Conversions and De-Conversions - Awake, My Soul, And With The Sun

The five years that I spent in Calvary Chapel undoubtedly changed my life.  Calvary Chapel taught me that I was worthless, corrupt and wicked in the eyes of God.  I was utterly powerless to do anything from my own strength.  I was a failure as a human being.  My mind was the product of corrupted and sinful flesh, and was sure to do nothing but lead me astray.  My feeble works were folly, and my pathetic wisdom was foolishness.  The World in all its lustful glory was thoroughly damned, and it could offer me nothing but one-way ticket straight to Hell.  Calvary Chapel taught me that we put ourselves in this miserable situation, and we had nobody to blame but ourselves for God’s condemnation.  Everybody I knew, everybody I loved, everybody who I cared anything at all for, was doomed.  We were all born to be damned.  Almighty God provided only a single provision for our deplorable condition, and I thanked God everyday that He had chosen me according to His all-beneficent providence. 

I was certain that I had my Heavenly salvation, but I could not stop grieving over all those who did not.  Calvary Chapel forced me to accept that the heathen deserved their own pitiable reward, and the force of that heavy burden weighed mightily on my soul.  I had to believe that God was infinitely wise, infinitely just, and that the damnation stored for those I loved was due to their own willful and wicked rebellion.  I could not believe at the cost of my own sanity, it but I had to believe it.  Calvary Chapel taught me that God was infinitely wise, loving and just, but it brought me no joy.  I reacted to my Christian beliefs as if the all-loving Ruler of the Universe was an insane, jealous, capricious, all-powerful monster, who dangled each of us, as Jonathan Edwards once said, over the Fires of Hell by the slenderest wisps of thread.  All secondary beliefs had to conform to this one primary dogma.  If we were destined for suffering and damnation, it was not because God willed it, because God is infinitely just.  It logically followed, therefore, that the fault for our damnation lied with us.  God’s creatures ultimately got the blame for all suffering that they inherited, while God Himself received all the credit for any good that they happened to experience.  Nothing good proceeded from us tragic humans.  I was a worthless, wretched sinner.  God was to receive all glory.

  I gave my life to Jesus in 1988 because I was a miserable, joyless wreck.  I attended Calvary Chapel because I wanted to worship my Savior Jesus, learn more about Him, do good for others, and try to give my life some purpose and direction.  I left Calvary Chapel after five years, more miserable than ever, but in a way that was different from before I attended.  I was no longer drinking my sorrows away like I was before my conversion, but I nonetheless felt like my humanity was stripped from me.  Everything in those five years was focused on Jesus.  I could do nothing good of my own, and I had to give it all up to Jesus.  Jesus had to be the focus of every aspect of my life.  I could do nothing without His guidance and direction.  Idle moments had to be spent in His service.  I read and studied my Bible, I prayed, I witnessed, I ministered, I worshipped.  Everything was Jesus.  Jesus.  JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS JESUS.  I still loved my Jesus, at least I thought I did, but He never gave me any isolation.  He was a stalker.  He was driving me crazy.

With this one-dimensional mindset that was forced on me, my self-esteem spun straight into the toilet.  Anything in my life that I gave any worth to was nothing but a puppet controlled by the mere whim of a silent deity.  When I prayed to Jesus for comfort, the silence that He returned to me was louder than ever.  I felt alone, I was wracked with guilt, and I fought the conviction that I was a worthless sinner in the eyes my perfect God, and any good He saw in me was due solely to His own worth.  I was evil, corrupt, and superfluous to my loving Jesus.  I was just so much chaff for the fire.

I left Calvary Chapel soon after I returned from my Hurricane Andrew mission, mainly for my own sanity.  The stifled mindset that Calvary Chapel was forcing on me was unbearable.  At the time I did not know exactly what was wrong, but I desperately needed a change.  I did not leave Calvary Chapel because I no longer believed.  I was not yet a critical thinker.  I did not question the historicity or veracity of the Bible, the deity of Jesus or any other central tenet of my Faith.  God was still sovereign.  Jesus still died for my sins.  I cannot say that I lost my faith.  I still believed everything I was taught.  I just needed a break from a life devoted totally and exclusively to Jesus and spiritual matters.

This was my state of mind as a Christian in 1993.  Upon leaving Calvary Chapel late in that year, my self-esteem immediately improved.  I do mean immediately.  I did not return to drinking and partying, as so many paranoid sermons at Calvary Chapel assured me that I would.  Instead, I focused more on my night classes at Albuquerque TVI, particularly physics and math.  I stopped spending time only and exclusively with my church friends, and surrounded myself with a more diverse group of people than I had ever done before.  The natural curiosity that Calvary Chapel squelched was finally awakened in my mind.  I returned again to my first love of reading, and I was suddenly unafraid to read books that would have been discouraged at Calvary Chapel.  I don’t know exactly what happened in my psyche in the immediate years after I left Calvary Chapel, but my whole outlook blossomed.  It may be that after three false starts of trying to grow up, the first attempt through the military, the second through alcohol and parties, and the third through Jesus, that I had finally found something that worked.  I finally found a simple maturity, and a blossoming self-esteem, neither of which I had ever possessed before.

I turned 30 years old in 1994.  If my high school years were the worst years of my life, I can honestly say that the years between 1993 and 1996, the years immediately after I left Calvary Chapel, were easily the best years of my life.  Instead of focusing every aspect of my life on Jesus, everything I learned felt new and fresh.  I spent more time at Albuquerque TVI.  I read, I explored, I studied and I learned.  Most importantly, I began meeting a wide and diverse array of people, some with unusual and contrary opinions.  For the first time in five years, I listened to my new friends without the ulterior motive of trying to wedge the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the conversation.  It was liberating.  Christians sometimes accuse apostates of leaving the Faith because they want to be free from God’s accountability.  I must confess that in my case at least, they had a point.  While I would not have called myself an apostate at the time, in fact, I still considered myself a Christian, I needed to be free from the ever accusing judgment that God burdened me with.  I never felt more free than I did in those few years immediately after leaving Calvary Chapel, when I finally learned to live without Him invading my every thought and judging every action.

For the first time in my life, I had enough confidence in myself to become romantically interested in women.  Outside of a single high school fling, I never dreamed that any woman would ever be interested in me.  Women generally left me aloof and intimidated, and I rarely talked to them.  I never questioned my own sexuality; after all, homosexuality was an abomination.  Dad asked me more than once if I was gay.  I think he was a little concerned.  I assured him that I was straight, but unconvinced, he asked me on several occasions to join his Mormon congregation on some Sunday morning, and he would introduce me to some nice, young women that he knew.  No thanks.

It is amazing to me, looking back nearly twenty years ago, how the simple act of not attending church had such an impact on my self-esteem and general outlook on life.   Perhaps another factor that played at this time were the night courses that I was simultaneously taking at Albuquerque TVI, and the interaction that I had with the wide and diverse mix of people that I met there.  It may also be that at this time I was discovering that, to my amazement, I was exceptionally talented at something that I had earlier in my life found to be impossible.  While Christianity taught me that my total intrinsic worth was nothing outside of Jesus, and that absolutely no good thing could ever come from myself, my night classes taught me that I could understand and creatively apply mathematics, that terror of my high school years, to a level that I never before dreamed possible.  Calvary Chapel, in particular, constantly stifled my own worth and merit, so I guess it should be no surprise that my self-confidence blossomed the second after I finally left that particular Church.

I continued to work as a cook and waiter in Albuquerque when I was finally able to gather up enough courage to ask one of my waitress co-workers on a date.  She was the first of several that I casually dated at that time.  I was not too romantically involved with any of these lovely women, and I was not yet interested in pursuing a relationship.   I was just thriving in my new, guiltless freedom, and I was learning new perspectives on life like a dry sponge thirstily soaking in water.  I was constantly meeting new people, and I was excited to see for myself how they approached life.  While I never felt the need to adopt any new lifestyle, neither did I feel compelled to preach to anybody and convict them of their sinful ways.  I purposely let that part of my Christianity wither and die.  I figured that I could always come back to Jesus, but I for the time being I needed to remove myself from Calvary Chapel, the only conduit for Faith that I then knew of.  In the meantime, I thrilled in exploring, growing and maturing.  I cannot emphasize enough how those Renaissance years between 1993 and 1996 were the best years of my life.  I was too close to the trees to notice that it was also the beginning of the end for my Christian Faith.  The chisel was applied to the foundation, and it slowly, speck by speck, chipped away.

Calvary Chapel taught me to be aware of ‘cults’.  I needed to avoid those beliefs which had a resemblance to Christianity, but which denied the sole divinity and salvation through Jesus Christ.  Most people that I met during this time claimed to be Christians, but very few of them actually fit my narrow definition of what a Christian actually was.  Not that any of that kept me from learning more about them.  I dated a woman who was fascinated by UFOs, crop circles and traveling to places of harmonic convergence.  She had photo albums and binders full of catalogued photos and articles about these astral encounters.  I never criticized her, but I wanted to learn more.  I wanted to understand why she believed these things as strongly as she did.  She was also a licensed Reiki therapist.  The Fundamentalist in me would have condemned her as a heretic and her beliefs as demonic cultism.  Instead, I asked her to give me a session.  I wanted to experience what she did.  I lied down on my bed and she placed her hands on me, explaining that she was projecting or channeling some kind of energy through herself and into key connection points of my body.  I had heard of such silly things before, but instead of dismissing her as a nut, I decided that I wanted to take her seriously, and experience what she experienced, and to see if I could immerse myself into her alien belief.  And after several minutes of concentrating on her hands that I felt on my body, I could actually feel her hands sink deep into my chest, and bury into my flesh.  If I allowed myself into her world, and had momentary Faith in her Reiki discipline, I could literally feel her burning into my bosom.  It was a powerful sensation.  While I enjoyed exploring what she held to be sacred, I also secretly understood it to be a mind game.  I had to allow myself to let it happen, just like a therapist’s patient can be hypnotized by the power of suggestion only if the patient is willing.  If I stopped concentrating, the spell was broken, and I was instantly whisked back into the mundane world, and I could feel her mere physical hands resting only on the surface of my physical skin. 

It was then that I realized all those emotional rushes of love that I felt by the power of the Holy Ghost, well, they might have also been just brought on by the power of suggestion too.  I only felt the physical embrace of God during intense moments of ecstatic worship, and I had to allow for the sensation to take place.  They never took me by surprise.  Of course I still believed in God.  But I was not going to allow myself get so emotional over worship again.

I became a master of, what I later learned was called, cognitive dissonance.  I wanted to place the beliefs of my friends into one part of my brain, experience them, and try to understand them, only to ultimately see the mind game inherent in them.  I could see the danger of doing this, because it is only natural to extend that kind of criticism to my own belief in Jesus.  There was a reason why Calvary Chapel wanted so desperately to keep me ignorant.  But I left my own precious beliefs in another part of my brain that was safe from self-reflection. 

I have a strong suspicion that most people who leave Fundamentalist Christianity stay stuck at this point in their escape.  I did not reject my former beliefs completely.  I still believed in God, Jesus, Divine incarnations, Heaven, Hell, Divine Judgments, and all the rest.  I had to meet other people and learn other perspectives to understand that, well, Jesus might not be the only way to Salvation after all.  How could God damn all these naïve, sincere people?  I thought, maybe, perhaps, God did allow many paths to Salvation after all.  And this, I do think, is where most people who escape Fundamentalism leave it.  They do not take the next few crucial steps that I had to make into total non-belief and de-conversion.   I did have to take a few more steps to get to that point, but those steps had to come in their own time.

The next crucial step in my de-conversion was that I fell in love.

In May 1994 I met B----.  How do I describe this woman without allowing my writing to descend into a pool of emotional mush?  This is a story of my spiritual journey, and she is a huge part of that journey, even if indirectly.  B---- came into my life in that crucial time after I left Calvary Chapel, a church that encouraged Christians to be obedient and ignorant followers of unquestioned dogma.  B---- was the first person I ever met who dared tell me to shake those chains from my mind.  She proposed the frightening concept of doubt and questioning.  “Question Everything!” she would tell me, and it was a lesson that took me over a decade to fully understand.  She taught me to believe in myself.  She was the only person I had ever met up to that point, parents included, who convinced me that I was good, that I was smart, and that I was interesting.  B---- introduced me to science, to life, to art, to all sorts of worldly pleasures and pursuits that were the complete anathema of my Christian heritage.

At the time, B---- was studying chemistry at the University of New Mexico, and loved my enthusiasm for math and physics.  Even though our relationship only lasted three years, I will always remember B---- and how much she taught me.  Some time ago, I wrote a short story on this blog about the time B---- took me to the University of New Mexico library, and I stood dwarfed amid shelf after shelf after shelf of bound research journals.  “There is so much here!”  I exclaimed.  “There sure is.  This is the Wisdom of the World!”  The Wisdom of the World was contained in this new sacred space.  This library had so much content, and so much to digest, and the platitudes and condemnations of Pastors Skip and Chuck just paled in comparison.  Pastor Skip taught me to beware of the Wisdom of the World, but surely he was wrong about that.  I could not wait to dive in!

B---- accepted my Christianity, and constantly affirmed that she was also one.  Her family came from a long line of Methodists back in Virginia, and her family was in regular attendance.  I had been warned by Calvary Chapel about ‘Sunday Only’ Christians.  She never answered an alter call, and certainly did not understand the concept of Salvation through Faith alone.  But the thought of preaching to her just seemed absurd at this point, although I came dangerously close a few times.  Some of the books she asked me to read were certainly bizarre and heretical, but I also found them exciting and mind-expanding. 

One of the first books that B---- gave me was James Redfield’s new blockbuster The Celestine Prophecy.  I had to read it, she said.  I honestly do not remember much about the book, except that it was a story about an explorer traveling to exotic locations in quest of certain ‘spiritual insights’.  It was left ambiguous whether this story was true or not, but I suspected it was not when, at the last page, some characters literally vibrated themselves into pure energy.  “What did you think about the book??” B---- asked enthusiastically.  “Well….” 

B----- always seemed to flirt a little too close to ambiguous New Age western-eastern spiritual jumble.  But she insisted she was a Christian, and I was madly in love, so what did that matter?

Other relevant books she gave me included Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters.  These books attempted to describe how Eastern religions such as Hinduism so neatly correlated to modern particle physics.  I read these books, but I remember almost nothing about the religious or spiritual aspects.  But their descriptions of the bizarre world of quantum physics fascinated me, and the natural physics captured my imagination.  Several books on the mathematical discipline of chaos theory, which seemed to be almost trendy in the early 1990’s, put me deeper into the world of math and physics.  Instrumental here was James Gleick’s popular book, Chaos.  Chaos theory, which could not be fully studied until computer power had evolved to a suitable level, explored the idea of infinite amounts of information contained in finite spaces, and constructed with only a simple recursion formula.  Even the tiniest perturbation in a formula’s initial condition would add a new set of infinite amounts of information.   Chaos theory and quantum mechanics overwhelmed me with their ambiguous power.  The world was more enormous, more vague, and more unpredictable than I ever imagined.

I also re-introduced myself to the work of Isaac Asimov.  My high school years were filled with his science fiction novels and other forms of escapism.  I picked up from somewhere his enormous, three-volume book, Understanding Physics.  This book fascinated me like no other.  I read it in bed, in the bathtub and in my break area at work.  I read it at every spare moment until I had it finished.  I started at page one, the most basic forms of mechanics, and did not stop until his discussions of general relativity and quantum physics at the end.  I was enthralled.  Asimov presented physics as a historical overview, how the simplest steps in understanding the natural world was started by the ancients, and how each new discovery was built upon the previous foundation.  I particularly remember Asimov’s discussion of Mendeleev, and his construction of the Periodic Table of the elements, to be incredibly fascinating.  Atomic elements could be predicted to exist, based on the periodic nature of the already discovered elements.  Predictions were made, experiments were conducted, and the elements were discovered, with the properties that they were predicted to have.  Learning about the scientific method, and constructing theories and models that could actually make predictions was just mind-blowing to me.  I desperately wanted to be a part of it.  Somehow.  Someway.  The New Age stuff that B---- was attracted to was fun for me to think about, but it did not have the meat, or the tangible reality that physics had.

Unlike my own family, B---- came from a highly educated family.  Her father was an engineering professor from Virginia, and upon meeting him, he generously gave me a few gifts to encourage my curiosity.  Books.  Books!  Books to encourage my ever-growing interest in physics!  One of them was a new book by Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot.  I had not heard or read anything from Carl Sagan since his PBS series Cosmos aired on television when I was a teenager.  The book was a celebration of the Voyager Spacecrafts.  Voyagers I and II had spent the better part of the 1980’s rushing through the solar system, taking unprecedented photos and collected valuable data about the planets.  Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the gods of the ancient pantheon, were now objects to be explored and probed by the instruments of mere mortals.  In the opening pages of the book, Sagan tells the story of how he convinced the Voyager project leads to point the instrument cameras back toward Earth to take a photo.  So out beyond the orbit of Neptune, past the farthest reaches of the solar system, Voyager 1 turned its camera back towards its earthly origin and took this now famous photo of a Pale Blue Dot:

The Earth is but a single pixel amid the vast vacuum of space.

Sagan then gives this homily:

Look again at that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home. That’s us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.  Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dust.  In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.  There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.  Visit, yes.  Settle, not yet.  Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.  There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known

 -Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, p8-9

Reading this in 1994, soon after leaving the rigid dogmatism of Calvary Chapel was an amazing revelation.  In my mind, Sagan had written a sermon more spiritually profound than any I had ever heard from Pastor Skip.  I had found my calling.

B---- and her father were the first people I ever met who convinced me to attend university fulltime.  Nobody ever told me I was smart enough or that I could do anything with my life other than dead-end work and manual labor. They believed in me.  They had confidence in me, and they gave me the confidence in myself, something religious belief never did.  They literally changed my life, and I will be forever thankful to them.  I was afraid.  I had been led to believe that I would never attend University.  University was for ‘other’ people.  I barely knew what University was!  I truly had little idea what to expect!  But in December 1995, I jumped off the cliff into the unknown and embarked on the next huge chapter of my life.  At almost 32 years of age, I enrolled, fulltime, as a freshman student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology as a physics major.  And through it all, I insisted that I was a still a Christian.

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Conversions and De-conversions - Brutus, thou sleepest...

The articles about my years as a Fundamentalist Christian are particularly difficult for me to write about. I think I cold write dozens of articles describing my years of attending Calvary Chapel, and consolidating all those disparate memories into only a few short articles is a bit of a challenge. Ultimately, my purpose in writing about these years is, not just to describe the stress and guilt I felt as a Christian, not just about the humorless ignorance that Calvary Chapel encouraged me to live in, and not just about the bogus apologetics they taught me to believe or the hypocritical behavior they engaged in. My purpose in writing this series is to explore why I converted into religious faith, and why I left religious faith. By 1990, simultaneous with my most fervent years as a Christian, I began to crack out of the ignorance that Calvary Chapel imposed on me. It took years, but the real beginning of my de-conversion from Christianity began out of necessity. I needed to learn a real trade in order to escape my life as a short order cook. My real education and my escape from Christianity finally began, slowly and tentatively, in 1990.

I can summarize my years as a Fundamentalist Christian in Calvary Chapel this way:

I was convinced that I had the exclusive truth about the nature of reality. Us Christians, especially those of us who did not rely on mere religion, but on our personal relationships with Jesus Christ, were the only humans on earth who had the unmerited favor of the Almighty, and had exclusive rights to eternal paradise through the Blood of Jesus Christ. All other humans were self-deceived or liars. Knowing their backgrounds or their stories was irrelevant. It did not matter what other religion or religious tradition they followed, and it did not matter why. It did not matter why they did not worship God as he One True God. The bottom line was that every single one of them was no better than Lucifer. Like Lucifer the fallen angel, they were prideful enough in the face of God Himself, to want to set themselves up as their own god. Non-Christians were guilty of the most heinous sin of all, that of pride, and they wanted to set themselves up above the heights of the clouds, to be like the Most High, and rely on their own wretched strength for their salvation. Anybody who did not take Jesus Christ as their own personal Lord and Savior was, in effect, spitting in the face of Jesus Christ as He hung on the cross. They were telling Jesus that they were good enough, and they did not need His blood to atone for their sins as the wrathful God demanded, but could face God clothed only in their own, pathetic, fleshly righteousness, which was no better than filthy rags before the Almighty.

This is what I truly believed while attending Calvary Chapel. I had confessed and repented of my sins there because I was miserable and unhappy, and I wanted to make something better of my life. It had nothing to do with Salvation. When I initially converted, I was not fearful of Hell. I just wanted to finally find peace and contentment in my life, and give it a sense of meaning and purpose. Calvary Chapel took these inner desires and piled on the baggage of Christian dogma. I was suddenly to believe that I would attain Heaven because of my Faith in Jesus. All others who did not believe as I did were damned, not due to God, but due to their own prideful lusts. The Truth was self-evident, but they were too deluded to accept it.

Believing this dogma was like hanging a millstone about my neck. I told myself that I was finally happy and at peace, but the truth was that I never felt more guilt in my entire life than when I attended Calvary Chapel. Most crucial of all, I lost my sense of humor. Christianity, as taught by Calvary Chapel, forced me to view nearly every human I came into contact with as a lost sinner, bound for eternal flames. It did not matter if they attended church, or even if they professed to be a Christian. I met many who claimed they were a Christian, but if I asked them about the specifics of salvation, sin, who Jesus was, or any other crucial matter of dogma, it was obvious to me that they were not really saved. They professed to know Jesus, but Jesus did not know them. They did not have a true relationship with Jesus, but were relying on their religious affiliation to do the saving for them.

I did not ponder too long on the uncomfortable questions that this dogma brought up. What about those who have never heard of Jesus? Crazy, I thought. I was certain that everyone in our modern world had heard of Jesus. What about those who were not raised in a Christian cultural backdrop? Pastor Skip once told us about his visit to India where he met a group of Sikhs. “They were still Sikhing,” he would chuckle. But seriously, what about people like them who were not from our Christian-saturated culture? I did not think too much about these questions. They were uncomfortable to me. Besides, God knew what was best, and He was a compassionate Father and all-knowing Judge. I had faith that He would ultimately do the right thing in determining their eternal destiny.

Questions like these became increasingly uncomfortable when I decided to enroll in the local community college. By 1990, I realized there was no future in odd cooking and dishwashing jobs. I needed to learn a trade, so on a whim I enrolled in a course in basic electronics. I finally had my foot in the door of higher education, and I started to meet people outside of my own social circle. At the age of 26, for the first time in my life, I met somebody who was not raised in the familiar traditions of Western Christendom. Trinh was from Vietnam, and everything about her was alien to me. Her thick accent was almost impenetrable, but we somehow managed to understand each other. I think I naively found her to be wild and exotic, since she was the first Asian I had ever really met. My curiosity got the better of me, and we became fast friends. One afternoon, over lunch outside the classroom, I asked her about Jesus. She did not understand what I was talking about. That was startling to me! Everybody whom I ever met, when asked about Jesus or God, gave some kind of opinion. They may not have been a true Christian, but they had an opinion about who Jesus was, or who God was. Everybody knew who Jesus was! But this girl from Vietnam, while she had heard the name, had no opinion about Jesus. She had as much opinion about Jesus as I had about the Buddha. That is, none. This Jesus character was not part of her culture, and she was not raised with this tradition, so why should she have an opinion?

Should I tell Trinh more about Jesus? I could tell a neighbor, a friend, a homeless guy on the streets about the salvation from sin that the death of Jesus gave us, and everybody would already have some basic idea of what I was talking about. Our culture was that of Christianity. Trinh was Buddhist. Since she did not share my cultural religious identity, I would have to describe to her, from first principles, about who Jesus was, why she was a sinner, and why she needed Jesus as her Savior! How could I possibly cross that cultural divide? It would be like her telling me about the Buddha – a name I had heard, but one that I knew nothing about. I was slowly learning how to view things from the point of view of over a billion humans whom I had never met. That was just a tiny step, just a tiny crack into viewing my Christian beliefs form another point of view, but it was a start.

“Are you going to talk to me about religion?” She showed her distaste by squeezing her eyes shut as if she bit a sour lemon.

“No.” I never brought up the subject again. I don’t think the thought that she was doomed for Hell ever crossed my mind.

Trinh was a whiz at math. I was terrified of math, and had never passed basic algebra in high school. I realized that I had to enroll in a basic math course if I wanted to continue studying electronics. My education began, but it was still tentative. I was still unsure of what I wanted to do, or how education was going to benefit me. Electronics did not really interest me, but the school catalog started to intrigue me. I could have a night course in Mexican archeology! American History! Creative Writing! Even as a lousy cook, I could afford these courses in the trade school! So one by one, on nothing but a whim and a newfound curiosity, I started taking night courses at Albuquerque TVI. I suddenly found that I missed all the reading that I had done in high school. After high school, I found one addiction in alcohol, then I found another addiction in Jesus. I did little of my own reading during this time, except for the Bible and John MacArthur biblical commentaries. The night classes in Albuquerque TVI taught me to be curious again. They taught me to be curious about dangerous subjects like history and sociology.

Back in Calvary Chapel, Pastor Skip taught me that curiosity in worldly wisdom was to be viewed with suspicion. Pastor Skip often spoke of his personal distrust of secular philosophy and psychology. He said that even Christian psychiatrists often had to do studies and readings of how the human mind works from secular labs and universities. “Why would I need to read these books of human wisdom,” Pastor Skip would preach, holding up his Bible, “when I have the Owner’s Manual right here?” Philosophy could be a good thing, Pastor Skip would say, since it literally means ‘the love of wisdom’. But true wisdom only comes from one source, again referencing the Bible, and secular philosophy leads to nothing but despair and sinful pride. Pastor Skip sometimes told us about his brother who once majored in philosophy. “He read all the philosophers, and came out more lost and confused then ever!” Well there you go. What more evidence did we need than Pastor Skip’s word on the matter?

Pastor Skip openly admitted that when it came to his Christian beliefs, his goal was to remain as ignorant and close-minded as possible. He did use those very words, and that really amazed me at a time when I was just discovering night classes at Albuquerque TVI. Pastor Skip implored us to read, study, and rely on nothing but the Bible. We did not need to bother ourselves with pseudo-intellectuals who studied the Bible as literature. We did not need to read about church history, religious thought or those Catholic church fathers. We did not need to entertain other ideas or points of view. All we needed was the Bible and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost to guide and teach us.

So for a short period of time, I alternated between two different ways of attaining knowledge and wisdom. Calvary Chapel insisted that it was by the Word of God alone, but at the same time my natural curiosity was being reawakened, thanks to some night classes at the local vocational school. I discovered that I was actually good at studying. I had an extremely long attention span, and I could sit for hours on end, doing nothing but reading, writing and taking notes. I followed Pastor Skip’s advice and read the Bible in its entirely. Then I read it again, cover to cover, in a different translation.

But I could also go to the library to check out some books assigned by my American history teacher. I particularly remember a shocking book written by escaped slave Frederick Douglass. My history teacher told us about how the Bible was used by Christians to justify slavery. “He certainly hates Christianity,” I would muse about my teacher. But I did not quit the class. As offensive as I often found American History, particularly my teacher’s condemnation of the role of religion, I did not drop the class. Instead, I went to the library in the attempt to verify some of the shocking things he said. Time and again, I found he was correct. He once described the horrors that the Spanish perpetrated on the southwestern natives in the name of Christ. I had never heard any of this information before! He told his shocked class, “Look, this is not a Disney movie. This is history.” I should have been offended, and I was. But I was addicted to learning more. If it were true, then I would have to deal with it. If I was to be honest with my Faith, I had to learn to reconcile this suppressed history, as shocking and offensive as some of it was, with my Christian beliefs.

It was a bit of a dichotomy. Pastor Skip, Calvary Chapel and my Christian beliefs on the one hand, and my burgeoning curiosity on the other. My high school education was next to useless. I had spent my entire high school career trying to avoid bullies and getting into a fair share of trouble. I had somehow squeaked through graduation after repeating my entire senior year and barely avoided repeating it a second time. I was given no educational direction from my parents, whom I don’t blame, because they did not know any better. I don’t think I was ever taught to appreciate the joys of education, or the thrill of discovery. I shuffled from class to class for five years at Albuquerque TVI, still with no direction, and with no intention of gaining a degree in anything. Some classes I excelled in, others I failed. I learned to face my fear of math. I enrolled in basic algebra, the same dreaded class that I had repeated and failed multiple times while in high school, and discovered that I had a natural affinity for it. I shocked even myself! I had come to believe that I was a failure at math, and that I would never understand it. It was a true self-fulfilling prophecy. I believed that I would never understand it, so I did not understand it. But I had no idea how talented I was in math, given a little confidence, discipline and attention. I learned to view the math problems as entertaining puzzles, much like crossword puzzles – and after much work, study and practice, I excelled. I was finally, after years of failure and self-loathing, learning to have some self-confidence.

Pastor Skip told me that confidence in my own strength was not pleasing to the Lord. I learned to repeat the wish of John the Baptist in reference to Jesus: He must increase, while I must decrease. Life was not about me. I was weak in my own flesh. I could do nothing on my own, without Christ who strengthened me. Of course Pastor Skip was right! I could see how lost we were when relying on our own strength! But when I pondered my own fleshly nature, and our lost and sinful state, I would sink into despair, guilt and self-loathing. There was nothing good about me, Pastor Skip taught, and I was wretched and wicked from my mother’s womb. Self-confidence only came when I was allowed to rely on my own strength, yet this confidence in my own power was offensive to God.

I was torn. Calvary Chapel taught me that I could not do anything. I was worthless without God. I had no power. I had to give it all to Jesus. Doing the seemingly impossible, by finally passing my dreaded math classes, and passing them after overcoming much self-imposed fear, was a tremendous victory for me. I was beginning to believe in, dare I say, myself. Just a little.

Despite my newfound love of learning, I was being pulled in two different directions. I could learn about the Bible, about Jesus and delve deeper into the meat of my beliefs, or I could rely on my own strength, develop some kind of discipline, and learn things in school, hopefully to lead to a better job, but ultimately just for the joy of it. I knew I wanted to study what I loved. And I loved Jesus. That love, I swore to myself, would never die.

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Conversions and De-conversions – my damned parents

By 1990, I was 26 years old and I was thoroughly immersed in the world of Fundamentalist Christianity. I was convinced that I had a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ”, that is I could talk to Jesus every day, at any time I wanted, and that Jesus was listening intently to every word that I said. Jesus was concerned when I brought my troubles and worries at the foot of the altar. Jesus was pleased when I witnessed his Gospel to my friends and family. Jesus showered me with his blessings when it was his good pleasure to do so. Jesus was scolding and correcting when I fell into Sin (“Correcting” was the term that my church used. We never actually used the Biblical terms of a “jealous” or “angry” god unless we were actually reading it from Scripture).

I talked to Jesus constantly. Of course, he never talked back. I never expected him to, because nobody I knew ever actually expected to have Jesus audibly speak to them. So it was a constant struggle for me to discover what the Will of God was for me. Apparently, from the way Pastor Skip used to preach, Jesus had a special and unique plan for me and my life. I would talk to Jesus, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk some more. He never said anything back, so instead I had to try and decipher seemingly random events in my life as if they were clues that he was sending to me. In other words, my relationship with Jesus was essentially a game of charades.

I found special and insightful meaning in that Psalm I read this morning. I wonder what God is trying to tell me with that?

My friends at work were especially receptive to that Chuck Missler cassette I played in the prep room today. God must want me to play some more of that tomorrow.

That checkout girl at the grocery store sure is cute. I wonder if God placed her in my life so that I could ask her out on a lunch date, and share the Gospel?

Jesus, when I bought this bicycle, I dedicated it to you for your glory. As I ride it today, lead me to a place where I can be an effective witness for your Kingdom.

Yes. I said all these things to myself – and much, much more. I went to the sermon cassette library and checked out all the messages I could find on the topic of God’s Will for the Christians’ life. “Discovering God’s Will for Your Life”. For the life of me, I don’t remember what any of them specifically said, but they all boiled down to, pray, be patient, live in the Spirit, and God will guide you to where He wishes you.

I took my Christian Faith very, very seriously. I figured I was not a powerful Bible pastor like Pastor Skip or Chuck Missler, but I could do my tiny part for the Kingdom working and spreading His message in the restaurant kitchen where I worked. I was happy with my small part in God’s giant plan.

But was I happy at that time? Looking back on that time over 20 years later, I don’t really know. I was certainly well liked at church and at work. My workmates put up with my constant witnessing and proselytizing, but while they loved spirited debate their constant pounding of my Faith really wore me down and tired me out. But I gained satisfaction from that by knowing that I was doing the will of God in spreading Gospel seeds among receptive unbelievers. Those seeds would surely germinate when they hit the ready and responsive ears of a willing heathen. I felt, probably for the first time in my life, that I was on a correct and constructive path. I felt like I had finally found my moral bearing. I had quit smoking and drinking, and abandoned almost every secular activity and pleasure from my life. I also felt like I was a tiny part of something much bigger, and that I had exciting, secret inside information concerning the spiritual realm of God and His coming Kingdom, that only those few of us who had genuine relationships with Jesus were privileged to. Those were exciting times for me.

But on the other hand, Christian beliefs could fill me with terror, uncertainty, anguish and moral disappointments. I sometimes felt as if I was constantly struggling to maintain Faith, fighting off guilt for not witnessing to a person I met in the streets, or keeping too much money when I knew I could always give more to Calvary Chapel’s coffers. I struggled to find the balance of being pious enough to be a good Christian witness for my friends, and not pious enough that I was making a disgusting show of myself. I struggled not to privately judge those who did not take their Faith as seriously as I did. I once gave a sermon to the singles youth group about how much Satan hated us, and wanted to take all of us down with him. I shuddered when I spoke, and I know I had the attention of everybody in that room, and several commented favorably on my powerful message. But it was a message that pulled from deep in my heart. I was convinced that Satan hated me, and that he hated everybody that I loved, and that my entire family was going straight to Hell. When I contemplated on that fact, I was terrified.

Sometime in the midst of my years of Christian fanaticism, my dad converted to Mormonism. My hard-scrabble lumberjack father finally put the booze down and devoted himself to the teachings of Joseph Smith. To this day I don’t know why he converted, but I am certain that it gave him a community, and allowed him to clean up his life a bit. But at the time, all I knew was that he was following heresy – a heretical temptation placed before him by Satan, the Father of Lies, and that the deception would land my dad into an unquenchable lake of fire. As I mentioned in a previous entry to this series, I have never been close to my dad. Especially during this time of my life, the blows of his fists were still fresh in my memory, and even though he lived several hundred miles from me, he still intimidated me. But he was my dad. He was the only dad that I would ever have, and I forced myself to love him because Jesus commanded it. I still remember the night where I, along with some other Christian friends, prayed for the salvation of Dad’s soul. I presented a photo of my bearded and smiling dad to my Christian friends, and told them about his damnable state as a Mormon convert. I asked my friends to pray with me. So we put the photo on the floor, and we sat on our knees, and out of habit, formed a circle around dad’s photo. I still remember that prayer. Everyone chanted and prayed all at once, while I cried. I cried and cried. I cried until my eyes swelled and my sinuses hurt. I distinctly remember staring at dad’s smiling face while imagining that smile burning in the flames of Hell. I remember that photo becoming wet with the tears that dripped from my face.

Mom was more difficult for me to figure out. She had long since moved back to my childhood home in San Ysidro. I knew she no longer attended any kind of church, but she did not appear to me to have joined any heretical cult, like dad did. She had clearly backslidden though. At best, she was the type of Christian that Pastor Skip warned us about. He called the type of Christian who had lost the passion and fire of their First Love, and now wandered about in Christian apathy, as a Carnal Christian. I did not know if mom had lost her Faith or her Salvation, but I saw enough disturbing signs from her, that I had become concerned. First, she did not attend any church that I could tell. I remember her mentioning that she believed that God does not care what you believe, but he does care if you are sincere in your beliefs. I felt that was a sure sign the mom rejected the belief in the exclusive salvation through Jesus Christ alone, and just not a very smart position to hold. My concern for her had nothing to do with her actions or morals. It had only to do with her beliefs.

I once got her to accept an invitation to attend Calvary Chapel with me. It was a Sunday evening service, which was the night that Pastor Skip typically did his expositional studies. I was very excited. I could not wait to get mom into the sanctuary of that church, and let her listen to the magic words of Pastor Skip as he presented the Gospel to her. I wanted her to see for herself how attractive my kind of Christianity was! It was not the half-crazed Pentecostalism of my youth that I knew that she was familiar with. No! This was the contemporary, modern and reasonable faith – a true, non-judgmental and genuine relationship with Jesus Christ, without all the baggage of religion!

When she accepted my invitation to attend Calvary Chapel, I decided to do a little early prep work. I had no doubt that mom was once a born again Christian but had abandoned her faith sometime after her divorce from my step-dad Michael. So I spent the afternoon praying. “Dear Jesus, I ask that you open mom’s heart to your message, and that the Holy Spirit gently, lovingly but ably convicts her of her Sin. I ask that you put power into the Pastor Skip’s sermon, so that he will say those words which will affect mom. Dear Jesus, I want mom to join me in having a loving relationship with you”.

I rode my bike to Calvary Chapel about an hour or so before mom was to meet me there for the evening service. I went to the back room behind the stage, which was the prayer chamber where I had given my life to Jesus a couple of years before. I told the assistant there that my mom was attending Calvary Chapel for the first time, that she was a Christian but had fallen away, and that I would like them to pray with me.

Out of habit, we joined hands in a circle and prayed. As we blessed Pastor Skip’s upcoming sermon, one of the assistants thought that maybe we could go into Pastor Skip’s office and ask him to personally pray with us. My heart leapt! Surely, this was going to be an anointed message from Pastor Skip!

We walked down the hall towards the pastor’s office and one of the assistants gently knocked, walked inside and told the pastor that he had a visitor. Pastor Skip was busy preparing for the evening’s message, but he graciously invited us all in. I told Pastor Skip that my mom was coming in for the evening’s service, and that she was a Christian in the early 1970’s, but had fallen away.

“Is your mom saved?”

“I don’t know. But I want her to meet Jesus”

Pastor Skip stood and joined us in front of his desk. Out of habit, we joined hands in a circle and he prayed. “Dear Jesus, I bring Joe’s mom before your throne of grace….”

After his prayer, he beamed a broad smile as he always did, and I thanked him and the pastoral assistants for their time. I sat in the lobby and waited for mom. When she entered the building, she was amazed at the size and beauty of the sanctuary. “Such a big, beautiful church! I can tell wonderful things are happening here!”

The worship band rocked as usual. Mom really got into it, and clapped along. She no doubt remembered the guitar-based music from her Jesus Freak days. Following their usual pattern of two up-tempo songs, the band slowed down and performed a more contemplative and praise-worthy song. The hands started to rise in worship. What would mom do? I watched her nervously. She kept her hands clasped in front of her, her mouth stopped singing and she watched.

Pastor Skip began to preach. I remember nothing about the message in particular, but I do remember when he began to wrap it up for the evening. Pastor Skip rarely gave altar calls. It was just not his style. But this particular evening, with my mom in the back of his mind, he got as close as he ever got to giving one. The piano played a few quiet chords under Pastor Skip’s exhortation:

“Perhaps you are not a Christian. Perhaps you do not know God. Maybe you have a lot of questions and doubts, but Jesus will meet you where your doubts are. Maybe you think you are not good enough to be saved by Jesus and that you can never be forgiven, but Jesus will take you just as you are. Perhaps you were once a Christian but have fallen away…

He looked immediately, with laser precision, directly at my mother.

“…but somebody who loves you very much dragged you here kicking and screaming. Jesus loves you. He wants to save you. Will you accept his invitation?”

The service ended. As people filed out the door towards the foyer, mom silently rose and slowly walked to the front of the auditorium. She stood at the foot of the stage, all alone, head bowed. I did not follow her. I just stayed at my seat and prayed fervently. What was she thinking? Was she giving her life to Jesus? Was she crying? Was she repenting of her sins? To tell you the truth, I will never know. She stood up there for at least 10 minutes, and refused all offers of help from the assistant pastors. She just needed time alone with Jesus.

She finally walked back to collect her things, told me she enjoyed the service, and without a word of explanation, she left.

I never spoke to her again of that evening. The next week she came again to Calvary Chapel to watch special guest musician Darrell Mansfield perform some Gospel blues. And that was it. She never returned. As far as I am aware, that was the last time mom ever attended church.

I was afraid to talk to mom about that evening. Watching her at the stage, deep in contemplation with her head bowed seemed like such a private and intimate moment for her, that I did not want to spoil it. She asked the assistant pastors for privacy, so I thought I would give her the same privacy by not intruding on her thoughts. But I finally figured that she was up there deciding if she wanted to return to Jesus or not, and in that tense moment of decision, with all her memories of religious belief to reflect on in that moment, she made the crucial choice to reject her religious beliefs.

Mom was teetering over the edge. She nearly gave her life to Jesus. We had circles of prayer warriors asking God for his salvation upon her! But in that crucial moment of decision she walked away. My heart sank.

One evening, several months later, I was visiting her in her home. My heart was sick knowing that she had known a taste of Christianity, but had decided to ultimately reject Jesus. She was deceived, lost and damned. For several months, I was very uncomfortable when visiting mom. How could I convince her? How could I tell her what she did not already know? How could I make her accept Jesus again?

She asked me what was wrong. I mumbled something about her not being a Christian, and that I could not get over it. I still remember her forcefully asking me:

“Joe! Do you think I am going to Hell!?”

“Yes!” I remember crying again. I remember that familiar feeling of snot clogging my nose, and tears running down my flushed hot cheeks. I cried out of terror and fear of my god. I cried because nobody seemed to understand the damnable fate that awaited them! I cried in frustration that nobody that I talked to, not even my own family, not even my parents, would accept Jesus as their Savior and accept a home in paradise. Nobody listened to me but a lousy street bum!

I cried and cried and cried. My god I cried so much when I was a Christian. I cried until I could not see from tears. I cried until my face hurt. I cried until I hiccupped from interrupted breathing. I had no time for God’s promised Peace that passeth understanding. I was too busy crying over the miserable survivor’s guilt that I felt. I was saved. Everybody that I loved was damned.

Mom, as usual, told me that there was a lot that I did not understand. But she asked me what kind of Heaven I could expect if everybody I knew was burning in Hell. How could Heaven be joyful, she asked, when everyone you know and love is burning forever? How much will you enjoy heaven with that in the back of your mind?

I never witnessed to my mom again. I never once witnessed to dad. The burden of guilt was unbearable. I could not hold myself responsible for their rejection of God, but I could not help feeling guilt whenever I was with them. So I just left them alone. I loved my Jesus, but I was terrified of the awesome power he held over us mortals. He held us from a thread that hovered over the fires of Hell. Why couldn’t anybody understand this obvious truth?

I was happy as a Christian. Sometimes. But I remember mostly the fear, the guilt and the tears.

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Conversions and De-conversions - Ye shall know them by their fruits

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
- Galatians 5:20-23

Ye shall know them by their fruits.
- Matthew 7:16

The dream of every Evangelical Christian is to lead the lost heathen to a relationship with Jesus and the gift of hope for an everlasting paradise. I was no exception. My former drinking buddies at work, who were surely baffled by my mysterious and sudden pious behavior, were my new mission field. I spent most every day on the prep line in the restaurant I worked in, talking about Jesus to them. When I was not talking about Jesus to them, I was playing recorded Pastor Skip sermons on the cassette player. If I was not doing that, I considered myself as ‘living a witness’, that is, behaving so that they would surely know that I was a new creature in Christ. I wanted them to find my behavior and personality as Godly and attractive, so that they too would want to come to know Jesus. I was called to be the Salt of the Earth, so just as salt places a thirst on the tongue and gives food its savor, I was to live in such a way that they would want to imitate. I tried to live with the Fruits of the Spirit in full view of everybody. Sorry, I was not allowed to try – that would have been forcing the fruits of the Spirit with my own sinful and weak flesh, and that was not allowed. The Spirit was not under my command. Rather, I prayed to Jesus fill me with His Holy Spirit, and fill me with dunamis, power, to shine forth with the Fruits of love, joy and peace. My friends could not see me get angry. They could not see me get impatient. They could not see me drink, smoke or cuss like I used to. They had to see a new creature in Christ, and a miraculously transformed life.

The problems that I faced with this lifestyle started almost immediately. How does one live with the love of the Holy Spirit, that is, love which is greater than the love of my heathen friends? How could I attain that selfless, divine, agape love that I always heard about from Pastor Skip? How could I have joy that was greater than theirs, or patience, or goodness? After all, my workmates and friends were not criminals and reprobates. They were mostly college students and single parents. They treated each other, from what I could tell, with as much love and compassion as I could reasonably expect from any civilized human. They were not the caricatures of villains or sinners like I read about in Chick tracts. They were not out murdering, slandering and backbiting. They were just… normal people. But the fact remained that I had to be better than them because I was filled with the Holy Spirit. If I could not live my witness as a New Creature of Jesus Christ, then they would not be able to tell the difference between the Sinner and the Saint. So I had to pray to Jesus give me the power to make my hyper-moral life stand above the background noise of worldly morality. I was bought with the Blood of Jesus after all.

The cassette player was always on, entertaining us in the food prep room. We usually swapped turns with cassettes. A former drinking buddy of mine had an old AC/DC cassette playing:

I’ve got big balls
I’ve got big balls
They’re such big balls
And they’re dirty big balls
And he’s got big balls
And she’s got big balls
But we’ve got the biggest balls of them all!

I looked at my friend with the same expression I used to see on Brother Ed’s face when he conveyed disgust at my rock music. “Can you turn that stuff down? I cannot believe I used to listen to that kind of music!”

“What happened to you? You used to be cool! Why don’t you pull that stick out of your ass!”

And with that little exchange, I learned that moral purity was not the same as being a sanctimonious jerk. So just what was I supposed to do? I did not for a second think that I was morally superior to anybody simply because I no longer cussed, but how else was I to be distinguished from the unwashed heathen? And how was I to do it without trying to do it? What did it mean to live for Jesus and express myself by the Fruits of the Spirit?

Needless to say, I took my new Christian beliefs very, very seriously. I was somehow supposed to be morally superior, to exhibit Spiritual Fruits, yet do it in such a way that it was not me who was striving, but the Spirit working through me. What it boiled down to was prayer. When a prayer like “Jesus give me strength, work through me with the power of the Holy Spirit - I ask that you mold me more into Your image” was repeated over and over, constantly throughout the day, every day of the week, it becomes a mantra. It was the same problem that I faced when trying to find the Will of God for my life. How many sermons, taped messages and pamphlets did I run across with titles like, “How to Discover God’s Will for Your Life”? It boiled down to Bible Study and prayer. So I prayed, “Please God, show me Your special purpose for me”, over and over, countless times, hoping somehow to discover God’s divine message. Little did I know at the time that prayer does work, but the power is in the act of prayer itself. The act of repetitious prayers and chants is what brings about the change. The power was in me the whole time. Sometimes it worked. Mostly it failed.

Because of my odd working hours, it was not unusual for me to stay up all night and sleep during the day. The Calvary Connection, a recording of a recent Skip Heitzig sermon, was broadcast on the radio every morning at 2AM. I remember that I was preparing to do laundry but I needed quarters for the coin operated machines. If I could hurry my walk of three blocks to the nearest all-night diner and get change, I could make it back in time to catch Pastor Skip on the radio. So I quickly walked to the diner and got my change. On the way back, I cut a corner through the parking lot of a Howard Johnsons hotel. There was no traffic at that hour of the evening. The night was dark and quiet until a van raced from behind and swerved in front of me, cutting off my path. The driver jumped out of the van and ran towards me, yelling at me not to move. I stood frozen, more out of the sudden shock than a need to obey his orders. Just half a second before, it was a peaceful walk. The next thing I knew I was being tackled on the pavement of the parking lot.

“I got you, fucker! Where are the others?”
“What?”
“Where are the others!” He was sitting on me and grappling my legs into some kind of lock.
“I am here alone. There are no others”
He punched me in my lower rib area. “Where are the others, you piece of shit?” I saw you with those other people. I saw you messing with the cars! Where are they?”

Then I understood. He was either plain clothes hotel security or else the night hotel desk attendant. He thought I was a vandal out causing trouble with some kids. The situation did not look good. I was out alone, walking through a hotel parking lot at 2AM. I had very long hair, a beard, and was admittedly more than a little shady looking. There were probably some troublesome kids on the other side of the parking lot, and he thought I was one of them. That’s it. Simple enough. He must have me confused with one of them. Despite how bad it looked for me, I figured I could get out of it. I knew I was innocent. I inwardly prayed. I stayed calm. God was placing me in this situation for a reason. This unhinged renta-cop was my new witness field.

He was a short, muscular man, maybe in his mid-40s. He got behind me, bent my arm into a chicken wing, and led me into the hotel lobby. There was nobody around. I do not even remember hotel staff being present, just him. With my arm twisted behind my back, he led me into a small room behind the back office, forced me in and threw me to the floor.

“What were you doing out there, mother fucker!?” I calmly tried to explain what I was doing. I lived in the apartments next door. I needed to do laundry. I went to the diner opposite from the hotel for some change. I was headed back to my apartment. You tackled me. You can call the waitress at the diner to confirm the story if you want.

“LIAR! I ought to kick your fucking teeth in!” He reared his leg back to kick me, and his pointed-toe cowboy boot stopping just inches from my nose. I did not budge. I prayed intensely inside. I did not move, I did not resist, and I was not even afraid. I knew Jesus was on my side protecting me. I just sat on the floor and watched that book swing to strike my face. He did stop himself, probably because he imagined the lawsuits that would come his way if he did injure me. But I am fully confident that I was prepared to take a full blow to my face with that wild kick.

“FUCK!!” He yelled in frustration. He told me that he was calling the police and that I was in a lot of trouble. He left me in the room and locked the door behind him.

I remained on the floor in that locked office room until the police came. I prayed intensely. “Dear Jesus, give me strength to turn the other cheek. Give me the courage to forgive. Give me the power of the Holy Spirit, give me the power to show them your Christian Love!”

The police finally came. The guard told his story to them, then they unlocked the door and let me speak. One police officer questioned me, and the other surveyed the area. I was overly polite. I was extremely courteous and cooperative. I answered all his questions fully and honestly, without a shred of hostility in my tone or my voice. They questioned the guard again, compared notes and then finally reached their verdict. Both policemen and the guard stood in front of me, and the lead officer said to me,

“I have to let you go. We have no evidence that you did anything wrong. But I will tell you my honest opinion. I think you are up to no good. I think you did vandalize some cars out in the parking lot. It is late, you are out here all alone in the streets, and besides if you were really innocent you would be screaming bloody murder and demanding to press charges. You are too cooperative. I don’t trust you. Understand, that is just my opinion, and I cannot prove anything. But I am telling you so you know to watch yourself next time you go for a stroll in the middle of the night.”

All three men were silent. I was being excused. But I felt that God was opening a door of opportunity that I could not pass up. I jumped at it.

“Thank you officer, but I need to let you know something. I am a born again Christian, and Jesus has given me the power to love you all, and I believe that I should not seek vengeance. That is why I did not strike out. I did it for the sake of Jesus Christ. God Bless you all.”

All three of them looked away from me as I gave my short speech – which I took to be a sure sign that they were convicted of their internal sins! The Holy Ghost had surely worked through me that glorious evening. I uttered not one angry word. I did not seek revenge or threaten lawsuits. I did not insist on my innocence. Instead, I was a witness for my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Someday, these three men may look back on that young man that they were certain was a criminal, and who instead showed them the divine love of Christ. I walked the short distance back to my apartment room, singing worship songs the whole way. My God is an awesome God!

I considered this event to be my most significant act of piety and faith, and the greatest and most selfless demonstration of my Spiritual Fruits that I would ever exhibit as a Christian. Simple encounters and incidents like this confirmed to me that prayer worked. I was never foolish enough to pray to God for what I considered trivial things. Prayer was a direct hotline to God, and I should never use it frivolously. I don’t think I ever prayed to satisfy selfish desires. I never prayed for extra money, or a better job, or good health. My life was given to me by God to be a mission field and an opportunity for Him, and I thanked God for the life that He had given me. I had seen the worst of life, and now that I had given my life to Jesus, I was seeing the best of it. Thank you Jesus!

I did my best to be a good witness for Jesus Christ at work. I sometimes put Bible quotes attributed to ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ on the kitchen bulletin board. I always introduced myself by saying ‘Praise the Lord’ instead of merely using my name. I witnessed constantly, trying to convince others of the loving and forgiving grace of Jesus. I invited many people to attend Calvary Chapel with me, and even had some success at that. I was spent most of the day looking for any opportunity that I could to witness to a friend in the restaurant. I would try to subtly guide any trivial conversation into a conversation that contained eternal consequences. The terrible gravity of my purpose in life made me preoccupied with evangelism. Guilt and evangelistic fervor drove me, and I must have been a terrible nuisance to my friends. I moved every few months from one wretched apartment to another, so I was always alternating between walking, riding my bike, or taking the bus to work. Usually I rode my bike. Every day as I prepared for work I prayed that Jesus would open some witnessing opportunity for me, and that the Holy Sprit would soften the hearts of those who would hear His message. The stress that I felt was sometimes terrible. I was young and single, with a relatively simple job and few responsibilities, yet I would have grinding headaches that would pierce my temples. The thought of my friends suffering eternal damnation had become an unbearable burden. The unfathomable joy that I was supposed to feel was overwhelmed with the guilt I felt for not effectively witnessing my Faith. As I peddled to work on my bike, I continued to pray, asking Jesus to give me strength and to help put wisdom into my mouth as I spoke to others about His loving grace. Which makes the day I stopped myself mid-prayer seem so striking to me now. I was fully hypnotized by the need to evangelize, and sold out to Jesus. Then one day, peddling to work, as I was praying,

“Dear Jesus, give me strength. Give me strength. Show me what to say. Give me wisdom. Send your Holy Spirit…”

I stopped my bike. I sat up and I told myself, out loud,

“You are just repeating the same thing over and over. You are not talking to God. You are just psyching yourself up.”

I suddenly realized that I was just chanting a mantra. It was no different than the athlete who cheers his team on before the big game, or when our old sales crew had sung songs to motivate us to sell door-to-door vacuum cleaners. I was pressuring Faith and Strength into my body just by repeating a chant and forcing belief. I suddenly had the thought cross my mind that there was nothing supernatural in any of this. All the power was generated in my will. It was all from me. That simple, short and blasphemous thought was shocking enough to me that I remember that very moment to this day, some 22 years later.

My mind was struggling with the divergent and conflicting ideas about where my moral and spiritual strength came from. I was fully convinced that Jesus was my Savior, the Bible was the inerrant Word of God, and held the rest of the Evangelical party line. I was convinced because I had witnessed for myself how Jesus had turned my life around. As the song goes, “I was blind, but now I see”, and when you are held under the power of such beliefs, it really does feel as if your former, faithless beliefs were like unto being blind – even dead. I believed that my true life had only started on the evening I walked forward to the church stage at Calvary Chapel, and had voluntarily given my life to Jesus by my own freewill. I knew firsthand how miserable I was without Jesus, and how joyful I was with Him in my life. How could any of that change in my life possibly happen without His miraculous power? But the other side of the dichotomy came when I fully surveyed my feelings. I could secretly feel that my prayers to Jesus were becoming indistinguishable from just talking to myself. The joy that I felt was mostly a result of Pastor Skip telling me that I had to feel joy, and my new Christian friends telling me how joyous they always felt. If I dared search deep enough, I often felt just as miserable as I felt before I met Jesus. My thoughts were centered on Evangelizing to my lost and dying friends and family, and the guilt I felt if I dared think of my own needs over those of the Heathen. How dare I watch secular television or go to the movies when there were lost people who needed to meet Jesus? When I think back to those years, I do not actually remember much joy. I remember guilt and stress.

I longed to evangelize to the lost, and wished I could be granted the privilege of actually leading somebody to Salvation through Jesus. I loved hearing stories from Pastor Skip in which he led somebody in prayer to meet Jesus at the park, in the airport, at the beach, in a restaurant – it seemed he had a salvation story for every occasion! How I longed for experience like that! What better way for me to demonstrate my Spiritual Fruits, and demonstrate to myself and everybody else the miracle of salvation and a regenerated life? What a glorious feeling it would be if I could lead somebody to Jesus! If I could feel the joy of leading somebody to Jesus, what could possibly go wrong?

With a lead-in like that, you know what’s coming, right?

Restaurant work is often difficult, fast-paced and frantic. The place I worked at was extremely busy during the lunch hours, and catered to businessmen and women on tight schedules. They had to order anything off the extensive menu, and get it quick with a smile. As calm and pleasant as a restaurant dining room is, always remember that it is often barely controlled chaos behind the kitchen doors. The kitchen manager always scheduled the most valuable cooks during the peak hours, and their duties were crucial. Off hours were more calm, but the lunch rush could be exhausting. Everybody in the kitchen had their assigned positions, and if one person was missing, the whole kitchen staff would suffer. I was often scheduled to work on the pantry station during the afternoon peak hours. My role was crucial, and without me there the kitchen would quickly be buried in untended salad tickets.

I waited at the bus stop for my ride across Albuquerque to the restaurant. I remember waiting at the bus stop for quite a very long time before the bus came. I don’t remember why I arrived early to the bus stop on that particular day, but if I were still a Christian I would have said that the Spirit called me there early that day. I had a divine appointment and purpose to fulfill. I looked around and saw an obviously homeless man sitting by the side of a building near the bus stop. I went over to talk to him. I can still see his face. He was perhaps mid-40s, with long, graying scraggly hair under a stocking cap. He was tall, with very thick hornrimmed glasses. I sat near him and we had a conversation. As I always did, I attempted to turn our conversation towards spiritual matters, and on this day I was successful. As the conversation turned my way, he started to get flustered – not with me, but at something personal within himself, perhaps some painful experience from his past. He told me that he was Jewish, and asked why he should accept Jesus as his Messiah. I knew absolutely nothing about Judaism, except that Jesus was a Jew, so I figured that we were already halfway home. I looked at the time. The bus was running on schedule, in fact, I could see it coming up the road to pick me up and take me to work.

I had to make a fast decision. On the one hand, everybody at work knew that I was a Christian, and I viewed myself as a representative for the Faith and for Jesus Christ. If I missed work during the frantic lunch rush, I would never hear the end of it, not just from the kitchen manager, but also from my friends. They might think that I was a selfish and irresponsible Christian for not making it to work on time. I doubted that I would get fired since my work record was excellent, but that possibility did exist. On the other hand, there was a homeless man here with me, who was obviously hurting. He had a story to tell, and I was there to listen. But more importantly, I saw that he was willing to talk about matters of eternal gravity and was halfway to accepting Jesus as his Savior. He just needed a friend to push him over the edge. He was a transient with no home, and I was afraid that if I got on the bus I would never see him again. There were no coincidences in God’s Plan, and I believed that both of us were there near the bus stop on this particular day by His divine appointment. It was a stressful moment of decision, and I saw no way out of a bad situation.

Should I disappoint my friends and put my Christian reputation and witness at risk, or should I leave this man who was willing to talk about Jesus to continue to wander the streets without an opportunity to hear the Gospel of Jesus? I had no choice. I knew what I had to do. I watched the bus drive past the stop as I offered him something to eat at a nearby diner.

I did not call the restaurant from a phone booth to let them know I would not make it in. If I did, they might have been able to call another cook in for relief. But I did not call. To put it bluntly, I did not call work because I was a coward. I could not think of a suitable excuse for not coming to work that would satisfy the kitchen manager. “I cannot make it to work because I have to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with a homeless man” did not strike me as an excuse anybody was likely to accept. Lying was anathema to my Christian beliefs – I could not be ashamed that I was spreading the Gospel by lying and telling my boss that I had come down with a sudden, nasty cold. Excuse or no excuse, there was no way I was going to avoid getting in a lot of trouble.

We sat in the diner for a few hours and he spoke to me about his life and experiences. He ate soup with bread and told me why he was so disappointed with religion. I told him Jesus was not a religion but a relationship. He asked me if that was what the button I had clipped on my ball cap meant. “Know Jesus Know Peace. No Jesus No Peace”. The lunch crowd in the diner finally dispersed and I could speak more openly and freely. I told him about how wonderful and joyous my life with Jesus was. I told him how he had changed my life from a life as a reprobate sinner, to one of godly hope for eternal life. I told him how rich life was with Jesus, the True Messiah! I brought him to tears. The homeless man cried and stuttered and choked on his snot the same way I did when I gave my life to Jesus. I asked him if he wanted to meet Jesus. He said yes. Please pray this prayer with me: “Dear Jesus, I confess I am a sinner before you, and I want you to forgive me of my sins. I accept you as my Personal….”

With that triumphant victory, I told him I had to get to work. I prayed with him. I sat with him at the bus stop until the next bus came for me. I boarded the bus, looked from the window at him sitting on the bench, and the bus pulled away. I never saw him again. I reeled him in and bagged him, so my duties were over. I get a star on my heavenly crown. See you on the streets of gold, buddy.

I did not feel the overwhelming joy that I expected to feel after leading him to Jesus. I did not feel relief from guilt after successfully evangelizing. Frankly, I felt sick. I don’t know if it was because I was bracing for the consequences of showing up to work several hours late, or if it was because I felt like a parasite after leading an obviously hurting human being to Jesus, then once I converted him, suddenly releasing him to flail away on his own. I scored my touchdown, but felt sick about celebrating.

I walked into the kitchen and the cooks were busy preparing for the evening clientele. They glared at me. I tried my best to sneak onto the line unnoticed and start working with them. I kept quiet but felt foolish and embarrassed.

The kitchen manager stormed up to me. “Nice of you to finally come to work! Where were you?”
“Sorry, I could not make it.”
“What do you mean you ‘could not make it’? Where where you!?”
“I am sorry. It is terribly personal. I cannot really tell you. But I promise you that it will never happen again.” As foolish and cowardly as that sounded, I knew that it was more acceptable than, “I was busy converting a stranger to my religion”. I felt as speechless and inept as I did when I was ten years old, when I sat in a broom closet terrified of explaining to Mrs Cristola that I was crying because I had blasphemed the Holy Ghost. How could I possibly explain these Spiritual concerns to unbelieving heathens?

From that day on, I viewed all Evangelism with particular suspicion. Something in my brain just clicked. I don’t think I ever again evangelized with such fervor, and I was always wary of those around me who did. I remember joining my friends as they evangelized around apartment clubhouses, and we lured the apartment kids with pizza. We would not give them pizza until they listened to our 5-minute sermon. I could see then what a disgusting bait and switch job we were pulling on children. I remember joining my friends as we surrounded strip clubs in ‘circles of prayer’ as some others went inside to evangelize. I remember the pride my friends felt when they dared the owner to call the cops to chase them away – and I kept my cowardly mouth shut. I remember attending a Greg Laurie ‘Harvest Crusade' at the UNM basketball arena. The place was packed to the rafters and I could only find room to sit on an aisle stair. In the middle of Greg Laurie’s preaching, I was told by an usher who worked for Greg Laurie to get off the stair, since there would soon be a flood of people on the stairs responding to the upcoming altar call. I remember wondering how the usher knew that so many people would be responding to an altar call, unless the whole thing was somehow orchestrated in advance. I obediently got up and stood behind the back row, and sure enough, on cue, the floor of the stadium was covered with converts. I was beginning to view evangelism as similar to a stud in a single bar, driven by raging hormones and looking for a one-night stand. Just like the single male stud scouting a young girl, the Evangelist and the Sinner have a ritual complete with body language, a courtship, intimacy, orgasm and eventual abandonment. I spent time with that homeless man, I gave him my Gospel message, I was kind to him, bought him food, then when the right moment came I laid the emotions on thick, made him cry, and prayed a prayer of conversion with him. Then I abandoned him. It was all part of the script, and I recognized it immediately. Similarly, the ‘Harvest Crusade’ usher knew that Greg Laurie would haul in a stadium full of converts, because he always drew in a stadium full of converts. It was part of the script.

It seemed that no matter what I did, I could not figure out how to show others my Christian Faith by my Spiritual Fruits. My attempts to demonstrate my Christian love, hope and peace all seemed to backfire in my face or be plainly insincere. The fact that I could not sincerely demonstrate my divine Gifts of the Spirit, despite constant prayer, despite constantly seeking Jesus and fervently desiring to Evangelize, was a huge step that eventually led to my complete abandonment of my Christian Faith. But there were many more steps to come.

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Conversions and De-conversions - He Is Sailing

After I ‘gave my life to the Lord’, I felt like I my life had a clean slate. I felt light and pure, and I glowed with a joyfulness that I had not known in years. One of the first things that I did after my religious conversion was to look for a suitable church. I was attracted to Calvary Chapel, but I did not want to commit to the first church I visited in six years. I quickly discovered that the clubhouse in my apartment hosted a prayer meeting every week, so I decided to sit in. I arrived a little late, and walked in to about 10 young men and women chanting in tongues very loudly. ‘Loud’ meaning full throttle from the diaphragm. It was not ecstatic as worshippers in Grandpa Wagner’s church though, and when I walked in, a young man abruptly stopped his chanting and warmly welcomed me, then just as abruptly started belting out the glossolalia again. I had seen plenty of Tongue Speaking over the years, but this level of intensity was different from anything I had experienced. There was no interpretation with the Tongues, and no worship involved. It was simply these ten people, pacing back and forth in the clubhouse, and very loudly chanting in an Angelic Language. They told me that they were blessing the clubhouse and casting out demons, and I could just sit and wait while they continued. So I sat and waited, and watched.

OK, this is your new belief. You are back in the religious world. You know this is the kind of stuff to expect from now on. Better learn to accept it.

After they stopped yelling and pacing, they gathered for a Bible Study. Since I was the newcomer, the study was quickly geared to evangelize to me. At one point, they even read John 14:6, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man cometh to the Father but by me’, and everybody suddenly stopped speaking and looked at me waiting for me to make a decision for Jesus. It was a very tense moment. The secret desire of every Evangelical Christian is to lead sinners to Jesus, despite their awkward reluctance to include them in a worship service. “Don’t worry everybody. I’m a Christian”. There were audible gasps of relief.

The only person there in the clubhouse who actually lived in the apartment complex with me was a hulk of a man nicknamed ‘Atlas’ because of his size. After the Bible Study he took a couple sniffs of my clothes and told me that if I was to be a Christian I had to stop smoking. “You are the Temple of the Holy Spirit. You don’t want to pollute God’s Temple”. That logic made a strange kind of sense to me at the time, so I promised him that I would do my best to quit. “You cannot do it on your own. You need the strength of the Holy Spirit to give you power! You can do all things through Jesus! Without Jesus, you are powerless!”

From then on, I took a commitment to pray to Jesus for strength in my new life of Faith. I vowed never again to forsake Jesus, and to always seek God in prayer. I vowed not to simply play religion. I went back to my apartment room and flushed all my remaining cigarettes down the toilet, continually praying for strength the whole time. In my newfound conviction, I felt I had to finally be serious for Jesus, to finally get real about living my life for him. That meant I had to purge all worldly influence out of my life, and dedicate my life solely and exclusively to Him. I looked at my huge stereo system, and the several hundred music LPs that I had collected since high school. I remembered all the debates about secular music with Brother Ed back in Cape Baptist Christian School, and repented of how rebellious I had been.

So that evening, I sacrificed my one and only true passion and joy in my simple and empty life – I gave up my secular music. It must have taken a few dozen trips to the dumpster to unload the heavy stacks of music LPs that I had collected since high school. I remember looking down in the dumpster at several hundred LPs of all different genres, wondering if I should have given them to somebody who could enjoy them instead of giving them a trip to the landfill. NO! I do not give away garbage. Garbage goes where it belongs! And with that certainty of conviction, I marched back upstairs to my apartment to grab another armload of LPs. I had to sacrifice what I could to Jesus, to show Him that I was truly Faithful to Him, and that I sincerely meant to commit my life to His cause and accept His purpose.

Out of the hundreds of LPs that I threw away that evening, there was one that I simply could not part with, and was inwardly able to rationalize keeping. I must mention that LP because it is directly related to this story of my de-conversion. The message of the music on that LP contains a reflection of my Spiritual thinking during those years. The songs were mostly vague, quasi-religious prayers and hymns that were achingly beautiful, and by straining and stretching the meaning of the lyrics, I could re-interpret most of the songs into becoming worship music to Jesus. Sort of. One of my favorite songs off the LP was called He is Sailing, which is a song of hope and expectation for a coming Messiah figure. True it is just a song, but as much as I loved it as a Sinner, I found new hope and meaning in that song as a Christian. I knew the song was not explicitly Christian, and I knew that the singer and lyricist was definitely not a Christian, but the music and message was so beautiful to me, that I simply could not part with it. That song represented both my newborn conviction as a Christian, and my link back to the secular world with my secret hope for universal salvation. Hell, the song even includes glossolalia.




He is Sailing.

Out of the mist into tropical splendor
With garlands of flowers
In majestical fusion we see tonight
On to this sacred reunion of pleasure
They row as a rhythm
Ten thousands of millions to touch the Light

King is sailing they say
King is sailing this Day of days
King is coming we sing
King is coming we know

All the souls He to touch. All the millions of souls He to touch…

Heaven set sail in His ship full of light
He transcends all our love
To caress all our fears in a moment divine
Weakest and strongest will dance in delight
All Illuminous. Our Savior.
They bringing Him forth. We will sing tonight

Our true Kingdom Come

Damn. Just listening to that song again now as I type this, and thinking back many years ago to emotional, yearning love for Jesus brings tears to my eyes. It is the bitter memories of discovering the disappointment of religious Faith, and the failed expectations of loving a Divine Savior. How I longed for Universal Salvation and Universal forgiveness! But as much as I clung to that hope of salvation through that meaningful song which I often played in Christian devotion, I knew my beliefs were of a strictly exclusive nature. I knew that Jesus was a vengeful god, and would strike out against those Sinners who dared rebel against Him in their unbelief. I knew that Jesus demanded humans to walk the narrow path of belief and Faith, and that the highway to Hell was paved with Sin disguised as good intentions. With the knowledge that I was one of the lucky elect of God, there was no way to not feel that I was better than the hordes of unwashed heathen doomed to everlasting torment. It was an ominous feeling knowing that my eternal fate was in the hands of a god who willed us into paradise or torment based on nothing but our deepest thoughts and beliefs. That thought terrified me. I had no outward sign that assured me of my Salvation. Unlike the certain sign of Salvation that Speaking in Tongues gave, and that Grandpa Wagner taught me as a child, Pastor Skip taught me that I could not spend my time looking for outward signs and wonders. I had nothing to rely on but my own failing Faith.

The eternal love expressed in the words to that song described a Divine Love that I had never felt in my life, and a Love that I desperately craved to feel. I do think that, in a strange way, deep down in my psyche, that song also reflected my hidden and unspoken hope that Jesus was in fact not the only Way. That we would all, eventually, find our own salvation, through whatever religious tradition we cared to follow. Not that I would ever admit to such heresy. But the Mind works in mysterious ways. That song carried me through many mental trials during the following years. Now, over twenty years later and after completely shedding religious beliefs from my life, He Is Sailing still carries my hope of universal salvation. Salvation is a mythic symbol of human restoration, and salvation carries whatever vague meaning the myth may hold.

That evening as I dumped armfuls of worldly music and my filthy past into the dumpster, I felt that I had fully repented. My religious conversion on the week previous was just the first step of a long haul, and I prayed to Jesus to give me supernatural power to make me a new creature. That evening I quit cigarettes. I had half-heartedly tried several times before to quit, but that night I was able to commit permanently, without the need for tapering off or support groups. I also quit alcohol. I drank not so much as a drop of beer after that night, without the need for AA. I viewed the nearly complete rejection of my former secular life as nothing short of miraculous! I thought that nothing or nobody but Jesus, the Son of God Himself, was able to transform my life as abruptly as it did. I did not think it possible that I had the power within myself to change my life. As miraculous as I felt my transformation to have been, I still did not have a healthy self-esteem. My Self did not matter. I must decrease as Jesus must increase, and I gave it all up for Him.

After a couple of months looking for a small church to join, I decided that such excitable Pentecostal congregations did not suit my taste any longer. I decided that I would stay with Calvary Chapel in Albuquerque, despite my initial reservations about the size of the congregation. I was raised to think that as a Sinful human I was worthless in the eyes of God, and Calvary Chapel only reinforced that belief. I was born in Sin, corrupt in Sin from the moment of conception, and by default immediately destined for the fires of Hell. No matter what good I tried to do in this life, I was not a good person, in fact no good thing could come from me, and I could do absolutely nothing of any value without the power of the Holy Spirit. My good works were just filthy rags in the eyes of God, in fact Pastor Skip often emphasized that the rags were covered in the filth of menstrual blood. I was taught that our culture was egocentric, and humans in their corrupt perversity were only living to fill themselves up with temporary pleasures and ungodly lusts. I believed that life without Jesus was empty, pointless and vain, but life with Jesus brought true joy and a peace that passes all human understanding. The previous few years of my life, in which I drowned my sorrows in alcohol only confirmed that conviction! Jesus was the only way to achieve true happiness and meaning in life. Without him, we were whitened sepulchers with darkened hearts. Without Jesus, our damned selves stumbled and droned about the world like the walking dead.

I felt worthless before I attended Calvary Chapel. I believed that I was worthless after I started attending Calvary Chapel. The difference was that I was happier knowing that I was worthless, because I believed that God viewed me as perfect because I accepted the sacrifice that His perfect Son made for me. It was a strange dichotomy. I was perfect in God’s eyes, because Jesus Christ was what made me perfect. But without Him, I was worthless. When I talked to unbelievers who accused me of being sanctimonious, I could always just turn and tell them that I was really no better than they in God’s eyes. But when I told people that I was Saved, I could just tell them that the Blood of Jesus made me perfect and Sinless in God’s eyes. The Christian religion, as conceived by Calvary Chapel, is full of slippery dichotomies like that. If a discussion or argument was getting too heated, I could always flip the card, and still be convinced that I was correct in my double speak.

My conversion to Evangalical Christianity was initially joyful, and a wondrous change to my miserable life. I loved Jesus. It was only after several weeks that I learned that I had to fear this Jesus just as much. Jesus was great, powerful, loving – and terrible, jealous and vengeful. It was a dichotomy that I had to learn to live with, but I don’t know if I ever fully and successfully accepted the dreadful implications of worshipping an almighty Deity who demanded sinless perfection from His worshippers. I often wondered to myself if I was truly a Christian, and if I truly had enough Faith to merit salvation. After all, I was told, many people who think they are Christians will be surprised when they are find themselves cast into the Lake of Fire. Did I believe enough in the atoning efficacy of Jesus’ death to meet God’s satisfaction? How could I know for sure? I thought that I manifested my beliefs through my good actions and that the Holy Spirit was evident by my Fruits of love, joy, peace, etc. I knew that my salvation was supposed to be given to me by Jesus through my Faith alone, and that any thought of earning my own salvation through my own good works was heresy. But the only way I could tell that I believed enough was through my own works, and if I stumbled by becoming unduly lustful, angry or impatient, I could not help but wonder if my lack of Faith was evidence of my lack of salvation. So I would strive, knowing that I was not allowed to strive, to do good works, to demonstrate to myself that I did have enough Faith in Jesus to merit His salvation. In this way, even though I dared not admit it, my salvation through Faith was implicitly a salvation through Works, and I knew of no way to avoid it. So I did my best to pray my way out of the dilemma, and hope that my vengeful god would accept me by my Faith anyhow. I became a Christian because my life was miserable, and I wanted to be happy and fulfilled. I remained a Christian because I longed for salvation and became terrified of damnation. Jesus may have been able to transcend all my love, but He could not caress all my fears, even though I had to pretend that He did. I had to ignore troubling dichotomies. So I played He Is Sailing on my record player, and thanked my vengeful and jealous Jesus yet again for His boundless mercy and love.

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