My Christian Oddyssey Pt. I

I’ve been a Christian for most of my life. According to my mother, someone gave me a tract about Jesus when I was a young boy, definitely younger than 7, because we still living in New Jersey on Ft. Dix. I took the tract home and peppered my mother with all kinds of questions about God and Jesus, and again, according to her, I would not relent until she took us to church. I have no memory of this, but I have heard my mother tell the story some many times, it’s almost like I was really there. My mother had some questions about God and religion, and she was definitely a hell-raising skeptic. As she tells it, the preacher who spoke that day at the base chapel said that the Lord told him to preach on everything that my mother had questions about, and then actually proceeded to do. My mother took this as a sign that the Lord did indeed care about her, and the rest as they say, is history. I have been going to church ever since, sometimes feeling very close to God, sometimes feeling very aloof. That's a very vague statement to cover the next ten years, but who really has time to chronicle all their sins and virtues? Exactly. When I left home at age 17 (I graduated high school a semester early because I was just so miserable, then moved out to Philly to stay with my grandmother for a while), I really started to seek God out on my own, not in an organized setting where someone is interpreting the Bible for you. I was working at a bookstore out in Havertown, which is quite the commute, and also at one of the McDonalds’ out there, and so during my rides on the trains, trolleys, and buses, I began to read my Bible from cover to cover. I got a Revised Standard Version from the bookstore, and really tore through it. It was incredible, one of the best things I had ever done. I began to pray in my own voice, not just repeating the words and stylings of the church folk I had grown up around. I felt really close to God. I felt alive and vibrant like I had never known. It was better than being in love, and this is coming from a fool who was always falling in love.

Eventually it was time to return to Illinois and begin my studies at the U of I in Champaign-Urbana, also the place of my birth, as my parents met each other as students there a generation before. I began to drift away from God immediately and got caught up in girls, the Black Power student movement, and um… girls. It wasn’t long before my grades were falling and I was in danger of losing my scholarship (somehow I earned an academic full ride as a National Merit Scholar Finalist). So on the last day, I withdrew from all my classes (there was no way I was going to pass any of them) and moved down to Atlanta, where my mother had moved to after I had left home. I needed some time to get my head on straight. She had been telling me about this church she had been attending and was really learning a lot from. The name of this church was World Changer’s Ministries. It would indeed change my world.

To be continued…