1. *In filling out my application for Ministry School, I was asked to describe in detail “How I became a Christian.” I couldn’t stop with this just being an application assignment, I had to hold on to this on paper, plus, I thought I’d share. Here’s what I’m giving them.*
I was saved in October of 2011, so I suppose I am still fairly new Christian, but the growth has been incredible. I grew up in a Catholic family all my life, and I went to church with my parents, I was just always bored or distracted at mass. At that time, I was very young (I had made the personal choice to stop attending church when I was in the 6th grade, my parents never forced it on me or my siblings, they respected our space and our choices, though I wonder sometimes if it were for my own good, but here I am today).
Jesus wasn’t a huge part of my life and I truly didn’t know who He was then. I only “sought after him” when I was wishing for a mountain bike on Christmas Eve. My family had seemed to slowly but surely thin away from attending church—as a group of course—and it never really seemed to become a topic of conversation in my home after a while—or at least, not that I was noticing. Maybe it had become the giant elephant in the room nobody ever talked about.
In the 8th grade, my parents shocked me at the dinner table with news of their impending separation which led of course—and I shudder at the word today—to divorce. But please keep in mind, this was all very long ago, my relationship with my parents is not only restored but continues to flourish more as I grow up. The divorce changed my life, who I was (or a lack of who I thought I was), who I wanted to be, what I thought I could accomplish in life, what my purpose was—maybe it was my fault? Trust me, friends, I have been through the mind games of an adolescence who watches their parents—who you once thought were greatest friends and your most trusted guardians—part ways from each other.
My sophomore year of high school I had discovered a way to mask my emotions, which at the time was a subconscious stress relief from my actual self. What started as a diving-in-head-first motion quickly became a motion of desperately dragging myself to another joint of marijuana. I felt like a drowning man without the temporary care and protection from these two new companions of mine.
By the grace of God it only lasted for just over a year, and thankfully I never got in trouble with the law. But I was throwing my relationships with my friends and family out the window—no questions asked.
I could write an entire book about that dismal year of my life. But in pressing forward a year later (I was almost 17 years old), I sobered up in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous thanks to following the footsteps of my closest friend of 16 years who stumbled in those rooms 9 months prior. It took me three months of fighting to finally be done for good after having an emotional relapse. To this day, I’ve managed to find a way to remain clean serene from all substances for over five and a half years. I no longer struggle with the temptation and daunting obsession to crawl back into a bottle of alcohol the way I did as a child.
Through working diligently with others and creating new friendships through those twelve life-saving steps, I had found a new fellowship of lifelong friends and had opened my heart to the fact that there had to be God out there who cared about me, but Jesus had nothing to do with it as far as I was concerned. I only saw the societal negatives of the Christian faith and the religiosity of those who claimed to be ambassadors for Christ standing and shouting in the streets with picket signs of all of our impending dooms in a sea of fire. For several years, I chose to have nothing to do with the “overly-religious and uptight Christians”. Yes, I did have close friends who were Christians, and I respected them greatly for who they were, but this Jesus character just wasn’t for me—for them, fine, for me? No thanks, I’m okay. That didn’t begin to change radically until I met my girlfriend. Still to this day I believe that God sent an angel watch over me on that warm summer day on the docks when I met her - the most wonderful woman in my life. A woman should have an incredible amount of influence in a man’s life. I’m confident I’ve been blessed with the right girl, because she has helped build me into a man I never dreamed I could ever become, and I still have a long way to go. But I’ve learned so much from her; if I could choose the one of the most important lessons that girl has ever taught me, it’s that a man should love.
Two friends of mine throughout college who were Christians constantly shared the gospel with me and invited me to Church on a weekly basis, but I persisted to remain in the greatest state of ignorance as possible to their beliefs. Today, I see why I broke their hearts with my hard-heartedness!
When I joined the Air Force, I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to connect with anybody spiritually in person as I was seeking at home, I had finally bucked up and decided to attend church on Sundays to get away from the screaming of my MTI’s for an hour or two. I had gone to two services with Hana before I left—I was terribly discomforted by the worship service, the amount of spiritual freedom I saw in the room blew me away, “Why can’t I have something like that? And why am I so timid by the sight of such praise?”
Something about the atmosphere was just—how do I describe it—different. I couldn’t open my heart to such power like these people did, and I wouldn’t admit that to anyone, In fact, I tried to keep my Sunday service-visits as much as a secret as I possibly could among my other friends who weren’t Christians, and I’m not honestly sure why, I trusted them after all, it was just so foreign to me! I just needed to know a little more about who this “Jesus” was, it certainly wasn’t the Jesus I remembered growing up with!
One of those college friends of mine sent me a Bible in between training with the Air Force and I decided that if I were to please him and get him off my back, I’d just man up and read at least a few verses from the Gospel (he suggested to start in John). Besides, I knew he’d call me and ask if I had been reading my Bible. It was a gorgeous and probably very expensive leather-bound study bible he had delivered to me by mail.
So there I was starting with the Gospel of John. One chapter went by, then two, then three. I couldn’t put the book down, as far as I was concerned, this would be some great bedtime reading.
That book broke me. It was as if someone had all of a sudden turned on the light bulb over my head. I would catch myself biting my lips in an effort to hold back the tears welling up behind my eyes; the tenderness of this Jesus was reaching me on a level I didn’t think existed inside of me.
John 3:19-21 is where it really clicked inside of me that I had discovered where I had been identified in myself and my previous feelings sitting in a church sermon with Hana.
“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” If I could add a disclaimer, before I came to Jesus, I didn’t consider myself a “horrible evil” person by any means, but I can see the distinct difference in who I was compared to today. My ideas about life, the way I spoke, the things I looked at, the people I mistreated or gossiped about, the conviction I had that something in my life was simply missing was how I connected with that piece of Scripture. It was as if God had spoken to me right then and there, “I know you well, Owen. But all I desire a relationship with you.”
At that point, I knew I was stepping in the right place. For the better half of about 4 months after that, I wept in every single worship service I stood in. Especially while I was away at Basic Military Training. After one of the Sunday services, several Airmen came up to me to shake my hand or congratulate me for stepping out in faith at the service. You see, I never heard when the Chaplain had offered the trainees a chance to come to Christ right then and there at the altar, I thought I was just following a friend to the front to collapse to the floor with!
When I finally finished the Gospel of John, I started attending a Bible study regularly and asked more questions than anybody in the room. I wanted to know what God was doing to me through this book, and if it truly was His Word. Finally, I sat down with my beloved Chaplain and incredible friend to this day, I had to get down to the bottom of what was stirring inside of me. No more of this “half measures” business, I wanted to know.
When I was in Texas on F-15 maintenance training, I asked him, “How do I know that I have been saved?” Expecting a “white light moment”, Chaplain Combs turned me to me and opened up the book of Romans ch. 10. Together, we read aloud. With a certain eagerness in his voice, he raised the tone when he hit verses 9 and 10, “9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.”
All he had to do from that point was to simply look up at me and make reach eye contact, his expression was so compelling. Without a doubt in my mind or reservation in my heart, I responded to his gaze with a relieved: “Yes.” It was that moment that I truly started to know Jesus Christ. He is the Son of God. And I couldn’t live without Him having seen and felt what I had through the months of investigation. What was next? My relationship with Him.
Chaplain Combs smiled back and remarked that he was so excited for me, “That is so awesome,” he said. And it seriously was. When I went back to my dorm room, I read the next verse: “ 11 For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’”
Since the beginning of my pursuit to know who Jesus is, and my decision to devote my entire self to Him, my life has radically transformed. All of my preconceived notions about what I thought my identity was have been flipped upside down. Last March I was baptized by my pastor and girlfriend, my parents were there to watch. My siblings unfortunately, were absent. My father flew all the way from Southern California to witness the biggest rite of passage I had ever taken.
Today, I walk differently. It is by faith, not by sight. Do I stumble? Daily. Do I have bad days still? Absolutely. But has my life ever looked so blessed? Never. To have faith is to accept challenges. My pastor says, “Faith is spelled, R.I.S.K.”, he has an incredibly good point there. After all, C.S. Lewis said, “We must not encourage in ourselves or others any tendency to work up a subjective state which, if we succeeded, we should describe as “faith”, with the idea that this will somehow insure the granting of our prayer…. The state of mind which desperate desire working on a strong imagination can manufacture is not faith in the Christian sense. It is a feat of psychological gymnastics.”
To have faith is to be challenged constantly! My heart’s greatest desire is that I bear a testimony to my family and my friends that the Son of God truly lives. He is in me, and He is even in you. He is the Lord Jesus Christ. Reach out and touch Faith.
Matthew 7:7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”
Cat’s out of the bag! Now we all know you have a secret! And I am DYING to tell you—that it’s none of my business…
keeping this a secret is so. hard.
(Source: alyssanicoledykgraaf)
Opaque closes out the hour - there’s a lot of bullshit in this world. Holding value in patience grows me weary. So tonight I recoil from this day as though it were a hot flame. The lids may close now, and I sink into these feathers, because tomorrow holds the same endeavors.
Yes! Get all of the “fuck” out! Tell it to fick off ;)
(Source: alyssanicoledykgraaf)
