My Personal Narrative

So, growing up in the church, I've heard all kinds of testimonies from all kinds of people. There's the "I was a preacher's kid and did lots of crack!" testimony, and the "Sinning was tons of fun, but Jesus saved me. Praise God!" testimony, and my personal favorite, the "God delivered me from everything but breathing, and he'll do it for you too!" testimony.

As I was reading today and reflecting on my spiritual pilgrimage (the word "journey" is so overused, but it's hard to replace), I thought about how long it had been since I documented the process that has taken me from who I was and where I was to who I currently am and where I am. I don't think I've written down anything of this type since early in my "college-life," when a call or desire to enter vocational-ministry had to be validated by a grand story of Jesus either sucker-punching the subject in the face or bodily appearing to them with a chorus of angels. Since everything "important" nowadays comes with a disclaimer, warning it's readers of the impending danger of reading a selected work (usually done by an author to excite the reader and appear daring), here is my disclaimer: The following will be very boring to most of you if not all of you. Sorry. It isn't written for you, but it's an exercise for me to work out who I am and where I am currently. It will probably be fragmented, like many of my thoughts. If you happen to actually read it, I hope that it gives you hope, or maybe just a good laugh. In any case, thanks for reading thus far. So, without any further delay, here is my boring personal narrative.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, is know as the "Buckle" of the glorious "Bible-Belt." Almost everything in Tulsa (or Oklahoma for that matter) has been influenced in someway by a traditional, ultra-conservative understanding of the Bible. We have the famous, "Praying Hands Statue," and churches on every street corner competing for the attention of anyone who might drive by. We are one of the last states to legalize tattoos, and if you were to attempt to purchase beer (affectionately called "The Devil's Urine") at the grocery store, it would be half the strength as if you were to buy it at the liquor store. All of that is to illustrate the social environment I have grown up into. It is here where my journey begins.

I was born to a nominal Christian family. What I mean by that is that we attended church every time the doors were open, but we hardly ever prayed together (Unless it was before lunch on Sunday, because that meal belongs to the Lord!). Mom was always very sensitive to spiritual matters and I always knew that she wanted something deeper than what she currently had. There were times when dad would pray with me before I fell asleep, but it was mom who would unflinchingly field my questions about Jesus and what it meant to follow him. In spite of this, it was hard in my formative years to see a direct correlation between the beliefs of my parents and how they lived their lives.

I loved Jesus growing up and thought everyone else felt the same way about him as I did (I guess in that regard, my parents weren't so nominal after-all). But the older I got, the more questions I asked and the less my parents' were able to answer. It even appeared that they were severely inconsistent. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it was when I was ten years old that I tried "rebelling." Rebelling for me consisted of cussing and looking at naughty magazines with my friends (something my parents never addressed, yet I still felt guilty for some reason).

We found community within a small congregation that met in a building that looked like half of a house called, "Forest Ridge Church of God." People would always say, "Oh, you attend the half-church.... Is that a cult?" My family attended for the friendships and the teaching, I attended because I felt guilty for my attempts at rebellion. I was wanting to find out if God really loved me or if he was mad at me for looking at things I had no business looking at and saying things I had no business saying.

The summer of my sixth-grade year, I was invited to enter the youth group of the church. Most other years, a student had to be entering the seventh grade to "move up" into youth group, but the church was small and there were no other kids my age (plus teenage girls were alot prettier than girls in my age group). It was here that everything changed and I began to develop my "roots."

More Tomorrow...