Milestones In My Spiritual Life- Epiphanies

 

I’m reading Anne Lamott this summer. I love her writing style. In this book, Traveling Mercies, she begins with incidents in her life that brought her to God and Christianity. It made me think about my own spiritual journey. Along the way there have been many moments and people who helped pave my spiritual road, but three epiphanies stand out.

I have already said I grew up in a Christian home. My father was a pastor, son of a pastor. My mom was also raised in a Christian home. As a kid I felt my whole life was taken up with church. It wasn’t, but it felt that way. I thought I was a Christian. I knew the lingo and I would use faith language to explain to my friends why I couldn’t do what they were doing, especially as we got older and there were things like dances. It’s cringe worthy to admit that I would say I couldn’t go because it was “against my religion.” Painful to even write it down. The truth was, dancing wasn't against my religion, it was against my parent’s moral standard, but who wants to say that? So I played the religious card.

But though I was “religious”,  I wasn’t a Christian. You don’t truly become a believer by osmosis. You have to take action on your own account. I was living off of my parents’ account. It just didn’t seem that important to me, until it did. My first epiphany began with a movie we watched at church. I don’t even remember the name of the film, one of several made for church offerings that were out. But what struck me from the story was how the “Christian” characters prayed. I grew up around prayer, before meals, before bed, and all through church activities. But the way these people prayed totally blew me away. They just talked to God – plain, simple conversational words.  I had never even imagined you could just “talk” to God like that, like He was a friend. But, it was just a movie.

A few months later I went to camp. I was 13, the summer between junior high and high school. The speaker, whose name I have also forgotten, woke me up the first night by praying in a similar manner as the people in the movie. He just talked, like God was in the room beside him. I don’t remember if that struck anyone else as odd or amazing, but it hit me hard. I thought I knew God. I prayed. But I didn’t know this man’s God. I realized I wanted to know a God you could just talk to. That week I came to the realization that I was not yet a Christian. For the first time I understood that Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship. I had a lot of religion, but I didn’t have a relationship with God. I knew I needed to make that decision for myself, and I knew that if God was that approachable, I wanted to approach and spend time with Him.

My life changed as I began to see faith in God as relational, not merely following a bunch of rules. My life changed, but not always for the better. The legalistic part of me still existed. But the process had begun. I graduated from high school and went on to college.

At college I found an amazing church. The pastor wanted to give a Bible School experience to the students who attended his church. I found what he offered irresistible. I loved his classes and practically lived there on Sundays and Wednesdays during my undergrad and graduate years. I have copious notes from my time there. I borrowed commentaries from my dad’s office.  I don’t think this helped in my relationship with God as much as it filled my head with a lot of knowledge and ideas that later made more of a difference. The experience fueled the teacher in me, and began a lifelong love of Bible study. This pastor too saw knowing Jesus and God as relational, and the more we knew of Them (via study and experience) the closer we could come in relationship, if we pursued it.

I pursued the knowledge but not so much the relationship. College was full of other types of relationships. One relationship that became very important to me was with a young man. I adored him. He made me feel beautiful for the first time in my life. There was the minor issue of his being more or less atheist, but who cares, right? I remember exactly the night when I felt God pushing me for an answer – my relationship with Him or my relationship with this person who doesn’t even recognize God exists? I chose the man. 

But ours was a strange relationship that went on for many years. I think now that what he liked in me he also disliked – my relationship with God. I kept going to the Bible classes, but the rest of my life was full of school and him. Then came time for my student teaching. I would be away from campus for an entire semester. During that time my guy found a girlfriend more to his comfort zone. And I went a little crazy. By day I worked at school and by night my roommate and I enjoyed the party scene in town. I had never met and spent time with men in bars, and here I was. It was flattering and fun, and certainly not what God would have wanted for me.

My second epiphany came during one of those evenings. I’d met a guy, he bought my drinks. We talked and danced, and finally he asked for my phone number so we could go out sometime. I wrote it on a match book (or a napkin – I can’t remember, but it felt like something from the movies). A few days later he called me. It was exciting, except his first question was, “are you a Christian?”  What??? We hadn’t talked about faith or even religion. I kept up drinking with the best of them. There was no way – yet, out of the blue he asked that question. I said, “yes.” “I thought so,” he said, “I don’t think we need to see each other again.” And the conversation was over.

How did he know? In that moment I came to understand that once I’d placed my life into relationship with Jesus, I was “stuck” with Him.  I may have thought I left Him at home, or back on campus, but in truth He went with me wherever I went, including the bar. And somehow he shone through me so that young man could see. It was far from my intent, and yet there it was. I realized I could think I was running from God, but in fact, He faithfully stuck with me, as indeed happens in the best of relationships.

Gradually I began the trip back to being more faithful to my relationship with God. I finished school and began teaching. A pastor who’d gone to school with my dad, and whose wife had been in graduate school with me, had a church where I worked. He put me to work with his youth group and mentored me. From there I took a job as a youth pastor, found my husband and felt like my relationship with God was blossoming. That church experience was trial by fire for me, especially feeling like I was in the dream Christian job only to find that working with Christians can be anything but a dream. But I loved working with the kids, and teaching the Bible.

I left that job to become a high school English teacher. A couple years into that job my mother found out she had an incurable liver disease. Her final year was quite tough, as anyone who’s known someone in final stage liver failure knows. It’s awful. But I always felt God was there, walking through it with us. I was experiencing the truth my college pastor had taught – what we know about God we take into our experiences. The more we know, the more we can trust Him in the circumstances.

My third epiphany occurred when my mom was dying. My mother loved Jesus. She had her issues, but overall she was one of the godliest people I’ve ever known. Being a pastor’s kid drives a lot of children away from God. My mother’s confident belief and faithful prayers created the glue in our family, seeing us all develop relationships with God.  I just knew that my mom would be one of those people Jesus would gently take by the hand and lead into heaven. She’d look up and see Him at the foot of her bed, smile and peacefully go.  Her death wasn’t anything like that. It was, for me, horrific. Since then I’ve learned that a lot of what she went through was the normal process of dying. But we didn’t have the benefit of a hospice explanation. Instead I witnessed her gasping for breath, her eyes wild as she thrashed her head looking for something that wasn’t there. Suddenly, inside my head, I wondered for the first time if there really was a God. Because of my upbringing, I’d always assumed He existed. I also assumed He’d take my saintly mom into his arms and carry her to heaven. Well, we all know what assumptions do. So I stood there wondering if I’d bought off on a pipe dream. Maybe we’d all been wrong, because it certainly seemed there was no God in this room.

It was terrifying. Suddenly, it all changed. Not my mother calming. Not Jesus at the foot of her bed. But there, inside me, came the overwhelming sense of God’s presence. He was there, with us, with mom, with my family, and with me. It was as real as if He’d spoken. “I am here.”  And there was peace. This experience cemented my beliefs. I’ve never doubted God’s existence again.

Three epiphanies. Three experiences that shaped my faith. Christianity is not a religion full of rules and regulations. Christianity is a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. My behavior and beliefs are shaped by this relationship, not by a list of does and don’ts.  The relationship is based on God, not on my behavior. I can be a miserable failure as a believer, but God is faithful. Once we have accepted God’s gift of relationship, nothing can separate us from Him, especially our own failures. And occasionally He has to remind us He is still there, most often in very surprising ways. Finally, in the midst of the worst life can throw at us, He is there. He may not be stopping the situation, taking away the pain, but He faithfully steps into the pain with us, and holds us steady.

Epiphany can, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, mean a sudden understanding of something important, or a powerful religious experience. I have no doubt that my three experiences were manifested by God to teach me something important. Probably I understand them better more by hindsight, but in the moment they were pretty clear messages as well: God wants a relationship with us, He will never leave us, and will give us the strength and ability to endure even the most difficult circumstances.