I’ve always been a church person. As the story goes, I literally came home from the hospital as a newborn to my home at the married student trailer park of a Bible college. And I never strayed much farther away from the church than that starting point. My dad pastored three churches through my childhood; my house shared a driveway with one of those churches for almost a decade; I attended a Christian college; my wife and I got involved in a church immediately after getting married and starting our adult lives together.
Despite that lifetime of proximity, something was always missing.
For a while, I thought maybe it was a lack of specific purpose - what exactly did God want me to do with my life. I met with one pastor around my 30th birthday to express this concern and he started me down a path of mentorship with someone who had been a successful businessman and had used his Christian faith as a guide and example throughout his career. That was fine, but it wasn’t what was missing. In fact, during a period in my life where I was entirely too impressed with my own career prospects, it was a moderately treacherous path.
For a while, I thought maybe I didn’t really believe. I tried to question the facts, tried to examine the historicity of Jesus and the validity of the canon as an academic would. I find those to be fascinating topics. I’m not sure whether I was relieved or disappointed to find that I didn’t doubt any of the key facts. I’m happy to have some more refined apologetic knowledge, but I didn’t need it to convince myself. The Christian story makes sense to me on an innate level. I don’t need to convince myself that Jesus is the Son of God and that the claims made in the Scripture are true. I know that the evidence for these claims is strong, but I don’t need that evidence to support my own beliefs in my internal dialogue.
This feeling that something was missing didn’t preclude growth and learning important lessons along the way. I was led to make a seismic shift in my priorities in 2010, escaping the corporate culture that was infecting me with pride and selfish ambition. I continued to study and learn. I served and took major steps of faith that have yielded tremendous rewards of friendship and community. But I still knew that something was missing; I was just running out of candidates for that missing element.
From 2012 through 2014, I spent three intense years of involvement in a new church plant. That time was incredibly challenging on very many levels. It was emotionally and physically draining, it was stressful, but it was also a catalyst to forging bonds of friendship, to seeing my kids develop their own servant gifts, and to witnessing lives changed in the process. It was a unique time for everyone involved and as time marches on, a time that I will treasure deeply.
When that ended and I went back to an established church, a funny thing happened. The only word I can use to describe how I perceived it is “fake”. Now, to be perfectly clear, nothing I was seeing was fake. But after three years in a more raw environment, the more refined stage of an established evangelical church felt so comfortable and familiar that it exposed a fear. That fear was that I was only a cultural Christian. You see, I like church. I like church people, church dinners, and church services. It’s where I’ve been my whole life. It’s my culture. When I observed the established church world spinning around just as it had when I had departed it three years prior, I feared that it would be all too easy to slip into complacency and allow myself to just become a part of southern evangelical culture. The temptation to “fake it ‘til you make it” was very real.
Ultimately, I met with the pastor of our church and expressed the same concern that I’d expressed at points in the past - something was missing in my life and I could not put my finger on it. Since I’d had this conversation with different people over the years, I was not really expecting him to suggest something that I’d never considered. But my world froze when he simply asked, “Have you repented?”
This question set me off on a soul-searching journey to understand what is meant by repentance, and to examine my own life as a sinner. I’ve always understood the doctrine of sin, that we are all sinners, that it’s impossible to meet God’s perfect standard on our own. I knew I was a sinner, but I didn’t really think much of it. I had delivered myself into the age-old trap of believing that my sin wasn’t ‘bad enough’ to be holding me back from relationship with God.
I studied the book of Job and saw a picture of myself. Job was a good man, who ‘feared God and stayed away from evil’. When his world came violently crashing down around him, Job fiercely resisted reconciling with God. At the climactic moment of his story, Job - the man who was earlier described as a blameless man of complete integrity - says ‘I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes. I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.’ This man who was righteous in the world’s eyes had to be stripped to his very core to understand how to make himself right with the Lord. I saw myself in Job before the disasters struck and was grateful that I could learn this lesson without losing everything I hold dear.
One evening in late May of 2016, I literally got on my knees and cried out to God in repentance, for the first time in my life. Repentance is not a one-time decision - it’s lens through which to view our lives. On that night, I began to live my life repentantly. I have made a habit of asking God to show me ways that I am rebelling against Him, a request that He honors time and time again. By asking for acute awareness of my separation from God, it is impossible to not be constantly grateful for the freedom He has offered me from that sin. Choosing to live a repentant life has put my entire life into the shadow of the cross. After a lifetime of living as a Christian, that night I feel that I truly began in earnest.
That was over a year ago. I have not made any dramatic outward changes in my life. The dramatic changes have been in my peace of spirit. After years of wrestling with ‘what was missing’, the hole has been filled. I have had not one doubting thought since May of 2016 and that freedom has brought me to my current place, where I am ready to be more public in my declarations.
As I have been approaching my fortieth birthday (which, surely, must be a clerical error?), I have been strongly led to share this story with those around me and to publicly commit the remainder of my life to pursuing Jesus Christ. After 40 years of hearing the truth, like Job, I have now seen the truth.
