The miracle of re-birth... and of romance

Thoughts of Anna's birth have led me to reflect upon my own birth: my second one, whereby I was reborn by the Holy Spirit and became a new creation in Christ.

A while back, Amy asked me to share my testimony. And then our advance warning of questions to be asked for Jeff's interview came in and they are going to ask for my testimony tomorrow as well. So I thought I would use the quiet tonight (I'm over at the T family's house babysitting their five lovely children) to share some of my testimony with this blog's readers. Jeff warned me I'll only have about two or three minutes at the interview, but I hope you might have a few more moments than that, my dear reader(s??). I'll warn you now, this may well be my longest post ever.

My mother is a Christian, but my father is not. Rather, he is an outspoken atheist. He wasn't always quite so outspoken, however, and I do have one memory of him attending a Christmas Eve carols service at Mudamuckla church (a tiny building, it would seat perhaps only 30 people). He spent most of the service seeing how artistic he could be with the dripping wax from his candle. I wonder if perhaps after that Mum thought he needn't bother with the pretence of worshipping with us, even at those annual Christian celebrations of Christmas and Easter. I certainly don't remember him coming to church with us ever after that, until he came to each of my children's infant dedication/thanksgiving services, having been specifically invited.

However, my mother was and is a Christian and I often admired (and still do) her perseverance in her faith in the face of antagonism. I remember watching her place money in the offering plate each Sunday and wondering at her determination to give to the church of God despite Dad's seeming to let us go there on sufferance. My mother's quiet faith and perseverance in it spoke volumes to me as a teenager and I still reflect upon it today, mostly with gratefulness that, unlike her, I am married to a man who loves God.

Dad was content to allow Mum to bring myself and my two brothers up "in the church", although they did choose a family sport which took us away from services every second week during the winter. I attended Sunday School classes and, in high school, I went to a weekly Bible Study. I was enthusiastic about being a Christian, but sadly I thought Christianity was something you did, rather than something you were. This caused no end of strife in my later teen years and early adulthood!

I am not sure what led me to this erroneous conclusion. I did attend preparation for baptism/confirmation classes in high school, but somehow the things I was taught there did not sink in, despite me deciding to be baptised and confirmed into the church when the classes ended. I remember having a very lop-sided view of the Holy Spirit as a result, partly, of having listened to a very emotion-rousing speech at a youth event on the need to "have the gift of tongues" as evidence of one's salvation. I think the lesson I learnt from that was that the Holy Spirit's role in the life of a Christian was merely something to do with helping them pray in an unusual way. I don't remember being told that the Holy Spirit was promised by Jesus to his disciples as the counsellor, who would show them what to say and do in their lives after He ascended to heaven. Which was unfortunate, really, because I could have worked out the prayer stuff on my own (or with a few good examples, anyway) but it was the counsel part which I really needed in my own life.

I struggled deeply with the idea that I had to live up to a standard of behaviour in order to be a Christian. By about half way through university, I remember very clearly thinking one day that I couldn't live up to this standard on my own so I wasn't going to bother even "trying" to be a Christian any more. There was a guy involved, but he was just the catalyst for my decision, not the root cause. The problem was that I was a sinner - and I thought I had to be a saint all on my own, without any reference to what Jesus Christ had done for me, or what the Holy Spirit would do for me if I only had faith in Jesus' work on my behalf.

My behaviour spiralled down from there, but I won't go into that. Since I no longer had the desire to live up to God's standard, I didn't worry too much when I couldn't. And so I took many small steps which eventually took me a long way from the moral foundations I had once held dear.

At times I went to church with my Mum, then when I went off to Adelaide to do my Grad Dip I went on rare occasions with my brothers, and once or twice with a boyfriend. In my second semester of teaching I was working in a small country town and for some reason I decided to check out the local church and was welcomed. I even went so far as to join a Bible Study small group for a while, but my heart wasn't in it and I struggled to know what the point was. Upon reflection, I suspect much of my motive was a need to connect with someone who didn't know my boyfriend whom I had split up from after moving to the country to be nearer where he was. At the end of that year I decided to move back to my parent's place in Darwin and got work at a private high school there. I had emotional wounds to lick in private but my spiritual wounds would only grow deeper.

Despite living for a while with my parents again, I didn't go to church with Mum. I moved out with friends after a while. I put a lot of effort into my work (most of my teaching time was with ESL Aboriginal kids who had come to the school as boarders from remote rural communities). I also spent a lot of time reading pagan books looking for a religion which would allow me to worship the god I wanted to worship, not the One in the Bible, who I had earlier rejected. I bought a goddess charm which I wore on a necklace and, while I didn't delve deeply into Wicca, I gradually came to look upon myself as a neo-pagan. Of course, I wasn't "neo" anything: I was a pagan just the same as those who worshipped the Ashtoreths back in the time of the Israelites! But I didn't think of it from that perspective, of course. I thought of it as a sort of feminist revival of a religion which suited who I was and wanted to be. There was a small voice inside which whispered "this is not going to please the One True God very much, is it?" but I managed to ignore it most of the time.

And then I met Jeffrey one Saturday as I wandered through the local shopping centre with a friend. I still shudder at some of the things I said in that first conversation, but for some reason he was fascinated by me and rang me later in the week to ask for a date. I remember thinking, after hanging up the phone, "That was odd... why on earth is he interested in me?" (Jason, a mutual friend who had given him my phone number, later let slip that Jeff had spent quite a while mooning over "that wonderful girl" to Jason before finally acquiring the number and ringing it. I still wonder how he wasn't turned off in shock at my antics.)

Jeff and I spent most of the next month arguing. Mostly about religion and our conflicting beliefs. However, he did tell me he loved me only two weeks after we met, and I told him not long after that. Seven weeks after we met Jeff asked me to marry him and I said yes, although I was quite put out that he chose to ask while I was barefoot in the kitchen cooking dinner. The champagne he had in the fridge almost made up for the burnt stir fry.

Despite our engagement, the arguments continued. Jeff thought of himself as a Christian, and I thought of myself as a pagan. I tried to argue with him that god was really a multi-faceted being and he was just choosing to worship the facet called "God" by Christians and I was worshipping a "goddess" facet, but he wouldn't have a bar of it. He told me it was all a load of rubbish. For the first time I ran up against someone who knew that post-modern pretensions that "it can be true for you, even if it's not true for me" didn't hold any water in the arena of religious belief. And Jeff, who had been on the territory debating team in senior high school, was no slouch when it came to arguing his point forcefully. Still, I loved the adrenalin of the arguments almost as much as I hated the frustration of knowing I was losing most, if not all, of them.

I stubbornly held to my own beliefs, but as a good post-modern I couldn't do anything to attack Jeffrey's. After all, he was entitled to believe whatever he wanted, wasn't he? So at some point before we got engaged, we came to what I now look back on as a naive and foolish, if not downright stupid, agreement. I agreed to support Jeff in his "Christian" beliefs and also allow any children from our union to be brought up to think that Christianity was true, so long as they were also taught that other people believed something else was true. Jeffrey pretty much only conceded not to harass me about my pagan beliefs anymore. It wasn't much of a truce but it helped me to feel comfortable with the idea of marrying Jeffrey, because I remembered from my childhood in the church (and my own family) that Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians. I still can't believe I was that naive.

Anyway, Jeff and I moved in together a while after that, because he had been living in a house provided by his employer the ICRC. He had been planning to move to Africa to work for them there two months after we met, but decided living in a war zone wouldn't be good for a new marriage. So when he quit his job we found a flat together and I embarked on what I looked at as "helping Jeffrey to be a better Christian, the Christian he really should be if he wants to keep calling himself by that title". You see, I didn't think Jeff really had too much of an understanding about what Christianity was all about. He never went to church, he was willing to marry me (and I knew he shouldn't do that because I wasn't a Christian) and he didn't even complain too much when I went and got a tattoo (and I knew the OT said something or other prohibiting permanently marking your body - how could he not know that rule, even if he was willing to flout the marrying one?). You can see from this that my view of Christianity was still completely one of living by the rules. I don't think I'd ever heard the word "grace" at this stage. I certainly didn't know what it meant.

Part of my plan was to get Jeff to attend church. So I told him to pick one, because he should be going. He picked Darwin Baptist, because that's where he had gone as a kid growing up in Darwin. I was happy that he didn't want to go to the church I'd gone to with my Mum years ago, because I worried that people would look down on "that poor heathen girl" - me. Because I knew that the best way to get him off to church on any given Sunday was to go with him myself. So there I found myself at DBC one Sunday, patiently standing and sitting with the rest of the congregation (but refusing to sing the songs or pray the prayers, because I didn't want to pretend to be something I wasn't), while I waited for Jeff to find out what this whole Christianity thing was all about. I found myself there a whole lot of Sundays actually, and even found myself singing along a little bit, just to the tunes which were really catchy, darn 'em.

We got married somewhere in here, seven months after we met. And we were still arguing about religion, but the arguments had spilled over into other things as well. Pretty much everything which we disagreed about seemed to have the root of the problem come from our differing views about God, however. I didn't realise until later how much Jeff's heart ached as it finally dawned on him that the woman he loved was not going to be in heaven with him when we both died.

Then one Sunday they announced at church that an Alpha course was about to be run. I nudged Jeff and told him, "You need to go to that. Then you'll really find out what Christianity is all about. You have to know what you say you believe. Put your name down!" Again, the easiest way to get him to go to the Alpha course was to go along with him. I look back with a smile at this time because I honestly thought I was being a good post-modern pagan encouraging my husband in his own religious beliefs, with no thought that God might actually use this course to teach me what Christianity was all about as well!

So we went along to the Alpha course together. Some weeks Jeff wanted to be slack and not go, and it was me (the "pagan"!) who got him there on time. And each week on the way home we would have huge arguments over what had been said in the video. Huge arguments, even for us! We'd still be arguing for an hour or more after we got home and then we'd go to bed to lie in stony silence. I don't know about Jeff, but I was always lying there trying to think of a better argument, and I just couldn't. I still can't believe that I persisted with dragging Jeff along to that blasted - blessed - Alpha course each week. Because if I hadn't become a Christian, we sure would have ended up divorced, those arguments were that bitter.

Around about the third or fourth week of the Alpha course, there is an explanation of the fact that Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for the sin of the people of the world. It completely rocked my world. Beaten down by so many arguments with Jeff, I remember walking out onto the balcony of the flat where the course was held and praying my first prayer to God in years.

"God," I said with resignation in my heart, "Your Son has already died for my sins. It happened a long time ago now and there's nothing I can say that will undo it. So I might as well take advantage of it. I'll be a Christian if You want me to be one. But You know I can't be a good Christian on my own. If You want me to change, You'd better make me. Because I can't do it on my own, and I know I do need to change. So You do it. Take my life, and make of it what You will."

I didn't really think, even in that moment, that He could change me. (It took two weeks before I would even admit to Jeff that I had become a Christian!) And I sure had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I told Him that He could do whatever He wanted with me. (I mean, here I am, only seven-and-a-half years later, about to become a Pastor's Wife!!!) But He was faithful. He still is. He led us to a Bible study where I heard about Justice, and Wrath, and Grace, and Mercy, and Election, and Love. And I slowly began to learn that God will never be what I want Him to be. He is Who He is, and I have to accept that and worship Him in Truth. I began to learn that Christians do not live lives which accord with God's moral standard because that earns them their salvation. Instead, Christians are moved by the Holy Spirit, which is placed within them at the moment they place their faith in Jesus Christ, to live lives which increasingly reflect the glory of the One who died for them. I learnt the difference between justification and sanctification. And at last I began to see how it all applied to me. And little by little, I placed more and more trust in God. And little by little, and sometimes even in big jumps, He was at work in me, sanctifying me and making me more like His Son, Jesus Christ. Giving me the desire and strength to live the life I had never thought possible as a teen.

After we moved to Perth I heard an explanation of God's plan of salvation and how it is revealed in the Bible which, for the first time, helped to put every word in the Bible into place for me. I enrolled in BSF, which I had gone to for a short time in Darwin, and learnt more about God's Sovereignty, and His provision for my righteousness. And I heard a whole lot of solid, Biblically-based teaching about the Holy Spirit and His role in the life of a believer. I learnt that a Christian is truthfully described as a believer, not a do-er. But also, that faith without works is dead, and "good works" are one evidence that faith is indeed present in the life of a Christian.

I learnt to hold precious those special words of Ephesians 2:8-10:

8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Thank You Jesus for dying for my sins. Thank You my Father in Heaven for calling me to be one of Your children. Thank You, Holy Spirit, for residing in my heart as a testimony to the hope I have in Christ Jesus, and for the way You move me to obey God's will. Thank You God, for loving me so much You saved me and made me a Christian in truth, rather than just one in name. Amen.

PS And just in case you're wondering, Jeff and I argue a whole lot less now: praise the LORD for His mercies!