Losing My Religion

If I'm honest, I'd have to tell you that there are plenty of things I'd have rather done than become a practicing Christian again. There were a lot of directions I saw my life headed, and none of them involved sitting in Bible Study or going to church or caring about what God thought about the direction of my life or doing an awful lot of praying.

I mean, somewhere in me I did care about those things for some reason, but I didn't care about them very much. Not enough to base my life on them. Not enough to make me change. Not enough to make me want to do anything that would be too hard or anything that would make me stand out or be weird.

I liked church sometimes. I liked the tradition. I liked the hymns. I even kind of liked sermons if they were uplifting and made me feel nice. I really liked religion. The very idea of it--the ceremony, the liturgy, the feel of a church. But, that was pretty much it. I guess I mean to say that none of this stuff really affected my life. Church was nice and all, but I didn't really see a connection between church and anything larger or any reason that what went on in church or what I had read in the Bible many, many years ago should really affect my life in the present.

So, what happened? I suppose I could tell some great testimony at this point, some story of one single moment in which I had an epiphany. But, I don't really want to give a testimony, and I didn't really have one moment in which all of this occurred. It didn't happen like that. Seriously, I wasn't Saul on the road to Damascus. I'm just a grad student who lives in the middle of a cornfield, and what happened is pretty simple.

I just realized it's all true.

I mean, that's it. Really. It's incredibly simple. I want it to be more difficult, more intricate, more...well...interesting. But it isn't. I just realized it's all true. And then I had no choice but to believe.

And, when I realized it was all true, I realized that I was connected to something much larger, and, suddenly, I realized that what I did with my life mattered, not just to me, but to a God who had allowed His Son to be sacrificed for me. And, when I looked at it that way, the cross meant more to me than it had before. Before, it was really just something at the front of the church, but I couldn't see it in that way anymore, and I still can't. Because it all became real. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And, that's the very simple story of how I lost my religion. Or, perhaps the story of how I gained a relationship.