For close to two years, I called myself a Christian while doing nothing with it. It was a bizarre sort of dual reality; I’d pack my Bible first for every trip I took, always giving it a place of honor beside wherever I was going to lay my head. Occasionally I’d even open it up. But I didn’t know where else to start, and I didn’t really give it any effort. I’d finished the Gospels, and wasn’t that enough? The rest of the New Testament was probably going to be a rehash, and the Old Testament was full of stories that Jesus had rendered obsolete. Right?
I was arrogant and prideful. I was also ignorant and a little lazy. I can see that now, but I failed to recognize it then. I was very accustomed to accomplishing whatever I set out to do, and unused to running into problems that required a tremendous amount of effort to figure out. I’d treated those pages like any other novelty: give it a quick read, pull out the key points, and move on. Clearly, the takeaways I’d pulled so far weren’t exhaustive.
Even with my newfound belief in Christ and His message, I hadn’t really got the message. My enthusiasm for consuming and understanding the Word of God had diminished, probably because when I acknowledged it was true I stopped searching for answers. Like any fool convinced of his own capabilities, I was certain I could figure it out myself now that I’d been pointed in the right direction.
But what had really changed about my life?
Sure, I’d stopped making irreverent jokes. I still made plenty of crude ones. I’d started looking at Christians – my new brothers and sisters – in a different light, but I was still swearing like a sailor (or a Soldier), happy with the trappings of the world, and drinking far more than I should have. I was still short on patience, lacking in empathy, and full of judgment for the shortcomings of everyone that didn’t show up in my bathroom mirror.
I was a mediocre husband who was convinced I had it together because my wife was well-supported and unabused. I was a mediocre father who measured my performance by the quality of the material life my children were living. I was a mediocre person, at best.
What I had was a dead faith, not that I even knew what that was.
I can’t tell you when exactly things began to shift. There wasn’t some catastrophic event that changed my perspective, no near-death experience to force my attention on the afterlife. It could have been boredom, or maybe the settling of our lives into a new normal, free of the chaos of transience and the interruption of deployments. I’d like to think it was the slow-burning fuse of my faith, finally drawing near to the heart of things. Probably, the Spirit just got tired of waiting and started pushing.
Whatever the cause, I started to get more serious. As serious about figuring out what a walk with Jesus looked like as I had been about deciding if Jesus was for real. Incrementally, I started evaluating our life, and myself, and figuring out which pieces need painted, which pieces needed repaired, and which pieces needed to go. I opened my Bible and started reading again. I also made two lifestyle choices that probably did the most to put me on track and recalibrate my life as a Christian.
First, I spent an evening searching for Christian resources and found the BibleThinker podcast by Mike Winger. I cannot overstate the impact that had. I’ll write more about it elsewhere, but I will say this. There is a world that exists where my walk turned into a stumble, where I failed to find the trail and never got around to it again. Where I finished my life with the same dead faith I’d been carrying without even knowing it. That possibility was eradicated by Mike’s work. Before I knew how vital the roles of elder, pastor, teacher, or even just a brother in Christ were, he and his content were filling them.
More importantly, we found a church.
This was a sluggish process. My household includes seven people in three generations. It takes an act of God to make all of them all happy at once. To say we had no idea what we were looking for is an understatement. My mom loved the music; I didn’t even understand why they were singing it. My wife was looking for community; I was looking for a Bible study. My sole example at that point was a guy who had no problem spending hours at a time getting nerdy about Scripture, and that was exactly what I wanted. My kids, on the other hand, were going to pay attention for approximately six seconds without something interesting to grab at them.
My wife’s experience, having grown up Catholic, was vastly different; in many ways she took just as big a leap of faith as me in all this. Even so, when I told her I wanted to start trying churches she just smiled and asked me when. She married an atheist and has walked every step of this journey with me. I have no doubt that without her, I’d still be sleeping on my couch with nothing hooked up to my TV but a Playstation. I will never be able to give her enough credit, but that’s how it seems to go with her.
Fortunately, the Lord decided to help us out. We were (slowly) working through our list of churches when my mom got a recommendation from a young man at work. That suggestion brought us to where we are now, and I think it took about four minutes for us to decide it was our place. Again, I cannot overstate how critical this decision was. It helped to solidify my own walk, and put us in fellowship with a family we didn’t know we had. Like a picture sliding into focus, our life gained clarity. We settled into a rhythm that still feels exactly right, built around the church and centered on Jesus.
That is, at least for this story, the end. I hope I’ve helped you, or at least given you something to chew on. I hope to keep doing so. If I can go from where I was to where I am, I promise that you can too. Anything standing in your way is a facade. If you search for the answers, you will find them. Once you get through the white noise, you will find a Truth that gives you as many ‘Aha!’ moments as you let it.
