The Return To Christ

For the first half of my life, I had a seemingly good relationship with what I understood as “God”. I was fairly sick as a newborn, and my family since told me that it was the prayers of the church that provided the miracle of my well-being. Thereafter, we dutifully went to church and Sunday school every week, where I repeated the tenets of the Apostles and Nicene creeds, ensuring that my relationship with God was grounded in the doctrine of the Christian Church.

After starting to attend a fundamentalist Baptist school in 6th grade, where I went to Bible class every day and had chapel two times a week, I started attending a Baptist church with a more active youth group than the kids who only met on Sunday morning at the Lutheran Church where I grew up. By the time I turned 16, I was going to church about three times a week and on the off days, I attended other events and concerts for Christian teens. They all included the tried and true outline of worship music first, followed by a message about how sinful humans are (you in particular), and a regularly emotional altar call to publicly give your life to Jesus… again.

Unfortunately, there were only so many times I could hear the same message and work through the same drama, and I began to question whether or not it was even true. Beyond my liberal arts education eventually revealing to me that the Bible wasn’t as perfect, inherent, nor infallible as I had been led to believe, the premise of Christianity started to lose its appeal for me. I didn’t really think God was so short-sighted in giving…