Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

As the civil rights movement gets under way, lifelong Democrats become Republicans overnight.

At the church’s Men’s Brotherhood meeting, he announces that he’ll close the restaurant if the feds make him serve Blacks. Sure enough, he does—and a few years later gets elected governor of Georgia.

The church has clearly lied to me about race. And about what else? Jesus? The Bible?

and a computer in Belgium supposedly has all our names stored away in preparation for the Mark of the Beast.

Some of the girls sob. And from down the hall we hear the muffled, ugly sound of students applauding and cheering. Of course we know why: over the last few years, President Kennedy has been sending federal marshals to enforce racial integration in the South.

As I step over the fence to the pony-farm field of the church where we live, I start viewing my own community of white-racist-paranoid-fundamentalism as its own kind of culture. I don’t like what I see.

Since the rest of the nation judges Southerners as backward, ignorant, and racist, I want to disassociate myself from my region.

Camp and church have taught me that much of life consists of acting.

I conclude there is no secret, just a learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words.

The prohibition of facial hair and restrictions on men’s hair length seem odd to me, since our textbooks depict Jesus, the apostles, and most male saints with flowing hair and beards.

Before long we’ll probably start hearing rock music in churches and this school will look ridiculous.”

A few months later Bob admits to me that he fabricated much of what he said that day—“I just started talking, and all sorts of wild stories came out.” Marshall’s question comes back to me. How do you know what’s fake and what’s real?

My suspicion is confirmed. I doubt that the Holy Spirit would reward a cheater.

“We hear all this stuff about the Victorious Christian Life, but it seems to me it just sets up a kind of self-righteousness competition.

“Who knows what’s real and what’s fake?”

I realize I don’t know much about Jesus, apart from the stories I learned in Sunday School. Churches in my childhood focused mostly on the Epistles and the Old Testament.

God. I’ve already learned to distrust my childhood churches’ views on race and politics. What else should I reject? A much harder question: What should I keep?

Yet from the Bible I am learning about a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who empowers such people as the adulterer David, the cheater Jacob, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. A God whose Son makes prodigals the heroes of his stories.

“I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls.”

“The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”

Nature teaches me nothing about Incarnation or the Victorious Christian Life. It does, though, awaken my desire to meet whoever is responsible for the monarch butterfly.

“Show me a man in love; I’ll show you a man on the way to God.”

Yet for me, whether in family, church, or college, the motions of faith have always proved unreliable. I have proved unreliable. Too many times I have adopted the guise of a Christian, only to have the reality vanish like vapor.

I can’t distinguish the authentic from the fake.

pass. How many times have I gone forward to accept Jesus into my heart, only later to find him missing?

In the end, my resurrection of belief had little to do with logic or effort and everything to do with the unfathomable mystery of God.

righteous evil unleashed in the name of God.

I marvel that any African Americans would adopt the religion of the enslavers who once “owned” them and the white descendants who oppressed them. Yet who ended up showing more of the spirit of Jesus?

“I wish I’d known more about the grace side of God,” he says,

In the churches of my youth, we sang about God’s grace, and yet I seldom felt it. I saw God as a stern taskmaster, eager to condemn and punish. I have come to know instead a God of love and beauty who longs for our wholeness.

Above all else, grace is a gift, one I cannot stop writing about until my story ends.