My Testimony

I was born into a Christian household. I grew up believing in God and he has never stopped being intuitive to me. I can’t shake him from the rims of my consciousness nor can I feel like my thoughts are free of his gaze. He has been with me since the moment of my conception, haunting every step. Likewise, I have always believed in Jesus Christ. I can’t say the exact formation of my understanding of him, but I have always believed that Jesus Christ is both fully divine and fully human, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, that he is God’s Son, Incarnate on earth, and that he lived a sinless life, teaching truth, healing people and reaching out to sinners, and that he was crucified for our sins, died, and was buried, that he rose from the dead on the third day, ascended into heaven, and is coming back. I always believed in the Holy Spirit, so I was essentially born with a Trinitarian mindset. I believed in the Bible as the Word of God.

My family was Protestant, theologically conservative, fundamental, and evangelical. Most of the churches I was raised in where independent Christian churches which date back to the Restorationist Movement, which resulted in the more mainline Disciples of Christ and the more conservative Churches of Christ and independent Christian churches (think Max Lucado books, if that means anything to you). Independent Christian churches are the ones with slogans like: “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent,” “The church of Jesus Christ on earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one,” “We are Christians only, but not the only Christians,” “In essentials, unity; in opinions, liberty; in all things, love,” “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, no law but love, no name but the divine,” and “Call Bible things by Bible names.” We had attended some Calvary Chapel churches throughout my life too, but independent Christian is where we tended to stay. I think this was because my Dad was raised in that denomination. He attended Bible college in that denomination.

In my toddler and kindergarten-aged years, my dad was the pastor of church in New Jersey. We lived in Pennsylvania and would drive over the Delaware Bridge to get to the church and my mom would say every time that George Washington crossed that river. I was a pastor’s kid, but I did not realize this and thus did not get to feel any specialness from it. I also have random memories like my mom teaching Sunday school once (which was more exciting to me than my Dad preaching), swallowing a dime that was supposed to my offering, playing in the church nursery, and getting scolded for crawling on the covered baptistery. My mom read my twin sister and I a book of morality lessons called “Choosing God’s Way” which was about choosing to be thankful, giving, helpful, patient, cheerful, or whatever other virtue. (I loved that book; it was my first exposure to an interest in discussions of ethics.) I read through an entire children’s picture Bible once. My sister and I owned tapes of praise songs and had Christian kids videos like “Psalty’s Salvation Celebration” (which stars Bethany Joy Galeotti from One Tree Hill).

My family moved to California when I was in elementary school. I remember when we visited different churches, looking for a home church. For awhile my dad was involved in youth ministry, which left an impression on me that it was normal and even desirable to be involved in church. I always liked going to church. I liked Sunday school with its Bible stories, morality lessons, praise songs, games like racing to see who could find a verse first (people with tabs marking their Bible books are legit cheaters in that game). Eventually we settled in at Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, California. It was big when I went there; now it is a mega-church with a café, a bookstore, and a prayer garden. It is a Christian village. Back when I went, it was just big and if you couldn’t fit into the auditorium (which seats thousands) you’d have to watch on the screen outside which was okay because the coffee and donuts were also out there. I always hoped that, afterwards, we would go to this burger place called The Mad Greek or this teddy bear-infused restaurant called Honey’s (which I hear is gone now). But I digress, that mega church served as my introduction to contemporary Christian music. At the time, I loved the Newsboys. It was always while I was in California—this could have been anywhere from first grade through fourth grade—and I decided to pray the prayer to “accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” At the time, what it meant to me was that I was making my faith my own. I was also interested in baptism, but was never baptized in California.

I was ten and in the fifth grade when I was baptized at Monmouth Christian Church in Monmouth, Oregon. In junior high, I started volunteering with the children’s ministry. It started with the 2 and 3 year olds and I eventually started being a teacher’s aide to a lot of elementary grades. I liked this because I didn’t like Sunday school and youth group for junior high and high school. It had become largely entertainment and game-driven and we did a lot of games about memorizing facts of Bible stories, but I wanted to look at something deeper. I wasn’t sure what, but something that felt like faith wasn’t contained in a book, but was relevant to my life and could flow out of me. I felt like the only kid in youth group who had the opinion of: “I don’t want to play; I want to learn.”

About that time, I read a book called “Rachel’s Tears” about a girl who died in Columbine and I loved that book because it portrayed her spiritual life through her intimate prayer relationship with God where she wrote to him through letters in her journals. She was serious about getting a deeper understanding of her faith, asking questions, struggling through the hard things that people sometimes push under the rug, and I knew that I wanted a faith like hers. It also mentioned how she started resolving to live by forgiveness, love, helping others, standing up for what’s right, showing mercy, seeing the best in others, kindness, compassion, being a friend, and I knew that I wanted to live like that too because I could be awfully judgmental. I could rip people to shreds and I knew that wasn’t pleasing to God. So I was motivated largely to start truly loving God and loving others. I feel like Rachel Scott was a model that showed me what spiritual life really looked like and, with that vision, I could get closer to where I wanted to be.

I did start going to youth group more often in high school just because it seemed like the kind of thing you needed to be disciplined about going to, even if you didn’t get anything out of it. Through that, I ended up going to a Christian conference that got me more dedicated to my faith. I remember half-sleeping in the van on the way to Idaho and hearing the Kutless song “Run” almost as if it came from my mind, singing, “Why do you run, why do you hide, don’t you know I just want to be with you?” I thought about that and how I allowed a lot of compromise in my life: emotional unchastity, still struggling with being judgmental toward other people, being on-and-off again in my relationship with God even though I knew where I wanted to be, and I was starting to get to the point where God was going to woo me over to him and I would seek him from the motivation of knowing he first loved me.

Initially, I just had goals. One thing was that I didn’t date. The idea what that there is a time to be single and a time to be married, but I knew I wasn’t going to be married in high school and that I could make the most of the time I had now growing as a person, pursuing goals, getting to know God, and figuring all that kind of stuff out instead of pursuing relationships that likely wouldn’t last anyway. Most guys were ridiculous in high school anyway. I was glad to be away from that pressure and to know that the right guy would be one who respected my choices to not date. I listened to Christian music almost exclusively and was obsessed with the Christian band Skillet. I tried to read the Bible every day, do daily devotionals, and keep a prayer journal. I read evangelical books by authors like Max Lucado, Beth Moore, John Eldredge, DC Talk (their Jesus Freak books), and Melody Carlson. The band Skillet had a ton of Bible studies to all their songs and something called the Alien Youth Bible Study and I loved those.

My faith got harder my junior year of high school. My OCD started, but I didn’t know what it was; I just knew that I had all these obsessive thoughts, fears and anxieties, scruples and doubts, and I felt so alone in my head. It was like a mental prison. My whole life I had felt like a regular happy dedicated evangelical Christian teen and now I felt so cut-off from that person, so dark inside. It felt like purgatory. Now I feel like so much of me was stripped away in suffering. I lost a lot of superficiality and affection for sin. It was such a dark night of the soul, but it was also a deepening of faith. My prayers were more desperate, but became more honest and seeking. I listened to Jennifer Knapp CDs all summer and my heart echoed back to God every confessional song and searching lyric. I read so many Christian books because I was so thirsty for the touch of God’s grace. I had to trust that the end would justify the pain it took to get me wherever God was taking me and that these days would all be lovely traces of God drawing me to him, teaching me to rely on his grace, on the energy of his Spirit, on his lordship upholding and protecting me, and on his love.

Post-graduation, I was attending another independent Christian church and helping with the church ministry there, but I was getting more confused about my faith. I was interested in the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches because the members of Skillet were Charismatic evangelicals, Rachel Scott came from an Assemblies of God background, and that faith seemed so vibrant with its ecstatic worship and emphasis on spiritual gifts. Then I would wonder if everything they did was Biblical and go back to being interested in purely non-charismatic Christian sources. I wanted to attend Corban University, a Baptist college, and major in creative writing. I visited the campus and could see myself there. I have never loved another college like I loved this one. This was my dream. So I started thinking, “Well, I’ll probably go to Baptist college and stay at the church I am going to now, so I can like Pentecostal/charismatics, but I don’t agree with them, but this isn’t an essential doctrine.” I always struggled going back-and-forth on this though.

I also went through a phase when I was really interested in the emergent church but this went like charismatic theology did: back-and-forth, always losing eventually because it didn’t feel orthodox to the way I was raised. For awhile, I was getting very serious about it though. I had read a book by Randall Balmer called “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament” along with a bunch of other emergent books. This was around the time CCM singer Jennifer Knapp (who had disappeared into a troll cave for a thousand years) returned and announced that she was a lesbian in a same-sex relationship. I wanted to be on her side and eventually came to the idea that same-sex relationships were okay in the confines of a committed, loving, monogamous, lifelong, Christ-centered relationship; that you should abstain from sex until you were committed by a marriage or domestic partnership or civil union, but that it was otherwise morally permissible. I started getting really liberal and, in an effort to be more feminist, started trying to see if it were possible to be a pro-choice Christian which I feel horrible about now but at the time I was getting really confused and liberal in my faith until I finally decided that all of this was shipwrecking my faith. So I started getting rid of everything that made me nostalgic for that brand of theology and I was getting back to the Corban College dream.

Then my OCD started flaring up, not worse than before but it had subsided in all my painful theological confusion and now that that was all settled it came back with the same force it had had when it first started. By that time, I figured that this was probably OCD. I was a nerdy high school kid who studied mental illnesses for fun and did her senior project on stigma and mental illness. I knew what OCD looked like and that I was looking like it too, only my OCD was mostly religious-oriented. So I called, had a therapy appointment, eventually was prescribed medicine. I got a book called “Can Christianity Cure OCD?” which mentioned St. Therese of Lisieux, who I was interested in once upon a time when I was reading about her because I wanted to know more about Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity (which I considered loosely related denominations to the rest of the Christians). She struggled with scruples and likely had OCD but didn’t know about it. Yet her Little Way helped her cling to God even when all was darkness. So I decided to go to the Catholic bookstore in my area to get a saint medal of hers to encourage me (which turned into “buy all the things St. Therese related!”).

When I was there, there was a poster:

And it struck me as an interesting thought because I had always wondered that with all of the Bible studies, comparative denominational studies, church history, and such that I had read throughout my life why there was such a plethora of people who said that their denomination had the truth. It puzzled me that we were so insistent that truth was black-and-white until it came to things we declared non-essentials and then truth became relative in that it didn’t matter what was true as long as we all loved Jesus. It bothered me how divided we were and how we decided it was okay because our unity was part of an invisible mystical church. This caused a spark in me so I started reading about Catholicism. I started to realize a lot of misconceptions I had had and a lot of the problems had felt about Protestantism but assumed were just part of the package of faith. This article: http://www.ourcatholicfaith.org/reasons.html mentioned 150 things that had bothered me too or that I realized were short-sighted. The more I studied, the more I felt a tugging in my heart that this was true, but it was so hard to submit to that because I liked the church I was going to. All my friends were from there. I loved the kids I was teaching. I was going to go to a Baptist college. I knew I would have to give up all of this and I delayed for awhile. I would attend RCIA classes, but still go to the evangelical church, but I knew I couldn’t have a foot in both places. I was a wimp about it and wrote the children’s minister an email and then I just stopped coming. I started going to Mass and for awhile it was so hard. I loved the Mass and Catholicism became more beautiful until I knew I was always going to be a part of this. But I also missed what I had left behind: my friends, my children’s ministry, Corban. I used to listen to Carrie Underwood’s song “Starts With Goodbye” all the time and be all, “This describes my life.” I have never been happier or more at peace with my faith, though, than here in the Catholic Church. My confirmation saint is going to be St. Therese of Lisieux because I feel like she was leading me along in little ways until I was at a place where I could accept the faith. I think of the holy card I was given of her by the Catholic bookstore that said “the truth will set you free” on the back as though it were a promise for me, for hope and healing, if I could choose to follow God in this journey of suffering and loss and immeasurable gain. Now I have spent almost a year in RCIA and I consider myself Catholic even though it isn’t official. I am where I am now: trying to love, know, serve, obey, follow, and learn more about God, loving the Church and its teachings, feeling so much more whole than I have felt in years.