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1. In the first chapter, I talked about how my "conscience" suddenly awakened one afternoon at a winter camp meeting in Brookville, Florida when I was 10 years old. What ensued was ten years of terror.
During those years, I prayed constantly for the Lord to forgive my sins. Frankly, I didn't know what sins I was even asking forgiveness for. Sometimes I thought it might be nice if I had deliberately done something wrong. Then I would know what I was praying for and would likely have found peace.
But there were few moments of peace in my quest to be saved. A couple times. And when I wasn't thinking about it. But if I got to navel gazing -- hyperintrospection -- it was torment.
2. Keith Drury once said there wasn't a moment of his life that he wouldn't have gone to heaven if he had died. As a young child, he had not reached a point of accountability, and the Lord would have received him. As soon as he knew his need for salvation, he prayed to receive it, His sins were forgiven, he became right with God. Every time thereafter, whenever he sinned, he asked forgiveness. As a consequence, there was never a moment that the Lord would not have received him.
What a healthy understanding of God's character! It was not the feel of the preaching of my youth. I grew up with a doctrine of eternal insecurity. Not only did hell loom over you before you came to Christ, but it was "one sin you're out" after you came to Christ. Say a curse word and get hit by a train? It's hell for you. This is just as unbiblical as eternal security.
3. I had always been a compliant person. At school, I was a goody-two shoes. If it was a rule, I followed it. The number of times I had deliberately disobeyed were few. I took a brick home from Hobe Sound. I asked if I could go to 7-Eleven but went to a different one than I knew my mother would think. I didn't correct the lady when she thought I had deliberately given the wrong answer. That's most of the childhood sins I can remember.
I was painfully shy. Perhaps I had sinned because I prayed in the pew rather than going down to the altar. At Frankfort Camp, I might go down to the second or third pew after the altar call was over. Maybe God was testing me to see if I was willing to go to the altar. I did once.
Again, I didn't know what sin I needed to go to the altar for except that I was constantly unsure if I was saved.
They sang a song. "It was on a Sunday, somebody touched me." You were supposed to stand. At first I didn't know if I was saved. I stood on Sunday because I didn't want people to think I wasn't saved. Was that lying? I had already asked Jesus into my heart a thousand times. What if I had the wrong day of the week? Thankfully someone added a verse, "I don't know what day it was but somebody touched me."
Then there was that time going up the stairs I had peace after praying the prayer for the ten thousandth time. I would count that time. I think it was on a Sunday, so I could stand on that stanza the next camp meeting.
4. Do I think the Lord was testing or tricking me? No. What a petty god would play such games!
If God is love, he wouldn't want someone so desperate to languish on like that in torment. That would be cruel God -- in fact, more likely Satan. I attribute most of my torture to a developing brain and whatever peculiarities there might be to mine. I was born to second guess myself.
Surely the almighty, sovereign God of the whole universe has better things to do than torture overly conscientious twelve year olds.
It's probably no surprise that I'm not too fond of this dimension of revival culture. It hyped up experiences. You got the impression that the Christian walk was fully of these emotional encounters with God.
But I was more like Spock in temperament. I had deep emotions but I tried to suppress them. Be logical. To this day, I feel like I've exposed myself if I let my emotions show. I feel guilty if I get stirred up in a meeting.
John Maxwell used to make us feel guilty for not witnessing to every passing stranger we encountered. I used to keep a Bible out when I was on a plane so that someone could ask me about it -- a subtle attempt to open the door to evangelism mid-flight. In high school, there was a phase where I would put a Bible on my desk as a witness.
But I would later recognize that Maxwell is an extrovert's extrovert. He can talk to anyone at anytime. It's no virtue to do what you're wired to do. Virtue is when you do good when you're not wired to do it.
A extroverted woman in my home church once told me when I was a teen that shyness was a matter of pride -- a person is too proud to put themselves out there, I guess. What a completely stupid thing to think.
5. I don't know why God didn't make himself more evident to me all that time. This is a question that would haunt me into my late twenties. You would think that God would want to be known -- especially to someone so constantly pleading for him to speak to him. Even in seminary, many Sunday mornings in church I would silently plead for him to speak to me in an obvious way.
When I was in England, I read Honest to God by Bishop John A. T. Robinson. He talked about how when he was at theological college, a certain group of students seemed to be constantly blessed, but he didn't feel anything. Man, I identified with that. Why is it that some people seem to have their radios tuned exactly to the divine frequency while others struggle to hear a peep?
I remember a young man at my home church growing up. He seemed to go to the altar every Sunday night. But for whatever reason, he just never seemed to find peace. I don't know, of course, whether he was struggling with some very specific issue.
I have since come to believe that some people have a gift in this area. Call it a gift of faith. They are on the right frequency to perceive God's working.
Can we all get on that frequency? I've come to think that we can. It's taken me a very long time to think that. I'm not sure how to put it, I think it comes from the assumption that our prayers reach God whether we hear anything back or not. In fact, I suspect for most of us, we won't experience any undeniable response most of the time.
I almost chuckle when I think of a moment in college when it occurred to me that I should imagine that God is actually there when I pray -- that I am actually talking to someone. I had just suddenly come to realize that my prayers were like monologuing. It was like I was talking to myself.
While this sounds ridiculous, how many prayers had I heard that were really the pastor talking to the congregation. "Lord we know that you are in control." Of course, God knows that. You don't have to tell him. Are you really telling the congregation that?
In many respects, I wonder if my revivalist tradition had set me up for this crisis. I had been led to believe that everyone was a Moses. We were all prophets and prophetesses. The impression I got was that I should be having regular highly emotional zaps and revelations from God. We were all Elijahs. If those zaps weren't happening, something was wrong.
Then I realized that Moses was eighty years old before he had his first real contact with God. Sure, the encounters came very frequently after that. But I'm not even sixty.
6. In seminary, I had David Seamands for Pastoral Care and Counseling. In that class, we read his Healing for Damaged Emotions (hate that title). More helpful to me personally was going on to read his Healing for Damaged Memories.
Although his labels are truly cringeworthy, he talks in that second book about "damaged love receptors." He argues that sometimes our God antennae aren't functioning properly. God is beaming his love to us just fine, but because our antennae are broken, we're not receiving the transmission. And -- here was the hard part for me -- he said God uses relationships and others to help fix our antennae.
As an introvert, I hated that thought. Why can't you just fix me directly, God? I know you can. But Seamands suggested that God just didn't design us that way. He designed us to live -- and heal -- in community.
7. Compounding the torment, as I mentioned in the first chapter, was the fact that I started to experience it at exactly the time that the rapture movies came out. We watched A Thief in the Night one Sunday night at church. Then we watched A Distant Thunder when it followed. Perhaps there was some connection between these movies and my terror. To this day, apocalyptic movies get in my head. Woe that my family got into watching Walking Dead. I started seeing zombies all over Marion.
At K-Mart, I would keep my mother close in sight. I wouldn't stay outside playing too long before going in to make sure she was still here. I clearly had no confidence in my own salvation.
At college, it got worse. I'm sure the girl I was dating thought I was nuts. We would come home from church and I would say, "I need to go pray. I'm not sure if I'm a Christian." I remember one Sunday going round and round the student center at lunchtime asking God for forgiveness for sins I know not what. I don't think it was God. I think it was neurosis of some kind.
One Sunday night, I was struggling again. Somehow I ended up in the lobby of the girl's dorm. Some movie was on. As movies and television always do, it pulled my mind into its story world. When it was over, I felt better.
That was a good insight. Left alone to my own thoughts, I would spiral. If I could be around people, if I could watch something that would pull me out of my own storyline and into another one, it was a kind of reset.
8. I would largely outgrow this bondage, which is part of why I think most of it was developmental. Perhaps it was also a faulty God-concept that I grew up hearing preached. The God of my childhood was a crooked sherrif who enjoyed having an excuse to blow people away. At least that's the way I experienced him.
To this day, I think there are many sons and daughters of the holiness movement who have a distorted sense of God. I think this is why they are attracted to authoritarian personalities. Punishing the wrongdoer is their primary mode of being. But this is a twisted sense of God. They are drawn more to God frying Uzzah than to God as the one who sent his Son to save rather than condemn the world.
I will share in the next chapter about the Easter experience that was a definitive turning point in my spiritual walk. Then I would go to seminary, which was pure joy and light and freedom in the Lord. During those next few years I would steadily move from bondage to freedom.
Please understand that I loved my home and family. But those years in seminary were a spiritual tug of war inside. When I would go to seminary, I would feel genuine freedom in the Lord. It was not a selfish freedom or a rebellious freedom. It was pure joy in the Lord. It was peace and happiness. It was light.
Then I would go home. I would begin to doubt myself again. I would question whether I was going off track even though it felt like my mind was exploding with new insight. I would doubt myself.
But at seminary, the Scriptures were opening up to me in a way they never had before. I was blown away. I was reading them in the original Greek and Hebrew and entering its worlds like never before. I was beginning to feel the love of the Lord.
Then I would go home, and a darkness would cover the land again, a bondage. It would take a day or two when I returned to seminary. Then it was joy again. But home was darkness.
You can't live in those two worlds forever. Eventually, I would choose the joy of the Lord. I was on a path toward confidence. I would reach a point where I was fully confident in the Lord -- I never worried about what he thought of me anymore. I was not troubled anymore by the doubts that had once enslaved me.
I continued to worry about what other people thought of me. I didn't want to disappoint others. Until my early thirties I pretty much did what everyone else wanted me to do (within reason). In teaching, I worried what others might think. In class, the imaginary presence of my mother sat in the back of the room as an alarm for when I might say something off limits.
I wasn't worried at all about what God thought. He understood all my new understandings. He and I were fine. It was everyone else out there I worried about.
9. Let me be really serious right now. I believe that a significant portion of the evangelical church has never moved out of the bondage to law that I am speaking of. Still living under the God whose primary mode is to destroy, they know neither the true love nor joy of the Lord. A believer in this land is putty in the hands of the Devil. They are not only unaware of their own bondage, but they are an easy instrument of bondage to others.
Lord, lead us out of Egypt to the Promised Land.
10. God's speaking is still a mystery to me. If you are open, you can see his hand everywhere. You can rarely be completly sure of exactly what he is up to. But you can thank him for every good thing that happens. You can rejoice even through the bad times.
As a Wesleyan, I don't think that everything happens for a reason. Well, I believe God either causes or allows everything for a reason. It's the "allow" part that gets a little uncertain. Sometimes, God allows things for reasons much bigger than Ken Schenck, which may mean that he has not directed them for some very Ken-focused reason.
The "everything happens for a reason" way of thinking can get very narcissistic, as if God is trying to teach me something very specific with everything that happens. But the universe is a big place and, most of the time, God is frying much bigger fish than me.
But I can be constantly in prayer. I can be constantly in communication with God. I can be constantly thankful in both good and bad times. "Naked I came into the world, and naked shall I leave." Life gives, and life takes a way. "Blessed be the name of the Lord."
Still, I should pray in confidence that my prayers do affect the outcome of events. And if at some point I sense the Lord speaking to me, fantastic! I must always be listening.
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