I grew up in a non-Christian home. My father is agnostic and my mother was a backslidden Christian, due mostly to marrying my father I suspect. Anyway, I grew up considering the universe to be one big souless machine, and I didn't believe in anything I couldn't see or touch. My childhood memories are mostly of microscopes, chemistry sets, telescopes, and me trying to take the universe apart to see what made it tick. I never went to Church or Sunday school, stayed in bed till lunchtime on Sundays, and hated Christians who I thought were all stupid. When I came to adolescence I decided that life would be easier to bear if I cut out all feelings and contact with other people. I was about eleven years old.
I spent the next decade working at achieving that goal and also trying to find a purpose for my life. I went through a stage of fads, where I would be fanatically interested in some subject, and then drop it when I found that it did little or nothing to feed the hunger in my soul. Being a speed reader helped, and I doubt there are many philosophies, beliefs, or scientific disciplines that I didn't examine for something that I couldn't exactly define. I didn't have many friends at high school, and those I did associate with decided I was "the person most likely to initiate a global holocaust". I dropped out of school after failing my University Entrance exams, and got a job as a chemistry technician with the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. With the money came independence. I left home, was living in a house by myself, going to a job where I spoke to no-one, and going to night school at the local polytechnic where I did the same. I had achieved my goal: my life was empty of any emotions or meaningful contact with others.
It sucked. Be careful what you wish for, you might not like it when you get it.
The second year I was at night school I noticed a guy in my class was trying to talk to me. He'd been trying for the previous year as well, but I was too messed up to even notice. Luckily he was the patient type. He was a Christian and he invited me to go to an evangelistic outreach with him. I nearly punched him out. After that he tried just to be my friend and not try any heavy evangelism on me. As I grew to trust him we started talking about life and stuff like that. I realised that alot of what I had been told about Christians when I was growing up was not true. I started asking him questions about his beliefs and he answered them, but had the sense not to push it any further. This took several years, but even though I finished tech, moved around various flats and made lots of other non-Christian friends he still kept in touch with me, and we kept talking about life and stuff. After a couple of years of this I realised that his worldview made as much sense as mine did. I started reading a Bible he gave me to look for mistakes or contradictions or anything I could use to show him he was wrong. We debated and argued our way through Genesis, but one night when I was alone in my room and reading Exodus of all things, it dawned on me that it was all true and I was the world's prize idiot. I felt something that my materialist rationalist self just could not explain. I hit the floor and asked Jesus to take control of my life.
My mother has since reclaimed her faith so my family is now
divided down the middle; my mother and I are Christians, my
father and brother are not. Becoming a Christian didn't solve my
problems, but it helped me to understand them and it opened the
way for God to start healing me from my past. After a few years I
started going to Bible College at nights to learn more about God.
I did that for two years, but then the pressures of trying to
hold down a full time and demanding job, go to Bible College at
night, and help out in the Church and its youth group got too
much. I dropped out of Church for a couple of months and failed
my subjects at Bible College. I wanted to do something with my
life for God, but I didn't know what. After a long struggle and a
fair bit of soul-searching I quit my job and applied for the
Youth Intern position at my local Church. One year of that
convinced me that I did not want to be a full-time church
youth worker, but I continued helping out as a volunteer for
another two years.
At the end of that time I was nearing burn out, and getting very
cynical about the whole "church thing". After not attending any
church for a while I ended up at a group called "Deep
Stuff". This was a group for people hurt by churches but still
wanting to meet and discuss their spiritual journey. It was a
spin-off from a group called "Spirited Exchanges", started by
Alan Jamieson who wrote the book "A churchless faith". Deep
Stuff was aimed at a younger agegroup, and used some of
the ideas from Mike Riddell's book of the same name, particularly
the idea of discussing deep issues over a meal.
Deep Stuff enabled me to process the hurt I had felt over the way
I had been treated, but I still didn't want to go to a church.
After I moved to Tauranga I did a spiritual growth course called
"Recovering from Spiritual Abuse" which really clarified my thinking
on what being a follower of Jesus should be about, and the problems
that come from trying to enshrine that in a large institution. So I'm
now part of a small house church. I still love God as much as when
I wrote the first edition of this page, but now I'm older, hopefully wiser,
and certainly a lot more reflective about what it means to be a Christ follower.