How I Got Here (part 4)

Finally…after several hours of unendurable spiritual warfare, I was given the grace to utter the words. “Okay, God, I forgive my biological Mom.”

When I said those words, I felt like I had become a new person. I felt as if I had finally tasted what it was like to be born again. I felt like I had let go of everything that defined

my life up to that point. I had “let go of the rope” and had every sensation of free falling.

The next day was Thanksgiving.

Previous to this particular evening in 2000, I had prayed the prayer, prayers, actually. I had taken the class and submitted to the rite of Mennonite baptism.

And was enormously conflicted, inwardly tortured and miserable. And up to that evening, in fact, up to that very moment when I told God I would forgive my biological mom, I barely knew why. I had a vague sense of what was supposed to happen once you “went forward” and “prayed the prayer” and “confessed all the sins you knew and could think of.

I had been taught to read the Bible from a fairly early age. I knew that nothing that the Bible writers claimed would happen when you “were born again” had happened to me.

You were at least supposed to have something called “assurance of salvation”. I spent the first night of being “born again”, trying to convince myself that something actually had happened.

Nothing worked. Nothing really seemed for real. But I was told it was real. So I went along with it.

Nothing prepared me to come to the conclusion that I was not born again before that point. It was not until three, maybe five years later that the realization would dawn on me.

About six weeks later, I boarded an airplane in Portland, Oregon and set my face toward Richmond, VA, and whatever awaited me at the children’s home where I was (somewhat surprisingly) accepted to begin a term of voluntary service.

This realization began the slow, and at first (probably undetected) deterioration of my adherence to the Mennonite faith.

The realization that I was not born again when I “joined church” first, probably, began eating away at me in my subconscious.  There was a hunger, that was undefined and unsettlingly vague at first. It provoked me to question just about everything that I had accepted as true up to that point.

How could I “just leave” the Mennonites, when, as far as I was able to tell, I owed almost everything to? I was adopted by Mennonites. I had been raised, trauma, and emotional and religious abuse that came along with being a foster kid in the Plain circles, by Mennonites. Even if the “loaf” of bread I had been given had some “rocks” in it, it was still a “loaf. And even if it was a “half a loaf”, even with “rocks” in it, it was still a half a loaf. And a half a loaf is  better than none.

Among the things I was compelled to question and “check my foundations”, was a tricky little word, “Baptism”. And right along with that “Holy Spirit” and “how many baptisms are there” and, oh, that pesky little thing called “speaking in tongues”.

I read, studied, prayed and sought this, more or less on my own.

All this was going on while I was a more or less good Mennonite and serving at, first, at the children’s home in Virginia, and later at a men’s rehab in southern Indiana. And  some of it was even happening after I was no longer “anything” but a somewhat crazy, bewildered, a little bitter and seeking, and wildly hungry “ex-Mennonite”.

A crazy ex-Mennonite who was even treated to his own encounter with God that included being “baptized in the Spirit” in the least likely place imaginable.  On the living room floor in the house of a friend who barely believed in that sort of thing.

But to me, I had waited a long time for it.

And “it” was only the beginning. Yet it wasn’t. Yet it was.

To be continued…