wrestling

Just picked up the book "Same Kind of Different as Me" by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. My supervisor at Northside this summer told me it was one of the best books she had ever read, so I figured it was worth a read. I found the following passage absolutely hilarious, and thought some of my friends out there might enjoy it as well :)

As newlyweds, Deborah and I were just your basic Sunday-go-to-meeting Methodists. We parked ourselves in the pews most Sundays, and definitely every Easter and Christmas, since in those days it was still the widely held opinion that only hell-bound heathens--and possibly lawyers--skipped church on Easter and Christmas. We kept up that pattern until 1973 when some friends from a Bible church invited us to their home for a six-week "discussion group" about life.

As it turned out, we had actually been labeled "lost," "nonbelieving," and "unsaved," possibly because we had no fish stickers on our cars. (Which reminds me of one friend who, though newly "born again," retained the bad habit of flipping off other drivers while barreling down the road in her Suburban. Even with her newfound religion, she couldn't control her middle finger, but according to her husband, the Holy Ghost prompted her to scrape the fish off her bumper until her finger got saved.)

I laughed out loud when I read that. The chapter goes on to talk about when the author and his wife first became believers. He describes the "six-week discussion group" and how he felt almost pressured to "pray the prayer" before the group ended. "After five weeks," he writes, " I had it figured out: If you hadn't accepted Jesus by the sixth Sunday, you were probably going to hell on Monday. So, on the last night after we went home, I told Deborah I was going to pray that sinner's prayer Kirby had told us about."

What an interesting perception. Sadly, I think it still rings true today. Hall goes on to say that his wife refused to fall into that line of thinking, that since her dad had paved the Methodist church parking lot in her hometown, she was sure to be "saved." Before the end of the chapter, Hall goes on to mention that his wife "cross-examined the gospel like a prosecutor on a federal case" before she became a believer as well.

I was brought up in a church that leaned more towards the performance and praying the "sinner's prayer" that Hall described. While I call myself a believer (even though I buck at using terms that can be used as labels), I hope that at 25 I am learning to approach Jesus and the gospel more like Hall's wife, where I am cross-examining and wrestling with truth instead of blindly and passively accepting it, just because someone who is older or "wiser" than me told me to.