The Adoption
There comes a turning point in the life of every child born into a Christian
family which I like to call “the adoption”. I intend for this post to be
an engaging and encouraging account to those adolescence within that stage of
their life.
First, what is this turning point which I call “the adoption”? What is
the nature of it? Speaking from experience, I know that the actual state
of being a Christian can become very autonomous if you have been living in a
Christian home all of your life. Such is true about nearly everything
when you are maturing. It is only natural. But when it comes to
Christianity especially, this fluctuation of mind and attitude, this inevitable
sense of autonomy, results in a crossroads between two excruciatingly crucial
decisions: am I all in or all out? Am I going to really continue
being a Christian, or is the day I leave my family the day I leave my
faith? What I call “the adoption” is when one makes the choice to really
continue being a Christian. In essence, the adolescent who does this
becomes their own Christian, and Christianity becomes theirs rather than their
family’s. This sense of ownership is why I refer to the choice as an
“adoption”. This adoption is by no means easy. There are certain,
highly specific things that discourage one from going through with it. I
refer to such discouraging circumstances here as “barriers to entry”.
Barriers to Entry
We know that a barrier to entry is something that discourages one from
“adopting” Christianity. But what precisely is the
nature of this barrier? Essentially, it is a personal standard set by the
potential adopter of the faith. Christianity must measure up to this
personal standard; or more accurately, the potential adopter must be convinced that
Christianity measures up in order for him/her to be comfortable enough to go
through with the adoption. Until then, Christianity remains irrational or
unacceptable, among other things, depending on what sort of barriers to entry a
particular person has. After prolonged reflection regarding these
“barriers to entry”, I have centralized the bulk of these barriers into two
broad, inclusive categories. If there are other sorts of barriers to
entry that do not fall into these two categories, I regret to announce that I
do not know of them. And obviously there are infinitely more barriers to
entry when it comes to an outsider becoming a Christian. But I am
referring here to barriers against the adoption of the
Christian faith and those only. I engage those who have been with
Christianity all their life and at this point don’t see it as much more than a
“tradition”.
I’d first like to address intellectual barriers to
entry. In this, before adopting Christianity, the person must be brought
to believe that Christianity is true, or at least logical,
rational, etc. This potential adopter needs their reasons to
be a Christian; “Just because,” or, “Because I say so,” will not suffice and
may even alienate the adopter from the faith. Until they are convinced,
Christianity remains to them irrational, deceptive, impractical, etc.
Cultish and overly emotional church services are the bane of
intellectuals. “Cultish” practices will likely only be cultish by their
estimation, whereas others in the church participate quite comfortably.
Something as simple as closing one’s eyes and lifting one’s arm to the heavens
during worship may look to an intellectual to be highly impractical.
Emotions are not to be trusted; so if an emotional rush is all Christianity has
going for it, then the intellectual’s barrier against Christianity remains
(probably even thicker than before). Conversely, apologetics, for
intellectuals, are as valuable as the Holy Grail. They are often more
than willing to accept a genuine presentation of logic, reason, and common
sense in favor of just about anything, including Christianity. The key
word here is presentation. What they despise is dictation (“You must believe
this!” “It’s true because the Bible says so!” etc.). They must be
presented with unbiased information so as to make an unbiased conclusion.
Dictatorial church services will be bland or even offensive to
intellectuals. Seminars and lectures that engage the audience as if they
were outside Christianity (as opposed to church services,
which tend to assume that everyone there is a Christian) are particularly
appealing to intellectuals, even if said intellectual has already accepted and
adopted Christianity.
One important thing which an intellectual must be brought to believe
before really adopting Christianity is that the Bible is reliable. If the
very cornerstone of the faith is unreliable to them, there is hardly any hope
of them becoming good Christians, since the most important things about
Christianity are in the Bible. One you manage to convince him otherwise,
though, it’s not very hard for him to accept the Bible as authoritative, since
all things sensible and reliable tend to carry authority for him in the first
place. In addition, it is fatal to shelter intellectuals from other
religions. An intellectual is almost certain to see religions in general
as competing for truth value. If an intellectual is not permitted to test
the legitimacy of other philosophies and religions against Christianity, they
will likely be tempted to suppose either that no religion is true or that every
religion is true. Something, in their world, must be assigned
ultimate truth value, and if they are not presented with reason enough to
decide one thing to be true and the other to be false, they deal with it by
denying that the “true-false” question ever had to be asked in the first
place. This hurts far more than their adoption of Christianity.
Risky as it might seem, it is imperative that intellectuals be given the tools
they need to honestly engage the question of religion on a true/false level; in
the end, it will make him/her much more comfortable with adopting Christianity.
I’d like to address teachers who teach youth specifically. If you
are instructing a single person or a group with intellectual barriers to entry
you should, above all, keep in your mind one key word: bias.
Your sermons, lessons, etc. ought to be free of bias as much as is possible and
appropriate to the setting (i.e. for a church service, you would not make the
sermon so unbiased that it loses its necessary “churchiness”). Instead of
saying, “This doctrine is clearly true because it is in the Bible. Now
let me break down what it means…” you should start a square or two back.
Start with, “Reason suggests that the Bible is quite right to lay down this
rule,” give them the reasons for which they are so thirsty, then you
can go on with, “Now that I’ve got you quite convinced that this doctrine is
true, let me break down what it means…” The proverb “give an inch, gain a
mile” could not be truer when it comes to overcoming the skepticism of
intellectuals. Always consider putting your starting line further back
than you think you should. Consider starting at the assumption, “This is
not true,” in regards to the topic of your lecture. From there, use
reasoning and rhetoric to work your way up to the assumption, “This might be
true,” then work up to, “This is true,” then conclude with,
“How does this truth apply to me?” Doing this, as opposed to jumping the
gun and starting at the assumption, “This is true,” will get most intellectuals
eating out of the palm of your hand. What’s in your favor is that most
intellectuals who have grown up in a Christian home, regardless of how
skeptical they seem, genuinely want to adopt
Christianity. They want to believe that Christianity is
rational, the way they want to believe that just about everything they do is
rational. I believe, perhaps more than anyone (having had this type of
barrier at one time myself), that Christianity can offer precisely what they
want from it. All you have to do is show it to them.
I speak now to intellectuals specifically. In regards to the
current cultural atmosphere, you live in a time of history that is in one way
greatly in favor of your adoption and in another quite the opposite. It
is no secret that Christianity has been taking a lot of challenges in the last
50-or-so years. The public would like you to think that Christianity has
nothing to say in response to these challenges. But the evidence suggests
otherwise. Indeed, I’d contest that Christianity itself is none the wiser
because of these challenges. Recent years have a seen a re-surge in
Christian apologetics as Christians seek to answer the challenges against them
honestly and boldly. This is how the current culture is both in favor and
against your adoption. While the challenges against Christianity are
growing, so is the Christian response. For those with this type of
barrier to entry, apologetic classics such as “Mere Christianity”, “The Case
for Christ”, and “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” may be just your
cup of tea. Practical sections of the Bible, particularly the epistles of
Paul, might prove to be great resources as well. My advice? Try to
remember, above all, that one does not have to commit intellectual suicide to
be a Christian. Of course Christianity seems irrational.
To base one’s entire life on something you can’t even see gives the immediate
impression of complete lunacy. But first of all, don’t we do this quite
often? People base their lives on the unseen all the time: love, right
conduct, enjoyment, etc. There is evidence that these things exist (i.e.
chemical reactions in the brain), but the things themselves are still
ultimately unseen. Second, we are supposing here that the very meaning of
life ought to seem rational to us, which is of course
ridiculous. Christianity’s contention that life itself has meaning
implies that meaning is overarching; it stretches its influence far over and
above us. And if that is true, how can we ever hope to fully understand
it? I suppose that you could simply state that the world has no
meaning. But I find this to be oversimplification. In the words of
C.S. Lewis, “If the world had no meaning, we would not have decided that it had
no meaning.” For instance, if all humanity could not see, we would not
have decided that we could not see. We would be
incapable of understanding that we could not see because we would have no idea
what sight was in the first place. In the same way, there had to have
been meaning in the first place for us to have decided otherwise.
When I say that Christianity seems irrational, am I
saying that it actually is irrational? Of course
not. I’m only saying that it seems irrational.
Allow me to explain. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “Once we’ve eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
People in general tend to oversimplify in this realm also; they suppose that
something improbable is irrational. But is it not irrational to deny the truth in
any case, regardless of the apparent improbability of it being true? If
someone really does get a full house during a game of poker, is it rational to
deny it simply because of the wild improbability of that happening? As a
general rule, and given the evidence, I contest that Christianity ought to be
given an equal chance in your selection of a worldview.
The second barrier to entry, dichotomous to the first, is the emotional barrier
to entry. This sort of person, before fully adopting Christianity, must
be brought to believe that Christianity is valuable, or in some
sense useful (not in the practical sense of application, but in the emotional
sense of psychological healing and completion), and, perhaps most especially,
humane. The difficult part is that each feeler (“feeler”, here, denotes
one with an emotional barrier to entry) has their own personal definition of
“valuable”, whereas the definition of “reasonable”, while slightly variant from
person to person, is largely universal. Regardless of the wide variation,
until a feeler can be brought to believe that Christianity is valuable by their
own standards, it remains for them unacceptable, inhumane, and/or negligibly
important.
Apologetics are only useful to a feeler insofar as they already find
Christianity to be valuable, in which case they no longer possess an emotional
barrier to entry. A feeler cares little for the true/false value of
Christianity. For them, the competition is between acceptability/unacceptability,
as outlined by their own personal values. If they want it
to be true, they need very little reason to think that it is true. If
they don’t want it to be true, they care little for the amount
of logic and evidence in favor of the conclusion that Christianity is true
(This makes feelers sound like highly irrational people. In reality, they
are champions of faith for its own sake and tend to be proficient in dealing
with other people on a personal level). Hypocrisy and depravity in the
Church is the bane of this type. If Christianity is not potent enough to
liberate people from their sins, then really how valuable is it?
Hypocrisy is even worse. If Christianity adds nothing to the world but
judgmental “Pharisee” types (of which surely the world has enough), then why be
a Christian? You can understand, then, this type’s tendency to ignore
apologetics while Christianity remains inhumane to them. If a nation of
hypocrites came to you and said, “Join us because we’re right,” surely you would
not feel the least bit inclined to join them!
It is important that, very early on, a feeler understands the separation of
doctrine and deed. They ought to learn to detach the Christian from his
actions; otherwise, every action of a Christian will itself be considered the
Christian thing to do. This mentality is damaging to anyone who
holds it; but most especially the feeler who, in order to adopt Christianity,
must find the doctrine of Christianity to be acceptable even when the actions
of Christians are flat-out unacceptable. It is also important that
feelers be assisted in their acceptance of hard-headed teachings in the
Bible. They should not be kept ignorant of these teachings, but such
teachings should be taught tactfully. The semi-genocidal actions of
Israel in the Old Testament might be taught with an emphasis on the depravity
of their enemies, or the danger it posed to Israel’s morality to keep them as
slaves. The doctrine of Heaven and Hell could be taught with an emphasis
on man’s choice between the two. This seems
deceptive. But there is no need to take affront to it if this tact in no
way jeopardizes the truth value of the doctrine. There also tends to be a
tension in the feeler’s mind regarding religion which ought to be addressed properly.
Feelers generally value other people and, by definition, respect other people’s
values. Since other people value their religions, this poses a problem
for the feeler. The combination of the Christian doctrines, “No other
religion is true,” and, “Heaven and Hell,” collide viciously with a feeler’s
need to affirm everyone’s values. The collision could be quite softened
if the feeler learned these doctrines in a perceptive way. First, there
is no need for a feeler to suppose that every religion is a complete U-turn in
the opposite direction of Christianity. It is far more accurate to say
that some other religions come very nearer to the truth than others, but none
as close as Christianity. This softening permits a feeler to value Christianity
without disrespecting the values of others. Second, the statement, “Be a
Christian or go to hell,” need not be in a feeler’s list of beliefs; or at
least, it need not be worded like that. A feeler need only think,
“Everyone is better off a Christian,” which makes it easier for them to
conclude that, “No one is well off without Christ.” And at this point the
feeler basically believes in hell, only in a far less intense sense. Hell
is likely to be the end-all be-all for a feeler. A good healthy reading
of C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce” might be just what they need to get a
satisfying perspective on the matter.
I’d like to address teachers who teach youth specifically. It can be
difficult to properly teach a group or individual of this type, since each one
has a distinct set of values. One thing you can count on to be
unilaterally valued by all feelers, at least to some degree, is humanity.
To each them, Christianity must be humane; it must encourage its following to
treat every human like the human that he is, since feelers themselves try to do
this in everything. Since Christianity does encourage this, all you need
to do is bring it to their attention. The harder part, however, is
keeping the humanity of Christianity intact when talking about things such as
brutal Israelite history and Hell. I have suggested a few ways to do this
already. As a general rule, when teaching about emotionally touchy
subjects, try to tell the truth in such a way that its humanity, sensitivity,
etc. is still intact (without, of course, jeopardizing the truth of the
teaching). Another thing which feelers thrive off of is Christian ideals.
A good sermon or lecture about the beauty of marriage, or the importance of
wisdom, or the wonder of God’s providence tends to resonate, at least to some
degree, with every feeler who hears them. Each of these examples
represent what the Bible says people should value. Using a healthy dose
of emotional appeal, an audience of feelers can easily be convinced to at
minimum consider adding what the Bible says they ought to value to their own
personal list of values. In all things, emotional appeal is what you want
in order to win a feeler’s approval.
I speak now to feelers specifically. I can honestly say that I understand
quite how you feel, regardless of my heavier inclination towards logic and
reason. For me personally, there are two things which violate my values
for Christianity. The first is hypocritical and judgmental followers (Who
does not consider such things inhumane?). People – indeed, entire
churches – have been lost to this sort of sin. They probably do these
things because someone was first judgmental of them. But why not use such
an opportunity to be especially sensitive and kind? Such would be far
better for the advancement of Christianity. The second is the issue of
depravity. I have not seen much of God’s supposed ultimate healing power;
at least, not as much as I should like. There are many I know who are
involved in church yet who ultimately remain enslaved to sin. Is God not
powerful enough to heal their imperfections? It has been emotionally
trying for me to maintain that the answer to this question is “yes” in the wake
of their ongoing sinfulness still to this day. But when I start to think
that the answer is “no”, I remember my family and one particular friend who I
lead to Christ. I remember how successfully God has saved them from their
own sin. Often times when one fails to value Christianity, it is merely
because he fails to look at the whole picture, or else refuses to do so.
If we really acknowledged God’s every working, we might
realize just how valuable He is, and just what faith in Christ is capable
of. Some good resources for you on your journey might include testimonial
books such as “A Grief Observed” and “Choosing to See”, among others’ whose
names I do not know. Books in the Bible such as Job, Psalms, Song of
Solomon, and the first and last chapters of Proverbs may help you get a clear
picture of what others found valuable about God.
A Lengthy Conclusion
I’d like to begin my closure with a final address to the teachers reading this
who teach youth. So far, I have disclosed various ways that you might
engage one type or the other. While the methods are useful, I find it
insufficient simply to leave my address to you at that for a few reasons.
First, you will quite certainly never have the luxury of teaching a group that
has only one type of barrier; you will almost certainly have to engage both
with a single sermon. Second, if you teach a particularly large youth
group, you cannot well know which barrier has the majority reign, if
either. Third, as I mentioned offhand, these two barriers are largely
dichotomous. Given, everyone is quite certain to face both barriers at
some time in their life. But it is also certain that they will not
experience each barrier at the same time or at the same intensity. An
intellectual with intellectual barriers, while entranced by logical appeal,
conversely takes affront to emotional appeal, thinking the speaker to be
deceptive and/or manipulative. A feeler with emotional barriers to entry
experiences just the opposite. Logical appeal, to them, is bland and of
negligible importance unless Christianity can present itself as valuable.
To cater to one is to automatically shut out the other. To give to one,
you must rob from the other. This makes teaching advice specific to one
type or the other hard to actually apply.
There are some suggestions I’d like to put forth in order to help overcome
this. First, you might try making the sermon, lecture, etc. predominantly
logical with a few flashes of emotion slipped in. For instance, you might
use reasoning and logic to lead up to a certain conclusion, engaging the
intellectuals in the crowd and getting them on board with the conclusion, at
which time you actually express the conclusion highly colored with emotional
appeal and idealism to appeal to the feelers in your crowd. The
intellectuals won’t care how the conclusion is laid out since
they will already be quite in agreement with it (if you’ve done the job
right). Conversely, the feelers in the crowd will be able to understand
that the conclusion is valuable, even if they were bored for the past minute or
two during which you laid out all the rationale and evidence behind it.
Another thing you could do is start a series based solely on one type of appeal
and to make known, in advance, what sort of appeal the series will wield.
At the announcement of a new series, make known, in some way or other, what
sort of appeal the series intends to use. In this, the youth know what
they are signing up for when they arrive at youth group. It eliminates
the surprise that supersedes a feeler’s sense of boredom or an intellectual’s
sense of offense, lessening its intensity a bit. If you take this route
of “block scheduled appeal”, so to speak, make certain to switch it up
regularly. Make every other sermon intellectual; don’t make feelers or
intellectuals wait too long for their sermon type. The good news is that
if you really hit your sermons home, a feeler will be quite willing to endure a
month of practicality in exchange for the following month of idealism, and
intellectuals will be quite willing to do just the opposite.
Besides all of this, there is one method in particular which appeals to both types:
testimonies. Testimonies tend to possess more appeal to one type than the
other type depending on the personality giving the testimony, but the good
thing is that it does not shut either type out. Even if a feeler
testifies about the time that they overcame an emotional barrier to entry,
intellectuals won’t take affront to it. The feeler is not trying to convince them
of anything using irrational, unreliable emotion. He is merely telling
his story, and there is no quarrel that the intellectual can raise about
that. Conversely, feelers will not be bored by the testimony of an
intellectual. In fact, they’ll probably remain quite engaged.
Testimonies appeal especially well to feelers, since in that, the testifier is
largely disclosing their values, which feelers always respect in others.
The one weakness in a testimony is that it does little to actually move an
intellectual closer to thinking that Christianity is true or a feeler to
thinking it is acceptable. The benefit, then, is that it keeps
the possibility of adoption open. The testimony of an intellectual about
the time they found reasons be a Christian will keep intellectuals in the
audience open to the possibility that they themselves could find reasons to be
a Christian. The testimony of a feeler about the time they found value in
Christianity will keep feelers in the audience open to the possibility that
they themselves could find value in Christianity. Wherever they are in
their journey, it keeps them from the conclusion which could end it all –
Christianity cannot be reasonable or Christianity cannot be
valuable – because someone just testified that it is reasonable/valuable to
them. If you find your youth group slipping – giving up on their
adoptions – you might try scheduling a testimonial. The days prior to and
following the testimonial, work hard on a sermon that really hits one group or
the other hard. Try to target the group to whom the testimonial most
appealed last week. If an intellectual testimony, follow up next week
with a powerful intellectual lecture, and vice-versa. This “combination
attack”, so to speak, effectively opens up the possibility and then strikes
while the window is open.
For an effective second and final half of my conclusion, I have decided to take
my own advice and give my own testimony. Considering the subject matter
of this essay as a whole, I’ll testify only about the time that I adopted
Christianity; leaving out the conventional topic of testimonies – coming to
Christ. It is almost certain that this testimony will contain much more
allure for intellectuals, since it is the story of the day that I overcame my
intellectual barrier to entry and adopted Christianity.
I could not tell you when this story started, for it started the day church and
the Faith became for me an autonomous things that held little to no spiritual
value. Surely there exists no such day. The process and my entry
into autonomy was a gradual one. The Devil plays his game that way; for
if the Truth and the Lie were to compete head on the Lie would be thrust away
without competition. Rather, the Lie relies on stealth, sneaking in and
chipping at the Truth as gradually as possible until, before you even realize
it, nothing remains of the Truth and your mind is naught but a cavern of
Lies. I was by now thirteen, and I had become self-conscious enough of
the autonomy that I openly complained about it. “Another sermon
about ‘Jesus saves’?!” “Yes, we know the story of Jonah,” “This is second-year
Sunday school material.” Regardless, I managed to hope against hope that
one day I might attend a church which discussed the obscure stories and
doctrines of Christianity and the Bible. I had outgrown milk. It
was about time I started eating solid food.
There were two things I could not have told you were happening within myself at
the time which hindsight has supplied me with a clear perception of (Funny how
much clarity hindsight affords!). The first was that I was facing an
intellectual barrier to entry. I wanted Christianity to be true and reasonable
and proper. Lake Havasu City could not offer me this sort of
Christianity. Well… perhaps could not is severe. I
would not wager to say that the pastors and church leaders were intellectually
deficient. To the contrary, their audience was, and as such
the leaders had to dumb themselves down to maintain proper appeal. At
least, that was their perception of the matter. I’m not so certain
whether or not that was true. Because, even while the church leaders
tried to maintain what they saw as “proper appeal”, their churches remained
barren; full of not but “snow birds” (the Havasuvian term for elders who live
in Lake Havasu City only for the winter and elsewhere during the summer).
I’m convinced, because of the fruit of some of my own work among the unbelievers
in Havasu, that all the city really needs is some good old fashioned Christian
apologetics. All the church leaders I knew thought quite the opposite, of
course, and as such I was the odd one out (indeed, my entire family was the odd
one out). I was one of the only ones in my age group who had some
thirteen-or-so years of Sunday school under my belt. I was the only one
who wanted – nay, who needed – a lecture on systematic
theology, or philosophy from a Christian perspective, or the ins and outs of a
Christian worldview. I was cruelly rejected this by leaders who did not
know how to train their followers how to, or worse, who did not think their
followers capable of loving God with all their minds.
The second thing about myself I can only tell you in hindsight is that I was
drifting away from Christianity. Have you ever known that you were
changing, and watched yourself changing, but you did not know if the change was
for the better or how you might stop the change? This was how it was for
me. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of my subconscious, I knew that I was
drifting away. But I had scarcely any idea that this was happening, let
alone what I might do about it. This, of course, never showed on the
outside. I looked to be one of the most zealous Christians on the
block. I think, regardless of this slow inner change, that I was (I do
not presume to have been the “best” Christian, only one of the more
“zealous”). There resides within me a very deep sense of loyalty.
Since Christianity was my family’s faith, I very much wanted to stay loyal to
it; and this loyalty was largely genuine. There is a chink in my chain
though; a single character trait that keeps me from being a pure loyalist.
There resides in me a sense of originality and imagination in the way I want
things to be. Had this been switched with a comparative contentment and
desire to keep things just as they are, then I would be a pure
loyalist. My imagination remains the only thing standing between my
personality and the personality of pure loyalist. I am capable of great
loyalty, but not for its own sake.
I was drifting away from Christianity because there was no “sake”. If I
was to remain loyal to Christianity, it would have to be for the sake of loyalty
itself, which I refused to do. My barrier dictated that I would only be
loyal for the sake of logic, reason, etc. But this “sake” was not in
Christianity’s favor; not as it had been presented to me thus far. In
fact, other religions and worldviews had plenty of “sakes”. Of course
Atheism looked quite reasonable and practical to me in comparison to
Christianity, which managed to waste an hour and a half of my life every week
(though I had not yet become complacent enough to consider it a waste at the time).
All worldviews must hold that they are the most logical and reasonable, else
they would not succeed to convince any intellectuals. The problem was
that Christianity, as it was in Lake Havasu City, insisted only that it was
valuable and acceptable and humane, almost completely ignoring the intellectual
side. And I wasn’t going to really join a religion where
all it had going for it was an emotional rush and no more.
I remember quite distinctly a day when we – my siblings, my dad, and I – were
in my dad’s office where he worked as the worship pastor at Lake Havasu
Baptist. I’m quite certain now that we were helping him organize it,
since he had only recently been hired there and only recently had moved all of
his things in. My dad, while sorting through a box full of books
(Christianity the theme of every last one) pulled one in particular out.
“You’d like this book, son,” he said something of the like, getting my
attention, “Very intellectual.” What he held in his hands was small, worn,
and faded. It was almost all white; not pure white but off-white, very
probably the result of wear-and-tear. There was a highly simplistic cover
illustration: a circle divided into three horizontal rows, each with writing in
them that was legible but only just. The title? “Mere
Christianity”.
The title was an initial surprise – in a very good way. Had man been
encouraged to judge books by their covers, this book would have, for me, been
appraised rather highly. The simplicity of the title, as accentuated by
the simplicity of the cover art, was what really ensnared me. This
brought to mind not boring church services that unendingly recounted the same
facts so that anything useful had to be gleaned after much mental processing,
but what I had been wanting all along. I’d had enough of peripheral facts
crowding space in my mind and complicating everything. I wanted, “Just
the facts, ma’am,” and somehow the title and cover of the book convinced me
that that was just what I was going to get.
Surprisingly, upon bringing it home, I did not forget about the book. At
the time I was not much of a reader (Surprising, huh? I conjecture that
this was due to the fact that a book I had tried to read long ago was too
difficult, or too descriptive. I was never good at picturing things in my
mind as books relayed the details, let alone keeping that picture in my mind
every time the object was mentioned again. To this day, only non-fiction
or fiction books with short descriptions and more action are my cup of
tea). I picked up the book and began reading. My original
impressions were not let down. Though at thirteen I barely understood the
complexity of Mr. Lewis’s arguments, I understood enough to see Christianity in
the light I had always wanted to see it; a doctrine of logic, reason, and
sense. I’d read a chapter. I’d lie back on my bed and contemplate
it. I’d re-read a difficult section. Though I self-resolved to read
only a single chapter a day (for what reason I am not certain; possibly to give
myself time to contemplate it or time to do other entertaining things), I
couldn’t stop myself from going on. I’d read some three or four sections
a day, which was quite a bit to process for a thirteen-year-old.
Just like I cannot tell you where this story starts, I cannot tell you where it
ends either. That is, I cannot tell you the precise day that I adopted
Christianity. This process, too, was gradual. That is how I find
God to work quite often as well. Service to Him is no single act; it is
an eternal discipline. Christianity became less my family’s and more my
own, yet still somehow remaining a family affair. I became my own
Christian; or perhaps more accurately, I am becoming my own
Christian, since the adoption neither started nor does it ever seem to
end. Though I started it long after, it is no exaggeration to say that
this book is what, at the root of it, inspired me to start the very blog you
are now reading!
To this day, I am perplexed by my dad’s remark to me when he introduced me to
the book; I am referring to when he said, “Very intellectual.” He
obviously said this because he knew that I was intellectual, and he figured
that the book would resonate with me. And it did, and he was right, of
course. But the perplexing part is that I do not recall, to any extent,
being overtly intellectual in any way before thirteen. Indeed, I did not
start thinking of myself or admitting to myself that I was intellectual until after reading
the book. It was as if, after reading the book and being able to
comfortably conclude that Christianity was reasonable, I was finally able to
really be an intellectual. Not until Christianity was
intellectual could I be intellectual, for I was a Christian. Before I
could be defined as intellectual, the thing that defined me also had to be
intellectual. I found myself, my true, intellectual self, in Christ and
the doctrine that is Him: Christianity. It leaves me with a provocative
question. Did I adopt Christ? Or did He adopt me?
