Please welcome my friend, and one of the fabulous leaders from my writing group, Beth Fowler! Her story fascinates me, and I know you will be blessed by reading it. She is writing in response to my question, "Who is Jesus to you?" as part of the Who is Jesus series.
***
Who
was Jesus to me? He was a storybook character like Santa Claus and Prince
Charming.
I
went to Sunday school and endured goofy flannel-board stories narrated
by ladies that seemed very old to me. At age 12, I quit going to Sunday
school and church. My parents didn’t question why. Faith was never discussed in
our house. You went to school on weekdays, the YMCA on Saturday and church on
Sunday. Now my Sundays were free!
Decades
passed. My life looked perfect. In reality, many mornings I woke up angry, but
didn’t know why. Time slogged by as I guzzled alcohol, studied
Buddhism, attended Avatar (not the movie, but a thought system), consumed
legal and illegal drugs, used sarcasm, babbled to a psychologist, left my
husband temporarily, babbled to another psychologist, yadda, yadda, yadda…I’ve
broken every one of the 10 commandments.
Once
in a while, I visited churches where phrases like “covered in the blood of the
lamb” and sad lyrics of hymns remained indecipherable to me. My super-religious
relatives (by marriage) refuse to visit us for Thanksgiving dinner if we serve
wine. If that’s Christianity, I didn’t want any.
Even
so, I knew there is a god and was so in awe of him or her or it that when
people asked, “What are you?” I squirmed. Atheist was too final. Agnostic
seemed dodgy. Buddhist didn’t fit either.
Meanwhile, a clot of grief throbbed near my heart, as though
someone I loved had died. I worried that my black thoughts were radiating
from me like poison. I was afraid my rotten inner world would give me cancer. Nothing
I’d tried changed me. By the time I reached middle age, I dreaded trudging through
the rest of my life if the future was going to be more of the same.
Then, six years
ago, a Christian friend told me about an Alpha class at her church.
You see, Nicky Gumbel was a barrister (Brit for
lawyer). One day Nicky’s buddy told him he'd accepted Jesus as his savior.
Appalled, Nicky studied the Bible and other sources to be able to prove his
friend wrong.
As you can guess, Nicky found evidence and
corroboration. He became a believer, an ordained priest and presenter in the
Alpha DVD series.
Nicky is the first person to explain Bible stuff in
a way that made sense to me. Plus, he cited other corroborative sources. (It
doesn't hurt that he's cute, funny, articulate and smart.)
After the first Alpha class, I wrote in my journal:
"I believe Jesus was more than a man. I accept He is the Son of God.
This acknowledgment has lifted my heavy, dark, judgmental cloud. The
weight that lifted was from my futile effort to ignore and disregard the two billion-plus
Christians living today and the 2000-plus years of Christian tradition."
My husband was blindsided when I crossed the line of
faith. He said, “I’m worried about the consequences.” He was afraid I would become like his
religious kin and start talking in an odd accent about Hittites and begin
laying down ultimatums.
“I will give you a
new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of
stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26 NIV) My new heart is
beating, and Holy Spirit rewired my mind.
Who is Jesus to me? He’s my life saver.
2 comments:
I think there are more people in the world desiring God than in churches. Leaving church at 12 was probably a necessary move.
Very nice Beth. Really well worded. Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks Abigail, for sharing a link to this on facebook.
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