happy anniversary to me

Forty years ago today I decided that I would live forever. I became a born again Christian at a local evangelical revival meeting, praying the prayer of acceptance of Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I was seventeen years old and struggled with the idea of spending eternity in hell. Not only were my Christian friends evangelizing me to make that decision, but I grew up in a church that taught that without a decision to follow Jesus I was lost and that when I died I would go to hell.

Did I believe what I had been told? Yes, I did, and yet there had remained in me, throughout my teenage years, a smidgen of doubt that hell was real, primarily because I doubted the existence of a loving God. I could never match my day to day life with an alcoholic father who made life miserable for our family with that of a loving Father God up in heaven overseeing the misery and thus allowing it.

At the time I was preparing to move away from home and go off to college. Not being gregarious in nature, the idea of leaving home bothered me, even though it wasn't all that pleasant of a place. It was all I knew. It was home after all. It was predictable. College was not.

My "decision for Christ", as I look at it now, was clouded, not by a great love for God or desire to serve God, but by fear and a need for safety. Fear of eternal hell, yes, but more than that was the fear of being separated from my friends by going to hell. Most of my friends were already "born again". I already hung with the "good" kids, for the most part. Didn't party or do any of that stuff that many of the others in my class bragged about on Monday mornings, back from a "great" weekend of partying and such.

I could picture myself continuing a life of loneliness and depression. Home life in those days was not something that was talked about. The secret of emotional turmoil brought on by the dis-function that alcohol brought on compounded the pain inside. My friends at school were my "salvation" before Jesus and without them life did not seem worth living. A big part of my decision to "accept Jesus" by praying a "sinner's prayer" was the need to be with my friends and feel their acceptance.

As I look back now, I can see that my decision was quite natural. At the time it seemed supernatural. There was a great sense of relief inside me after that meeting. Not only did I feel the acceptance of my friends, but the internal conflict which I had felt during all those years of resistance was gone. The guilt and condemnation that I had assigned to myself was gone. I had listened to all those Sunday sermons growing up, yes, every Sunday. I knew where I stood in God's eyes. I was an outsider from the age that I first began to understand the teachings of my church to that day 40 years ago.

The relief which I felt was defined by the believers around me as the presence of the Holy Spirit. But I know now that it was simply relief brought on by my releasing the guilt and condemnation that the teachings had brought me from birth. My "sins were washed away" all because I followed the formula of praying a prayer of repentance and acceptance of Jesus. It was a formula that I believed, and thus it worked.

And it worked for a very long time..... 34 years to the month, April 2007.

At the end of the next two and a half years, April 2007 to November 2009, I could clearly see that religion was no longer the path I could follow. Faith was no longer an option for me. I realized that the doubts I had as a young teenager were doubts based in reality.

From that time to today, I've been busy experiencing new ways to learn, listen, and understand. Topics which I rejected as a faith person I no longer resist. Now I am eager to learn about the taboos that Christianity espoused... my  emotions, women's equality, sex, evolution, how religions work, skepticism, and others. The life I choose today is based on the realities and truths which I can know today. Any other way seems dishonest.