At Disney World, I discovered a wonderful city of people, many of whom had never heard the Gospel, but who showed me the joy of sharing it. I watched God’s Spirit working in them: healing marriages, breaking addictions, and lifting burdens. Most of the time I parroted what I had heard on the Gospel in Life podcasts, and it would start the avalanche. By the time I ended up moving off to my volunteer ministry job, I found I hardly wanted to leave.
I began to give my heart to a god I made up in my head, a god who played fair, who gave good little Christians everything they asked for. The cross was something Christ did 2000 years ago, not anything relevant for today. Human ethics taught me I was a pretty good kid, and so I deserved pretty good things.
In an instant, grief and hope, joy and sorrow intersected. I learned that grief and hope aren’t parallel streets that we travel down based on life’s circumstances. They intersect. When God guides us down paths of grief, He isn’t leading us away from hope, He’s trying to lead us to the point where those streets intersect so that we never believe the lie that our joy is tied to our circumstances.
If I felt like I was a sinner, it’s because I was a sinner. If it felt like all the things I was resting my hope in for my own righteousness were disintegrating under my feet, it’s because by His grace, they were disintegrating. “He inflicts wounds that heal,” I remember Tim Keller saying, and God was most definitely breaking my dependence on my own self-righteousness, so He could demonstrate His own righteousness as the justification for my life and salvation.
I cried for two whole years, going to Redeemer. I kept going. I began to hear the word, and I think that the turning point for me was, “This thing you’re feeling down inside of you, that you can’t get to, has a name, and that name is sin.”
Because we are beings created to derive our identity from God, the most important aspect in the practice of self-reflection is understanding our stories within the context of God’s story.
Things change. Life changes. Organizations change. I’m happy to announce one of the better changes of 2023. On January 1, 2023, Gospel in Life changed parent organizations, moving from being part of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, to being part of Redeemer City to City.
Someone at the local small church told me I was the lamb of God. I wanted to believe that, and I kept a toy and a blanket that had lambs on them most of my childhood. When we moved back east, my horrible life went from bad to hellacious. I honestly don’t remember when the sexual abuse started, but I remember it as the beginning of my confusing childhood made up of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
As I began to go into shock, I heard a shot close by and felt a body collapse on top of me. Blood ran over me, and I tried to crawl out from underneath it. When I got free, I looked back and could see it was an old man who the police had killed. Then I passed out. When word of the violence spread, my relatives raced to every clinic and hospital searching for me (Xolani had made it out ok). They couldn’t find me, and assumed I’d been killed.
I wanted to say thank you for releasing “Questioning Christianity” as a podcast. It has been a very long road to finally “understanding” Christianity and by long, I mean 16 years of deeply pondering these claims. That finally happened last week once I got through this podcast.