Kidnapping Jesus: My Faith Story

On a thunder-clapped night in South Georgia at the age of 9, I accepted Jesus. The following Sunday I walked to the front of the 1st Baptist Church of Americus Georgia and professed my faith in Christ. A few weeks later just hours before I was to be baptized a squirrel got into the baptistery. It nearly took an act of God to get that squirrel out. That should have been a sign for my parents.

My parents were devout Southern Baptists who had been raised in small towns in the Arkansas Delta. They taught Sunday school, and they taught their four children that you went to church when ever the church doors were open. My parents were deeply committed to their faith, but they tended to speak about their faith about as much as they spoke about sex. Yes we prayed before meals, and yes we read the Nativity story every Christmas Eve, but I don’t remember hearing my parents ever speak about their personal relationship with Jesus. So, much of what I learned about Jesus came from the churches we attended.

This let-the-church-do-all-the-discipling model was working pretty well for my family until my older sister got pregnant when she was 18, and until my family started crumbling from within. I watched as our picture-perfect Southern Baptist family began to rip apart at the seams, and all I could think was that the church and Christianity were full of crap. Every time I walked into the church the more hypocrites I thought I saw. By the time I was a senior in high school I had pretty much given up on Christianity, but I kept going to church for the sake of my parents.

About the time I gave up on Christianity, I started to get more involved with gangster rap. Rather than worshiping Jesus, I began to worship Public Enemy, NWA, and Ice Cube. The anger that had been growing inside of me because of our family problems and the hypocrisy of the church was now finding an outlet. As I went off to college with Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet playing on the radio, I was convinced I would never step into a church again.

During my freshman year of college, I became painfully aware of the racial injustices that scarred the history of the United States. I began to see my complicity as a white male and I began to see the complicity of Christianity in this history. This only increased my disdain for Christianity. My hatred for the church and white America reached a breaking point when I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley. Through the life of Malcolm X, I saw the hypocrisy of the church and the insidious racism of America. But most importantly, through the life of Malcolm X, I saw Islam as the antidote for racism and for Christianity.

A good friend of mine at this time was a practicing Muslim, and he began to disciple me in the faith. He gave me books to read, and we would meet often to discuss the various tenets of Islam. By the Fall of my Sophomore year I had accepted Islam, and I had begun to pray five times a day and to observe Islamic dietary practices. Jesus was no longer God for me. He had become a great prophet like Abraham or Moses.

My full embrace of Islam continued for more than a year until I began to get frustrated by my growing spiritual emptiness and my growing sinful behavior. Islam was turning into a burden that seemed to have less and less impact on my life choices. I caved into sin and nothing in my life reflected a commitment to Islam or to any faith tradition for that matter. I was living a hedonistic life, but I still held to an Islamic view of God and Jesus.

During my final year of college, I squeezed four years into five; I amused and horrified my close-friends when I came home one night with baby Jesus in my arms. I had kidnapped him from a nativity scene that had been set up in front of a hardware store. Sometime afterwards as one of my roommates and I sat on the couch, drinking Old English 800 smoking Newport 100s, I looked over towards baby Jesus who was sitting in the corner of the room on a large traffic pylon that I had stolen, and I told my roommate with as much bravado as I could muster that “Jesus himself would have to come and sit down next to us on the couch for me to believe in him.”

About a year and a half later, not much had changed in my life except that I had graduated from college and was spending the summer driving around Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. My girlfriend at the time was exploring the North West with me, and we filled our driving times by taking turns reading aloud Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams. There was something hidden and dark about the novel that began to make me question my mortality. Slowly, I began to sense that I was going to die in the near future. The feeling of death was becoming palpable, and for the first time in my life I fully grasped my eventual non-existence. Having been raised by my parents to believe that the most important decision I could ever make was about my relationship with God, this realization of my mortality literally scared the hell out of me. I knew I had to come to terms with some belief about God whether that was a Christian or Islamic belief, and to my surprise I started to think about Christianity though I tried to fight against it.

Less than a month after returning from my trip out West, my father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. He had been playing tennis, and I was the only family member on the scene, I was the one who rode with him in the ambulance, I was the one who had to listen to the doctor say, “I’m sorry your dad didn’t make it,” I was the one who had to tell my older sister and younger brother that our dad was dead. On September 6, 1997, I watched one of the best men I knew die. Sure my dad had made mistakes in life, and no he and my mom weren’t perfect, but they were loving and supportive parents who had tried their best to instill Christian principles into their children. Even though I was reckless and wild, I looked up to my dad for his integrity, and I looked up to the way he lived out his Christian faith. Neither of my parents was going to openly witness or discuss their faith, but they were going to openly live lives committed to Christ. The one true anchor in my life, who had loved and cared for me regardless of how I had acted, was gone.

Through the days, weeks, and months of grief that followed, I began to allow myself to slowly turn back towards Christianity. One late fall afternoon as I stood in my mom’s backyard enjoying the fleeting warmth of the sun, I told Jesus that I was sorry for the way I had treated him over the past six years. Now I wasn’t ready to believe in him yet, but I did want to make peace with him (a bit ironic). This treaty with Jesus was a huge step for me because it allowed me the freedom to think more seriously about Christianity. For the next four years I became increasingly comfortable with Christianity and with the divinity of Jesus.

By the fall of 2001, I was married and had a four year old son. I had come to accept Christianity as the faith tradition that I felt most comfortable with, but I was not yet attempting to live as a Christian. Some time before Christmas of that year my mom had said something about the Bible to my son. His response to her was “what is the Bible?” To her credit she took it in stride and said nothing about it to me. Needless to say my I felt like crap, so I decided it was time to get back into church for the sake of my son.

I walked into Mount Pisgah UMC with a great deal of spiritual baggage and with a giant chip on my shoulder. I was ready to pounce on any hint of hypocrisy. Half way through that first sermon by Dr. Allen Hunt, I honestly had to look around the sanctuary to make sure everybody wasn’t staring at me because I was certain Dr. Hunt was speaking directly to me. In the weeks that followed, I would enter worship jaded and I would leave in tears. God’s amazing love was penetrating the brokenness of my life. It was telling me that I was a child of the living God and that Jesus the Son of God had died for me and all the horrible things that I had done. I began to allow myself to believe, and I began to allow God to change the way I lived my life. But even as all of this incredible transformation was taking place, I still had reservations about fully embracing the divinity of Jesus. Theoretically it was fine, but in practice it was still just me and Allah.

As I began to grow in my faith, God’s voice began calling me to something more. God’s voice had started calling me to something more when I was nine, and it had even called me to something more when I despised Christianity. So, in the late spring of 2003 less than a year after I had again committed myself to Christianity, I accepted the call to ministry. Over the next year, my wife and I prepared for me to begin attending Asbury Seminary in the fall of 2004.

Within weeks of being on campus, I knew that God had only scratched the surface of my brokenness. I quickly sought Christian counseling, and I got involved with a group of men who week after week showed me what it meant to be loved by Jesus. The effects of Islam were still lingering in my life and through these three men I discovered that I had accepted the idea of Jesus but not the person Jesus. This movement towards accepting the person Jesus reached its climax when Jyl Hall shared how she too had not fully accepted Jesus until she had come to Asbury. That day in chapel I knew that I needed the person Jesus. On that day, the idea or concept of Jesus as my Lord and Savior was no longer good enough. On that day, I needed to be fully enfolded within the story of a God who willingly emptied himself taking the form of a slave in order to tabernacle among his fallen children. On that day in chapel, I, the one who had derided and mocked the sacrifice of Jesus, needed to be welcomed back into his arms.

My wife was on a similar journey as me, and we both fully accepted Jesus around the same time. That Easter, my wife and I had the great fortune to renew our baptisms together. So on the Easter of 2005, my wife and I publicly professed our commitment to Jesus, and we together kneeled at the altar of our church and had the waters of life poured over our heads.

Since that Easter, my wife and I have continued to learn about the person Jesus, and we have continued to struggle and thirst for more. As Howard Macy has written, “God’s yearning for us stirs up our longing in response.” My life has been a life of pursuit and retreat. I have tried to fill my hunger for God with sex, alcohol, and religion, but nothing has been able satisfy my appetite except for the eternal Bread of Life.

What is your story?