A testimony

I don't talk much about my faith in this blog.  It's really important to me, but I have a twitchy aversion to speaking out loud about it.  I don't expect either of those things will change any time soon.  Still, two weeks ago, in church, I shared a bit about how I came to faith.  Since I had to write out my testimony in advance, I have it written up, and figured I might plop it in here.  I changed the names, because [anonymous], but here it is.

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I was raised in a loving atheist family. My dad was a nuclear physicist, and my mom a solar astrophysicist who worked at NASA. They believed in a life and values bigger than themselves; our home was open to neighbors and visitors from other countries; our parents regularly led giant Girl Scout camping trips; volunteered with our summer swim league,  the PTA, and our neighborhood civic association. They had both been raised in faith traditions, but had gradually drifted away.  It wasn’t so much that they actively opposed a faith in God (in fact, my dad, at 86 years old, is only now looking to re-home his  81-book collection of Anchor Bible Commentaries and Reference); it’s just that an active faith in God never seemed to be particularly relevant or necessary to our lives.  

My main exposure to church as I was growing up came through my best friends, the Smiths, whose family lived a very different kind of life.  They followed strict, old-fashioned rules:  girls wore dresses to school and had hair down to their waists; the boys, even in the 1970s, had crew cuts.  Mrs. Smith had taught elementary school until her first child was born; she once tried to volunteer with our Girl Scout troop, but had to give that up when that meant that she couldn’t have dinner on the table by the time “Daddy” came home. Their home was a whirlwind of unfinished projects, with the 700 Club on the television as we played.  Mrs. Smith was frequently losing things in the clutter of the house, and it was common for her to call all of the children into the living room where we would hold hands in a circle as she would pray “dear Jesus, please help me find the car keys.” And when she did eventually find them, she would whoop delighted hallelujahs; a miracle had occurred, yet again.  On Sundays, I’d sometimes join the other Smith kids in the back of the pick-up truck as the family headed to church.  I loved the exuberance of the household, and I knew enough Christians to know that the rules that hemmed my best friend in weren’t a necessary part of the faith package.   But the older I got, the more it seemed to me that Jesus was a crutch for the superstitious.

Fast forward past college, and then graduate school, a marriage, a child, an amicable divorce, and my first job.   Through all of this, I was what I might call “faith curious”, but never in a serious way.  My life was good, and I already had pretty much everything I thought I wanted.

And then came OfSnough.  I was a single mom;  he’d been one of the few to reach out and offer childcare help. He took my young daughter to church on Sunday mornings so that I could actually sleep in one day a week.  That was a Godsend, in many senses of that word.  OfSnough told me he wanted to marry me, which immediately freaked out many of my friends and family.  They warned me, “He’s going to try to convert you!”  My sister was so concerned that she drove seven hours to check on me; she told me her therapist reassured her that “Snough sounds like she’s too happy for counseling.”  As for me, I was faced with this thorny question that I couldn’t wrap my head around: OfSnough seemed like an intelligent person, who cared for the life of the intellect.  How could a person who seemed so rational actually believe something that seemed so irrational?  

I talked to a friend of mine who is both an astronomer and a Christian. I read a bunch of books including Fraser and Campolo’s “Sociology through the eyes of faith”. I went to church to meet his friends, and it reminded me of how much fun I’d had hanging out with the Smiths. OfSnough and I married, I got tenure, and we set out to adopt what we thought it would be a young sibling pair, but what turned out to be an infant, born in late November, who at the age of six weeks moved into our house.  We heard about the baby Nelson on December 23, and he moved into our home on January 4: I called it, my 10-day pregnancy. 

And then some time, in the middle of one night in the epiphany season, rocking this child on my lap with the Christmas lights the only light in the room, this baby boy who was not my child and yet who was my child, I believed.  I can’t explain it more than that.

I did not come to faith in Christ as some do, out of a sense of desperate need for him.  I already believed I was doing fine as it was.  In fact, when Jesus accuses the crowds of following him only because they want the bread or the miracles, sometimes I reflect that my own besetting sin is that what I really want is for Jesus to point me out and say, “hey, y’all.  That one there; she’s doing it right”.  I know -- and I claim I know --  I’m a sinner in need of a savior, but if you squeeze me too hard the attitude that comes out is “I’m a paragon of virtue, and it’s fine if Jesus wants to come along for the ride.” 

My moments of deepest faith have not, then, come from the times that He has lifted me up out of trouble.  It’s the times I’ve gotten knocked down enough to realize my utter dependence on him.  A flat tire during an IronMan.  A series of huge bills coming in, followed by even bigger bills.  The week in 2013 that my whole family still calls “The Horrible week”.  In those times, He has reminded me that I am not invincible . . . but that He is. 

 It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it, that Jesus would even want to hang out with me, and even more amazing that he could find a way past the shiny mirrored walls that I thought were the fortress  of my soul.  It’s why the ending Psalm 51 means so much to me.  

God, my sacrifice is a broken spirit;

You, God, will not despise a chastened heart.