C4K3

I was baptized at an early age. I thought I prayed for Jesus to save me, but nothing stuck. I suppose God wasn't ready for me. There's a lot of choice in the Bible, but there's a lot of God choosing as well, and as unfortunate for me as it is, it just wasn't my time. That's not to say I really ever sought God, except on those moments where guilt overtook me. But such were rare. I ran from God. I tried to forget him and heaven and hell as best as I could. In that running and forgetting I am now wounded. God has partially healed me, but I still have more to do and more to heal.

It was a quiet night the night I got saved, not much different from any other, other than it was tax night for the adults. Sixteen-year-old me was free from that burden. I went to the gym, I posted on my blog, and went to sleep. But, I couldn't sleep. No tossing or turning, I simply couldn't. I grabbed my Bible and started to pray. I soberly came to an unavoidable fact: that no matter how miserable, how hellish, my life would become, my existence as an immortal soul would be infinitely benefited from following God. I went all in. It was simply a matter of Pascal's Wager.

If you don't follow Jesus' commandments then you don't love Jesus, and you're not going to a good place. (I'm a Calvinist, by the way, and I take rest in this. But faith and works go hand-in-hand.) Are the precepts burdensome? To care for the poor, the orphan, the widow? The dis-enfranchised and the justice-seeking? To clothe the naked, to welcome the stranger, to visit the sick and imprisoned, to feed and give drink to the hungry and thirsty soul? To seek holiness, as he is holy? No, these are only burdens for fools, of which I have been chief.

The journey I have had with Christ has been different from virtually every expectation I had. I am simultaneously the most miserable and the most grateful I have ever felt. My status has improved, believe it or not, from what it was in the fairly early days of my Christian walk. It used to be just pain. That's what a lifetime of sin got me; every action has a consequence. But things are improving. And my hope lies in this: one day, I will be with God, with my own room in his house. I will marvel at the pillars in the house of God and my tears will be wiped away by Christ. We shall feast in joy for eternity, and all the unconscious longings of humanity will be fulfilled by his glory and grace.