyes zipped closed as if forcefully shutting off sight would also shut down the guilt pressing me further into the mattress. I knew, in an abstract sort of way, that theologians would call my feeling conviction. But I hadn’t known it would feel like I’d always imagined the clutches of death would feel before snatching my last breath.

I opened my eyes into slits and saw the soft light emanating from my parents’ room across the hall. My brain and heart knew my daddy would always be there to talk to me. We’d had many discussions about the Bible, theology, probably even about the intense “conviction” which now gripped me. But my feet wouldn’t budge from the bed, and I lay there in misery of soul until my alarm jangled and woke me to another day of school.

We were also in revival that week. A stately, white-haired gentleman who didn’t give near enough illustrations, in my jaded preacher’s kid opinion, was the evangelist. The musicians were a smiling couple with a toddler and baby, named uncommon names before it was common to do so. The revival routine was the same each night: come home from school, help Mom get dinner of the proportions of a Sunday feast on the table, then get dressed in a flurry with one bathroom and a host of people and head to our little brick church with twelvish long steps leading up to the front.

It’s cliché to say I don’t remember a thing the preacher said, but 28 years later, I still don’t remember anything he said the entire week. To be fair to preachers, I don’t remember what the singers sang either. Whatever they did, he looked very stern as he did it, and they looked very jovial.

I was anything but jovial as the evangelist invited people to the altar to pray after his sermon. The crushing feeling of the night before weighed on me again. People were quietly walking up the aisles and kneeling at the altar stretched across the front of our blue-carpeted church. Even as a twelve-year-old, I had prided myself on Bible knowledge, obscure trivia about who married which prophet and who killed whom with a tent peg. I could define terms like justification and I knew the difference between Calvinism and Wesleyan Arminianism. But no logical thoughts were marching through my mind like soldiers that evening. Only a horde of renegade emotions, stifling knowledge with the raw horror that I was on my way to Hell. The horde didn’t as much identify individual sins I’d committed as they pointed out I had never known personally that Jesus saved me.

I poured out my heart and my tears at the altar, though I cannot tell you what I said. I only remember looking down the altar rail at what seemed to be dozens of people praying beside me from my daddy’s church. Then, I looked up and saw Daddy in front of me with Mom beside him. His lips were trembling and tears stood in his eyes as words failed me. Suddenly, I knew. I just knew that I was saved — personally, individually, undeniably. Sobs wracked my body as I realized whatever had been clutching at me had vanished.

If pressed, I can give you a textbook definition of my beliefs about soteriology. I can somewhat explain the theological underpinnings of what happened to me that evening at an altar. But, if you ask me about my salvation experience, I will trade the term conviction for a musty brown book and a clutching, desperate fear. I will trade justification for the complete absence of that fear as I rose from the altar, legs tingling as circulation returned. And I will trade adoption for the shimmering tears in my daddy’s eyes mirroring those of our Heavenly Father, looking on while angels sang.