The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

How do I tell you about my conversion to Christianity without making it sound like an alien abduction or a train wreck?

I come to the limits of language when I try to describe my life in Jesus Christ.

Christians can lay hold of the meaning and purpose and grace of suffering and truly believe that all things, even the evil ones, “work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). A life outside of Christ is both hard and frightening; a life in Christ has hard edges and dark valleys, but it is purposeful even when painful.

Christians still scare me when they reduce Christianity to a lifestyle and claim that God is on the side of those who attend to the rules of the lifestyle they have invented or claim to find in the Bible.

Christian tradition, not Christian relevance. Too often the church does not know how to interface with university culture because it comes to the table only ready to moralize and not dialogue. There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.

The Bible makes it clear that reason is not the front door of faith. It takes spiritual eyes to discern spiritual matters. But how do we develop spiritual eyes unless Christians engage the culture with those questions and paradigms of mindfulness out of which spiritual logic flows?

Ken stressed that he accepted me as a lesbian but that he didn’t approve of me as a lesbian.

Two incommensurable worldviews clashed: the reality of my lived experience and the truth of the word of God.

I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.

Repentance is an intimate affair. And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.

I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different. At this time, though, obeying in faith, to me, felt like throwing myself off a cliff. Faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental.

One doesn’t repent for a sin of identity in one session.

When you die to yourself, you have nothing from your past to use as clay out of which to shape your future. Because conversion, in Scripture and in my personal experience, is arduous and transformative, I fear the consequence of the easy believism that typifies modern evangelical culture.

I couldn’t believe how exhausting it was to daily put Christ before me. The old patterns were there waiting for me, and they knew my name.

I don’t think we should ever jolly someone into faith, especially someone who has access to a pulpit.

As Pastor Ken once said to me, “You can’t steer a parked car. If you want to turn your life around, you’ve got to get moving!”

betrayal deepens our Christian vision: The Cross is a rugged place, not a place for the squeamish or self-righteous.

My lesbian neighbor had at one point been a woman of faith. I didn’t know this. Now she was dying of cancer. She approached me one day and said, “I didn’t give a damn about who God was to you in your happiness. But now that you are suffering, I want to know: Who is your God? Where is he in your suffering?”

There is no finer resolution to a faith test than genuine Christian ministry.

God gives and God takes away and he does it for our good.

Never again will I think of knowing God’s will as anything but the most humbling of acts. And never again will I confuse other people’s hopes and dreams for me as proof of God’s will.

elder and friend Bob Rice said, “Rosaria, never doubt in the darkness what God has promised in the light.”

This was my conversion in a nutshell: I lost everything but the dog.

I’ve always been more in tune with the inner landscape of life than with the outer landscape. It takes a lot to get me to notice geographical landmarks or the color shoes that somebody is wearing. I’d make a terrible witness in a crime. While internal landscapes have depth, shape, color, texture and taste, the external world is usually just a shade of gray for me.

Political advocacy plastered next to Bible verses makes me anxious. I’m not a betting woman, but if I was, I’d say that Jesus is not a member of either political party.

Bible verses that front salvation over Christian service, instead of being important interfaces between Christian homes and the watching world, seemed like sneaky little raids, quick and insulated targets into culture, with no sense that a worldview of care lay behind them.

Meyer says, “Unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him….Faith puts Christ between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them” (p. 17).

Even when faced with the blinding sting of someone else’s sin, it really is not someone else’s sin that can hurt us. It is our own festering sin that takes the guise of innocence that will be the undoing of us all.

All of the testimonies that I had heard up to this point were egocentric and filled with pride. Aren’t I the smarty-pants for choosing Christ! I made a decision for Christ, aren’t I great? I committed my life to Christ, aren’t I better than those heathens who haven’t? This whole line of thinking is both pervasive among evangelical Christians and absurd.

I felt and feel no solidarity with people who think their salvation makes them more worthy than others.

I told my audience that I think too many young Christian fornicators plan that marriage will redeem their sin. Too many young Christian masturbators plan that marriage will redeem their patterns. Too many young Christian internet pornographers think that having legitimate sex will take away the desire to have illicit sex. They’re wrong. And the marriages that result from this line of thinking are dangerous places.

God is not crushing the dreams of parenthood when he deals the card of infertility. God is asking you to crush the idolatry of pregnancy, to be sure. And, he is saying: Dream My dreams, not yours!

That’s the real ringer: the common cup—that is, our common origin in depravity. We are only righteous in Christ and in him alone. But that’s a hard pill to swallow, especially if you give yourself kudos for good choices.