In the fall of sixth grade I found myself at the community theater, performing in Pippin’ and sharing a dressing room with the teen and twentysomething guys. My favorite dude was a pot-smoking 19-year-old who described himself as a “born again Christian.” I asked how he could do the one and call himself the other, and he said marijuana was just something he enjoyed. That didn’t strike me as a very satisfying answer, but, nonetheless, I thought he was pretty cool, and his open expression of faith intrigued me.
Prior to meeting him, I had only heard the phrase born again as a slur to criticize people who had gone off the religious deep end. But having just dipped my toe into the shallow end of religious experience by praying the Sinner’s Prayer at church camp, I was beginning to discover more and more evangelical types whom I really liked. I soon came to call my camp prayer the moment I, too, had been born again. Probably it wasn’t.
That I assumed God was to be found most fully in the face of Christ and not Buddha or Mohammed or the moss on a rock could be argued, I know, to be simply because, being born into a culturally Christian pocket of the U.S., I began my spiritual search with the religious assumptions handed down to me by my parents. But is that not where everyone begins?
So it was, for me, that church led to church camp and, by the archery field, a group devotional as poignant as it was simple: man separated from God by sin, Jesus bridging the gap. I had always known God existed, and that He was good and all-powerful. Now, a deeper understanding of God’s love proven at the cross seemed to demand a response. One night that week, after lights out, the counselor stepped in to the 11-and-12-year-old boys’ room and invited us to pray. There, on the top part of the middle bunk along the north wall of Cabin 3, closing my eyes to the royal blue curtains framing the moonlit window, I earnestly told God I was sorry for any sins I had committed so far, asked Him to forgive them, and promised to start acting like a real Christian.
It was an important development in my spiritual plot. But, less like the Spirit to spirit encounter of regeneration, it was more like a pledge of the will to start being good. And good I was determined to become. I decided to stop the swearing habit I had intentionally begun at age nine, when I told my aunt I did a “damn good job” mowing the lawn, when I programmed the school’s Commodore 64 to run every bad word I knew, or when I referred to a randy churchman as “that bastard.” BC (Before Camp) I had decided to take advantage of the premium cable recently come to Hometown and watch as many R-rated movies as possible. Now I knew God disapproved.
Upon return from camp, I memorialized my reform by fashioning a five-foot high construction paper cross on the inside of my bedroom door, printing on it the words to one of our bonfire songs—“Jesus’ love is a bubblin’ over, Jesus’ love bubbles in my soul” . . . ending it with the early Christian saying, “Come, Lord Jesus!” I also began proudly wearing a small pendant with the inscription I am a Lutheran.
But my tweenish zeal brought with it struggle as well as celebration. The counselor had said God wanted us to listen to Christian rock. I wondered how he knew that, since the bible, completed 1900 years before Amy Grant ever picked up a guitar, made no mention of God’s musical preference for Stryper over Van Halen. But I began to think I should take down my poster of David Lee Roth, stop reading Mötley Crüe’s liner notes, and replace Madonna’s Like a Virgin with praise tapes about her namesake’s Son.
Also, for the first time since second grade, I began to doubt my calling as a performer. I wondered if it was right for a Christian to play non-Christian characters, and I envisioned being sued by a film studio for refusing to do so. I asked Dad if they could do that. “Why,” he answered with a question, “would you refuse to play any character, you little weirdo?” Actually, I made the final phrase up. But that must have been what he was thinking, I imagine now, 27 years later and not much younger than Dad was then.
Maybe for a moment he suspected what Mom would know a few years thence, that this new kick was beginning to mess with my career goals. I began to think God wanted me to become a minister, though I still hoped to become a movie star. In a moment of reflection during art class, I developed a syllogism to justify my likely disobedience to the call: it would be more spiritual to be an actor who wished he were a pastor than to be a pastor who regretted not becoming an actor. In the meantime, I was well on my way to becoming a Junior Pharisee, until my sixth grade Sunday School teacher introduced a very unkosher idea—John 3:16.
God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. “This,” he said, “was the gospel in a nutshell.” The point was inadvertently driven home by my unchurched social studies teacher, who taught us ancient world cultures, like Sumer and Greece, and all major religions. When she got to Rome and Christianity, she wrote on the board that the basis of this religion was John 3:16.
The radical verse set my imagination racing. It wasn’t Almighty indifference that lumped everyone into heaven or excellent behavior that qualified some. Rather, it was a universal invitation of grace, accepted through faith: salvation had been accomplished by Christ on the cross and was received by all who would trust in His sacrifice instead of their own. That year I exchanged a couple letters with my best friend from camp. He wrote about the last night, when we all put our mattresses on the floor to be closer together, and how surprised he was to see me cry. I wrote back with a multiple-choice quiz on religious topics. Subjects included What is Fornication? and Who Is My Neighbor? But the key question elucidated my newfound discovery:
What must we do to go to heaven?
A.) Follow the 10 Commandments
B.) Obey the Golden Rule, or
C.) Believe in Jesus
[Answer: C]
The notion of salvation through faith was a relief, but only briefly. For in the wake of this liberating realization, a new and troubling thought occurred through sixth grade and into seventh: if salvation hinged on belief, then it was more important than ever to know you believed. But how could you know for sure?
Nearly everyone I knew claimed to believe in Jesus. But, although I had always called myself a Christian, something happened on that archery field or in that bunk that made me not want to take my faith for granted. I assumed the good folks at church had all made similar commitments, even though few of them talked about stuff like that. Maybe, being of WASPy descent, they were not given to wearing religion on their sleeves, as a half-Swede cousin would later accuse me of doing. Perhaps the stoic but reverent profession of creeds and membership vows were the high church version of an altar call. But whatever the important visible steps of baptism, communion, and confirmation meant, and however sincerely they were carried out, no act could guarantee salvation if true conversion was granted by grace and activated through faith, an invisible and very personal matter, if not a private one.
I wanted to rest in the finished work of the cross but felt compelled to lean on my own act of “deciding for Christ.” The result was a compromised confession amounting to something like a syncretistic blend of old-time religion and neo-paganism: I had summoned up the good sense to choose Christ, and He, in response, had granted me a second chance at proving myself worthy. And although that supposed moment of getting saved brought with it little existential reality, I would just have to content myself with an imperfect degree of assurance. Hopefully, come the resurrection of souls, my hybrid sort-of belief would be enough to escape damnation’s flames.
Puberty helped bring my quest to a crisis. It had been coming for a couple years—sore armpits from sprouting hair, a vocal range that dropped from first tenor to second bass. But, by Easter of seventh grade, such characteristics played second fiddle to the real concertmaster: s-e-x. Or, because I wasn’t actually having sex, perhaps I should just call it lust. The gross sin of my thoughts alone obliterated any hope of getting or staying saved through good deeds. And, though I was trying to believe I was headed for heaven simply because “Jesus paid it all,” I also knew it was dissonant for a child of God to think like a demon in hell. The Word may be silent or debatable about a good many things, but, regarding the mental indulgence of fantasizing over anyone who isn’t your spouse, the Sermon on the Mount is clear: Jesus calls it adultery.
There was some comfort in learning from peers and mentors that my experience was 0% abnormal; in comparison with the mass of humanity, or at least teenage boys, I was not a freak. The hormones pulsing through me were the natural course of biology. But as good a thing a body is, I knew I was more than physical. I was also a spirit whom God had spoken to through nature and reason and the Spirit of Jesus Christ, Who had been pleading with me since childhood and, particularly since camp, to yield my whole self to Him. But the reality of my enormous desires and anger and God-knows-what other sins seemed to make the possibility of holiness impossible.
So, I was a sinner, longing for the certainty of forgiveness and the power to do what Jesus would do. In my search for such, I was reading the second-hand hippie bible Grandma had picked up for me at one of her household sales. At camp, during private devotional time, I had started “In the beginning” with Genesis and later got part way through Exodus, which, like the children of Israel wandering through the desert, I found a little dry. I tried to skip to the end, but Revelation frightened me more than Vincent Price’s monologue on my Thriller record. So I stayed away from the apocalyptic genres and most of the Hebrew testament to focus on the gospels and epistles.
What I first noticed, in the second half of that green bible with the modern paraphrase, were conditional promises—Be very good and God will bless you. And then, conversely, there were warning passages I hoped would scare the hell out of me. But seeing the Word simply as law, using it to appeal to pride—You’re a good Christian, so act like it—or fear—Flee immorality so terrible things don’t happen to you—didn’t empower change. In fact, it just made me weary from trying. Realizing all that I had was not all I needed, I slouched toward despair.
Around that time I had a dream of Judgment Day. Humanity was lined up before a chute that would take us to heaven or hell. As the line shortened and I approached my turn on the cosmic slide, I wondered where the ride would take me. I woke up before finding out.
Shortly after my fourteenth birthday, I was alone in the basement engaged in a secret practice that had become a new habit—watching The 700 Club. I had been doing so for several months, and it had become a tool for better understanding the message that united all of scripture and formed the bedrock of my religious ancestry, from Wittenberg to Stockholm to upstate New York by way of Minnesota: “grace through faith in Christ alone.” Even the ability to believe, let alone the desire to obey, was a gift—and an infinitely more hopeful prospect than a clean slate or a divine pep talk.
A natural liberal who voted in mock elections for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, I had no idea who Pat Robertson was—at the time he was off the air running for president. If there was conservative political commentary, prosperity teaching, or proclamations of judgment on natural disaster victims, I didn’t notice. What moved me were the featured stories of a compassionate God surprising broken people with His love.
By 10:30 that January night in 1988, I had seen enough. My key questions—how could I know I really believed? and how could I overcome sin?—gave way to one clear answer: I just needed Jesus. Truths introduced through the historic catechisms had been driven home by the Christian Broadcasting Network. After watching some testimonies about people getting “baptized in the Holy Spirit,” I prayed with the man on TV, Pat’s son Tim, for a similar experience.
I didn’t speak in tongues, and I don’t remember any of the English words he asked home viewers to repeat. But I do remember following his instructions to raise my hands in prayer, an ancient expression of worship I had never used before but which has felt natural ever since. The lifting of hands reflected the sudden feeling of surrender to God and the strong confidence that He could do something supernatural in me. He did. The Holy Spirit touched me and, in so doing, initiated a mysterious change that was to grow into a major interior renovation. While praying, I also noticed an odd feeling in my ear, and then Tim said, had said in Virginia Beach when recording the program 12 hours earlier, “Some of you are feeling a strange sensation in your ears.” That was odd, but maybe it was an external sign of God’s sovereignty over this internal event.
After the prayer I did a double pirouette, charged with the electricity of new beginning. Later, upstairs in my own room, I looked at the moon and saw that its beams, refracted through frosty windows, appeared to make the shape of a cross. I’ve noticed this phenomenon sometimes since, but that night, for a moment, I thought it was a special miracle from God. Then there was a shadow of anxiety as doubt queried, Are you just making this stuff up? I thought the twirl and possibly the moon-cross “vision” had more to do with my enthusiasm than God’s Spirit. For a second I wondered if I was embellishing, or at least rushing, the whole thing. Ignored, for the time being, the doubt quickly passed, and the next morning there was an abiding witness that Christ had come near and was with me still.
Whoever I had or hadn’t been, and whatever you want to call the touch of God’s love on my melancholic soul hanging out in the basement—assurance, sanctification, or, as I eventually came to label it, my real spiritual birthday—it was a turning point. I knew I’d made peace with God regarding my eternal destiny and understood that, filled with His Spirit, now, if not before, I finally had the power to live a holy life.
Applying the transformational leading of the Spirit to the impatience I disliked so much about myself, the morning after praying with young Robertson, I thought, I never have to lose my temper again. That was true. Since I was separated from my sins by Christ’s death and had access to the same power that had raised Him from the dead, there was no longer any need to sin. But I did. Not long after that, on a white water rafting trip, I got annoyed with someone on my boat, threatened to break his skull open with my paddle, and pledged I would enjoy watching the blood ooze from his head. Obviously, I was not always appropriating the grace I had been given. I would eventually learn that implosions—coldness, avoidance, passive aggression—may be even less honorable than explosions. But back on the boat, and safely to shore, and everywhere, as I continued to exhibit a mix of clear growth and real struggle (with impure thoughts as well as so much else), the Spirit patiently whispered, “You no longer have to be ruled by the whims of your own heart; you can instead be led by Mine.”
The testimony of the Spirit was confirmed by the Word, and vice versa. The bible that had for so long seemed a dry collection of pipe dreams and accusatory commands was now, itself, a vital testimony about God as the real lover of my soul, a perfect expression for the fellowship of re-creation going on inside of me. In the weeks after I prayed with the televangelist, I sensed that Presence—the felt reality of His Spirit pressing against my spirit, releasing waves of love I never imagined possible, every surge of affection affirming that I really was His child. That experience was to continue in a virtually constant and increasing way for nine months.
Then, in the autumn of ninth grade, the honeymoon light of God’s manifest pleasure was eclipsed, by what and for what reason I did not know. So I came down from the mountaintop, and my real progress in the walk of faith-without-sight began. And continues—often, it seems, despite my uncertain fumblings in scattered directions. But I can’t change the reality of my experience: I saw Him in the sanctuary of my soul. And I think, sometimes, that would be enough for a lifetime of faith. But He giveth more. Little feelings and leadings and answers and insights that come, in response to my seeking, because He is just; and, more often, they come, these reminders of His love, because He is something more than just. And because grace never depended on me anyhow.
@LScott Ekstrom is a freelance writer living in New York.
Article and photo credit: Copyright 2013, L. Scott Ekstrom. All rights reserved.
L. Scott Ekstrom - Writer 