A miscarriage in a “born again” religion

I grew up believing in the Christian conversion experience.

You know, being “born again.” The heavens parting, light streaming, doves descending, operatic voices in chorus.

I went down into the baptismal waters a sinner: Sinful behavior, sinful feelings, sinful thoughts. I expected to rise from those waters a saint. All that old sin down the drain like dirt in a bathtub. I was sure I would never fall short or miss the mark again.

In fact, my darkest, deepest, most compulsive sins were still my future.

Practically speaking, that’s one of the great disadvantages of baptism before puberty. You’re a 12-year old saint and almost overnight you become a raging, staggering sinner with an obsession for boobs.

They say males think about sex every seven seconds (or 8,000 times a day). Once sex became the tick-tock metronome of my mind, all bets on sainthood were off. As a baptized Christian, I was supposed to have the Holy Spirit, wasn’t I? The indwelling of a spirit whose first name was “Holy” would surely lead to holy behaviors, feelings, and thoughts, right?

This was not my experience.

I could memorize and recite Philippians 4:8 (“whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think on these things”) over and over. Still, I somehow always ended up daydreaming about the girls sunbathing at the pool. As I once heard someone say: “It’s like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.”

I was deeply ashamed of myself. I was deeply disappointed and disillusioned with the “born again” thing. I figured it couldn’t be God’s fault. It could only be mine. Maybe my baptism wasn’t legitimate. Maybe I was just doing Christianity all wrong and suffering the consequences.

After many, many years hitting the “reset” button multiple times a day on my holiness/purity, I concluded I must have a demon. I sought out a pastor who offered to perform an exorcism. Yes, a real exorcism.

Long story short: It didn’t work. Not only did the physical manifestations he predicted not happen (farting, gagging, raving, screaming, shaking, thrashing around, and vomiting), I resorted to falling asleep that night the same way I did every night: A ritual meditation on the female body.

What was wrong with me? Was my sinful nature so wild that even God couldn’t domesticate it? Surely not. It must be me. It wasn’t that God couldn’t tame my sins. It had to be that God wouldn’t tame them, so great were my offenses against him. I was doomed.

I don’t want to focus too much on sex here. The older I got, the more opportunities I had to feel disappointment and guilt in myriad ways. Let’s not overlook cussing, making excuses, narcissism, overeating, poor money management, procrastination, and whining (among other things). All of the stuff that I thought would get easy at baptism only got harder. All of the stuff that I thought would go away not only stayed with me, its extended family showed up in a Winnebago and parked in my driveway.

I felt ashamed. I really was so bad that even God could not reclaim me. In a “born again” religion, I was a miscarriage.

I ended up in the office of a Christian counselor asking him for answers. Did God reject me? If I had the Holy Spirit, wouldn’t I be getting better and not worse? What was I doing wrong?

Over the years, neither counselors nor pastors nor theology professors gave me the answers I sought. Despite desperate resolve to “get it right,” I went right on sinning. If nothing else, it was that “grace may abound” (Romans 6.1). Small comfort there.

What eventually changed my mind was a combination of things–none of them from a church Bible class. The illumination came from family life and an awareness of nature.

The common thread in those things is the lump-in-your-throat moments of beauty, love, and wonder that occur in family and in nature. Holding my newborn son for the first time was not an experience or feeling that I earned or engineered. I could not prepare for it because I could not imagine it until it happened to me. “Heaven must feel like this,” I thought. All the good things I’d done in my life put together were not enough to merit holding that baby boy.

That moment wrecked my world in a good way. I was the same sinner. But instead of ruminating on my sin, I had to confess the truth: God is not going to treat me as I deserve. God is going to treat me the way he wants to treat me. God is going to love me because love is all God really wants to do.

I had a vague notion of God’s love the day my son was born. Four years later, I have a crystal clear picture of it. I wake up every morning eager to find new ways to love my boy. I anticipate life with him. I nearly pop with admiration and pride a hundred times a day as I watch him grow and learn–often by making mistakes. I even cherish the moments when I discipline him for how those moments bring us close and help us focus on life together.

I’m really not interested in keeping track of his sins. Oh, I want him to grow up to be a man of character and wisdom. But I want that for him because I love him, not because that’s what he has to do in order for me to love him.

I’m convinced that raising a boy is how God writes the Bible on the hearts of men who want to know him. As a father, I’m internalizing God’s fatherly love. That’s changing how I see myself and how I understand my relationship with God. I’m not in some sin-eradication program. I’m in a relationship.

The other thing about fatherhood, marriage, and nature is that these things are the best things in life…but they’re never complete, never finished. They’re always changing, always evolving, always growing. Disappointment, difficulty, hardship, misunderstanding, setback are part of the process. In nature, you can’t have spring unless you have winter first.

If you really had a choice between a perfect family or your family, which would you choose? What if the weather was perfect in the same way every day of your life?

It is clear to me that God made a world that is always incomplete, unfinished. Rather than say it’s because the world is “fallen,” what if it’s because the God who makes the world really enjoys the process of making and making things new (Revelation 21.5)?

When does love become sweetest and most precious? When do we lean on it most? Not when everything is perfect. Not when we’re at our best. It’s when things are going wrong. It’s when we’re far from our best. What really matters most in life grows more complete when life itself seems incomplete.

If we were perfect people, love could not grow between us or in us. We would have no need for it. We would be perfectly self-contained, perfectly self-sufficient. If we were perfect people, it would change our relationship with God to something sterile and transactional. There would be nothing to become, nothing to learn, nothing new to make. There would be no glory in overcoming. There would be no resurrection. There would be no Gospel.

Thank God that I’m incomplete. Thank God that I’m a work in progress. Thank God that being born again is a gestation and birthing process that takes years, decades, or even longer.

Because love is not a moment in time; it’s a lifetime.

Grace and peace.