A common question pastors ask is, Can you remember a time when you asked Jesus into your heart?

I understand the question, but I can’t answer it.

And I suspect some of you reading this can’t answer it either.

Not because you’re not saved, not because you don’t know the reason for your hope…but because, it’s messy, the way painting can be messy.

Hearing the “gospel” depends on who’s telling it, and we can live our whole lives before we realize we’ve never even heard it at all…

I’ve been “saved” more times than I can count.

When I was 9 years old, I experienced some kind of conviction and got saved to make my parents proud.

I remember sitting on our porch in Needmore, country bugs and tree frogs croaking their songs, while a pastor read a tract to me.

The tract looked like a comic, a picture of a black cliff with me on one side, a steep scary canyon, and God far away on the other side. A Cross covered the chasm between us.

I nodded and agreed to everything he said as he turned the gray pages.

I just wanted to go play. And cry.

I felt like I was in trouble.

The following Sunday I had to “go down front” and tell the church I’d said yes to Jesus.

As sad organ music played and everyone filed past to hug me, I felt like I was at my own funeral.

I was so glad when it was over. I never wanted to get saved again.

Children are beautifully capable of giving their lives to Jesus with pure sincerity, but that’s not what was going on with me. I was trying to be obedient.

Several years later, I sort of got saved again after a car wreck, because that’s what people do when they nearly die—and I shared my testimony all over the place.

I’d seen unspeakable mysteries during that time and was more convinced than ever that God was true and real, but I still felt the cold howl of emptiness in my heart.

Leaning over the wooden rail outside my apartment, I’d have conversations with God. I’d look into the night and ask Him why I felt so lost. I know He heard me. I felt His Presence.

And yet, small-town Sundays would insist God couldn’t hear the prayers of people like me.

Then I got saved as an adult when I suddenly, truly, sincerely realized and believed the Bible tells the Truth about Jesus.

A few years later I was saved yet again when my limited spiritual journey of belief and head knowledge opened into living-color intimacy. This time the Holy Spirit was teaching me to walk with Him.

But my favorite time He saved me was after a time of deep, black spiritual yuck when I’d had all I could take of Perfect Church, canned Sunday School commentary, and a good look at the ugly, crusty underbelly of religion.

Whatever this was felt like being trapped inside an Iron Maiden, and every time I exhaled, the skewers of The Law, by-laws, and doctrine impaled me until I could no longer breathe.

I’d found Jesus, only to become lost in a corporate illusion.

I was done. I needed saving in a whole new way.

I needed Him to find me.

Then one day, all alone in my kitchen washing dishes while listening to a man talk about Jesus, I heard the Gospel in a way I’d never heard it before…

Such Love…

Where had this Good News been all my life?

It truly was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

In fact, it was such Good News and so refreshing and so freeing that I started to laugh…

I laughed and laughed, all by myself, and every time I thought of what I’d believed about God before, compared to the Good News, I started laughing all over again.

Then the laughter gave way to tears, and my insides wept. It was quite the reaction, let me just tell you.

I spent a week rereading the entire New Testament just to make sure it really is that good!

These days, I know I belong to Jesus Christ—God knows it—and He has saved me, but when asked if I can remember a time when…I don’t know what to say.

There is no date.

It’s felt more like dating, leading up to a Wedding.

Jesus has always known I was His; He can’t help He isn’t bound by time, because He’s God.

But way back as a child, the sweet conviction of God’s merciful Spirit was reaching out to me, just as He reaches out to everyone.

I said yes the best way I knew how, for reasons I couldn’t articulate. Everything after that is God’s business.

Snapshots from my life would reveal a lost soul, wandering and wondering, ever conversing with a God I was always certain was Present but not always certain loved me.

The journey of salvation is a Love Story, with periods of intense doubt being swallowed up in wave after wave of God’s lovingkindness and relentless pursuit of us.

The more I know Him, the more I crave this Living Water, a cocktail of love, acceptance, truth, and spirit.

This Drink is unconditional and free for everyone.

God calls it grace.

I’m still waking to all that He is—we all are, but someday we’ll fully know, even as we are fully known.

Awakening is a daily process of testing myself to see whether I’m in the faith, whether I’m standing firm as my spirit bows to Love, until The Day when faith will be sight.

But I’m not holding on to Him. He’s holding on to me.

He’s everything, and every good thing is because of Him.

Every day through circumstances of life, Jesus asks, Do you love Me?

And every day, both wounded and invited by His question, I take a shaky breath, count the cost, and say with certainty, Yes, Lord, You know I love You.

 

Follow Me.

~ Jesus, The Christ