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school public pool and baptized myself, by
immersion, in the name of The Lord Jesus
Christ and for the forgiveness of my sins. My
friends say I’m nuts behind my back, my wife
isn’t sure but seems to love me anyway, and
my cat doesn’t care as long as I feed her. But
I feel so wonderful I don’t care. There is a
very new sense of grace and possibility in my
life. I accepted Christ’s gift of eternal life and
I’ve been rebooted, if not reborn. I am in a
new covenant and it is personal.
Now this is where I have to be honest and tell
you I don’t like testimonials. I don't mean that
in a nasty or spiteful way but I have never
understood how all the incredible things that
lead you to Christ and God could help me in
my own journey. That probably sounds worse
than I mean it. But how Grace made you
move, swim, or crawl to God is such a specific
and personal story they are hard for me to
relate too. The problem is I don’t want to talk
about all the possible dots
that God connected leading
me to that high school pool on
a cold and foggy morning in
July. I can tell you now I don’t
understand anything about all the moments
that somehow seamlessly made it possible for
me to accept Christ’s gift of Grace. My wife
has always said I don’t receive gifts well, and
here I am trembling like a newly-wed and
running to accept a vow from God’s Son to
love and save me and give me an eternal life
on a “heaven on earth” after the Last Judge-
ment. That’s too much to believe in for any
of my friends and family. I can’t explain to
anyone how I know this. I can tell you what is
in the Bible (which many have read in their
lives), but I cannot tell you how to come to
that realization. I think that that belief is
actually the real gift- that is how Grace shines
in a heart, like a storm or wind rushing in, and
that is how a life begins to change. Redemp-
tion is not a moment, it’s a process. I will be
repenting and being redeemed until I go to
sleep in the Lord and am called to the Judge-
ment however far away that is. But I have
accepted God’s Son’s promise to me and I have
asked him to come into my life and guide me
forever. Forever is a long time and knowing
me I could screw up. That is why I now ask
Jesus often for guidance and some bit of
wisdom to keep me going on His path, and
since the Bible is what we have of God’s word
I have begun reading it often.
I was raised a Christian and had years within
both the Presbyterian Church (of my youth)
and The Eastern Orthodox Church. I was
excommunicated from the Orthodox Church
for taking Communion at a non-Orthodox
church. I lost my friends and was supposedly
cut off from the saints, etc. I have taken
classes in both the Old and New Testament
at a small Presbyterian college in North
Carolina, and studied scriptures informally
under my Orthodox priest.
All that being said, I have a brain like a sieve.
I can’t remember verse and scripture but I get
the ‘Big Picture’. I learn in sweeps of under-
standing. I can’t quote chapter and verse but
I can tell you in my own
words the wonder and awe
that each verse unveils. I can
tell you Grace shimmers in
time and space. I can tell you
that Grace shimmers though history. After
leaving ‘The Church’, I still prayed but it was
usually asking either for something to happen
or not to happen. It was like putting letters
in bottles and throwing them out to sea. I
basically became resolved to God’s indiffer-
ence or maybe my own. I was in the end
responsible for giving up on God. It’s a hard
thing to say but I think it is true, I gave up on
God. It’s a frightening thing to realize but I
never really trusted God to answer my
prayers. I always wanted to, even in Ortho-
doxy but I never felt a sense of trusting God.
Jesus and God to me were always a kind of
‘good cop’/ ‘bad cop’ routine. God scared me-
always did. Wrathful, jealous, vengeful
sounded like a God you shouldn’t mess with.
Jesus was different. He was loving and kind
and you went to him. That’s the way I felt for
years. In the Trinitarian tradition the persons
really meant a separate ‘person’ - so you
could deal with Jesus and avoid God. That’s
pretty much what I did. Jesus and The Holy
Spirit were approachable, and cool, and trust
“Redemption is not a
moment, it’s a process”