Twenty-Seven Years

Somehow 27 years have passed since I converted to Christianity. This weekend would have marked the 27th Easter Sunday in which I could have celebrated the sacrifice that I heard had purchased my eternal freedom. I remember how strange it was for me to have made the decision on the night of March 31. I woke up the next day and announced to my parents what happened. I wonder if they thought it was a joke given the day. That would have been a Saturday morning. Earlier that morning, I got a knock on the door from some first responders looking for my ex-girlfriend. They heard from AOL’s chatroom moderators that she wanted to kill herself and had taken several bottles of pills. If religion offered me anything, it was a means of breaking off that terrible relationship.

I went to a sunrise service the next day and felt at home immediately. The screaming in my soul had silenced. I was no longer running away from the path I had been raised to follow. Drugs no longer enticed me, and I felt like I had a testimony worth sharing. I was liberated. I remember chatting with several old friends and their parents. I recall thinking that life had been grey until that moment.

At some point that weekend, I tossed out all of my secular things. I asked God whether Mozart was worth keeping, and, hearing no clear answer, tossed it into the discard pile. The scraps of prose I had in a box, the comic books, the drawings and paintings I had collected, everything I could think of went into that pile. I brought the paper goods into the back yard and lit them on fire, and I broke every CD I owned, all to be certain I wouldn’t be able to change my mind.

The next weekend, my dad baptized me in the name of Jesus in front of the church he had raised me in but had left because they weren’t his style. I walked out of the baptistery and into the bathroom only to discover that I hadn’t even thought about the Grateful Dead belt an old friend had given to me a year or two before. I tossed that into the trash can there. I felt like a new person.

Sometime in the next month, I began to speak in tongues. That experience was evidence to me that I was on the right track in my journey toward being pleasing in the eyes of God. The euphoria during that first night left me hungry for all that God could offer. I devoured the bible as often as I could, sitting outside of lecture halls or in the quad while reading my pocked-sized full bible. “Thy word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.”

I began to wonder why the old church friends I grew up with had no similar passion. It was as if I was the prodigal son who appreciated anything the father would give me, and they had grown complacent with the goodness they never left. I wanted any scrap the Father would offer, but they seemed to rarely come to the table to feast. Being a Christian was the de facto position for them without question. Perhaps it was for that same reason that they remain Christians today. Perhaps because I became a father myself, I left that same faith 18 years ago.

On this Easter weekend, I commemorate the positive change that religion brought my way. I am reminded, however, that I could have accomplished the same change without the faith I was raised to think was the only answer for a hurting world.