Persuasion

I’ve been working away at my writing project and got stalled out at trying to describe the process of coming to Jesus for the very first time. It’s such a mysterious thing, such an internal and individual thing. Like Jesus says, you see the effect of the wind on the trees, but how do you describe the action of the Spirit itself? You see people beaming as they try to describe the difference inside them, and you see their lives change, but how do you describe what happens? All you can do is say what it was for you.

I was five. I was at an evening worship service at the church in Honduras where we attended, and I remember what struck me of the sermon. The preacher said that God wanted us to become His children. That we had a choice, that there were two roads laid out before us, and we had a choice to make—today. As a five year old, I got that. I figured I was too young to walk down the aisle at the church, so I waited and talked to Mom when we got home. I asked her if kids could make the choice of becoming God’s children. She said yes, and prayed with me, and I remember the next day sitting up in a crook of a tree, thinking proudly, “I’m a child of God; I’m a child of God.”

I’m not so sure about the theology of all that now. I don’t think I became a child of God then. I think I woke up to the fact of God’s fatherhood just about the very earliest that a child can awaken to it and responded just about as soon as a child can respond. I think that when the choice became clear to me for the first time, I jumped right into God’s arms and never looked back. I am a child of God in a dozen different ways. I’m a child of God’s because He created me. Because he put me into a family that dedicated me to Him from the day I was conceived. Because I grew up in a family that pointed me to God at every turn. Because I recognized God’s love as a child and walked trustingly to Him and became his little child. Because He adopted me as a child through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Because he grafted me into His family as a descendant of Abraham, the Father of Faith. Because he chose me from the foundation of time.

Like many who come to Christ young, I felt a pang of longing when I heard testimonies of those who came to Christ after a long fight, who could confess great sins and leave behind great evils of drugs and liquor (maybe I’ll tell you Robert’s testimony some time). I wanted to give Jesus this kind of faith and give to others such convincing proof. I remember listening to Billy Graham on TV when I was in high school and wishing I could convert all over again, so persuasive was his message (my dad came to Christ in a Billy Graham crusade).

I don’t feel that way now. I realize that I was privileged to be a five year old child of God, aware of how he cared for me though all my life with goodness and wisdom. Not that I’m better. I’m not. I’m simply familiar with Him, with his Words, his ways, and his love. I’m so convinced of his goodness that it surrounds me like the air. He lives in every good story I hear, every great wonder I see, every moving piece of music I hear, every great piece of art I admire, even the good movies I watch, just ask my kids. He is there in my sleeping and waking and resting and working. He shapes the history I read and the science I discover. He shapes world politics and under-girds philosophy. In all my years since childhood, he has persuaded me. As the Benedictines say, conversion is an every day thing.