Lost and Found
I want to tell you today how I came to know Jesus.
I was brought up in the church and heard about Jesus in my home all my life. I saw my Dad and Mom reading their Bibles and the things I made in Sunday School got saved just like the things I made at school. I grew up thinking that this was just the way life worked, but when I say that I mean that I believed that God was just part of living. I thought about God the same way I thought about ice cream. God was there. God was part of different days and sometimes it was great – like strawberry and sometimes it was just okay – like vanilla, but basically it was nice to know that God was part of life… like ice cream.
I didn’t really have any questions.
So, when I went away to a Christian Boys’ Wilderness Camp, upstate New York, there was stuff included about God and none of it surprised me. Until one early evening we had this conversation with our counselors. We were brought out to the campfire ring – but there wasn’t a fire. The counselors then told us the story of Jesus. Now I knew stories about Jesus, but this was the first time that I remember getting it presented to me as a whole and with a purpose. The purpose was for me to make a choice. Would I accept Jesus, would I believe in him? It’s the first time I can remember that a choice was involved.
But like I said, I had grown up in church. I filled out all the Sunday School sheets and books. I drew the pictures and solved the puzzles and filled in all the right words in the sentences where there was a line for the missing word that you’d find if you read the right verse in your Bible. So, when I heard the story of Jesus and learned that this was the correct response – I can tell you that it just made sense to me, so I accepted it. My best friend, who came to camp with me, also accepted Jesus that day.
When my parents came to pick us up we brought them the news. Well, we also told them that we had received no mail. Everyone else got mail, but we got nothing. Turns out our moms had talked with each other and decided that if they sent their two little nine year old guys mail that it would have made them homesick. Not. I went back the next year and that year my friend, John, and I got letters, postcards, greeting cards, we got food and little packages. Mail call was better the second year.
But I also brought my parents the news that I accepted Jesus and they responded to it positively but quietly. That was that. And that’s how I responded to it as well. It was just true. It was just part of life. We just moved on and we kept going to church.
So I had accepted Jesus but there was something missing. I didn’t realize it then, but later it became clear.
When I got into 7th grade trauma hit my family. My 15 year old sister got pregnant and that isolated us back at that time. That experience opened up a doorway for me and I grew up relatively lonely from that point on. I had been a pretty open, friendly, gregarious kid up until that point. There’s a story by Stephen King that tells of a trauma hitting a family and the boy who narrates opens the story by saying “that was the year I became the invisible kid.” And I understood those words inside myself years and years later when I read that story. I became “invisible” in the sense that for a while my family was in such confusion and some pain that I only really appeared on the screen when something was wrong. As long as things were going smoothly in my life, I was pretty much just there, somewhere.
During that time I became part of the youth group at our church. And that was pretty much what I did with life. I went to school. I did my homework. I watched TV and I went to church and youth group. I didn’t really play with friends. I didn’t really go out. People had shown that they could be pretty mean. By the time I got into ninth grade I figured that the best way to handle life was not to show any emotions. That was pretty strange but hey, it was working for Mr. Spock on Star Trek. Seemed like a pretty good idea to me. If you didn’t emotions, you couldn’t get hurt. And I’d been hurt enough by that point. So I just shut down.
By that time kids were getting into serious drugs and serious parties. I read. I watched TV. I went on stage and began to act. I started writing stories and plays. And I became the student leader of my youth group. I was given all sorts of “God” responsibility. And I understood how to handle spiritual stuff. I knew all the words. I read the Bible. I could pray out loud.
I would ask God for lots of things – good weather, help on tests, getting over stuff, just getting along with life, or helping people who were sick. I prayed with an expectation that God was there and that he cared and that he did stuff, but mostly I prayed because I saw it work. By “work” I mean that when I prayed for stuff it happened. And I was pretty specific in my prayers but I never asked for too much. Sometimes, when I was praying about the weather I was just asking God to hold off the rain for a while. I wasn’t really expecting a lot from God and so we got along.
I was missing something. I had accepted Jesus. I was involved in my church. I sang in the youth choir. I led my youth group. I went to retreats and summer camps. I went to Young Life and Youth for Christ. But I was still missing something.
As I went through high school I started getting into more and more plays and that led to more and more cast parties and that led to meeting more and more girls. And I was enthusiastic about girls. I thought they were one of the best things God had invented.
But you know what… by that point I knew all this church stuff. I knew all this God stuff. I knew how it all worked and I was kind of moving past it. It was nice if you wanted to be nice, but it didn’t really make a difference, not in real life. Talking to God about the weather or about people who were sick, leading people in prayer at group meetings or helping out with church projects that was all cool but it wasn’t necessary. It was just something I did because it’s what you do.
I just learned to take advantage of people to get what I needed to get by. So, when my parents told me that I had to pay for my own car insurance I never got a license. I just dated girls who were older. There were easier ways to get things done.
And that led to my coming down with Mononucleosis. There are diseases you can get from being with lots of different people. Mono is one of them. There is a whole week of my life that I’ve lost because I got pretty ill. I got so sick I couldn’t wake up. They almost hospitalized me but I came around. It wasn’t a fun way to wrap up the end of my junior year’s summer.
Going into my senior year I was as weak as a kitten. Walking up the stairs from the first floor to the landing between the floors, I could barely breathe. Our doctor was watching me close to make sure my anemia corrected itself. But as I started my senior year and my recovery I was approached by the pastor of my church. He wanted me to join him and an elder on a trip to Cincinnati to represent the church’s youth group at a Presbyterian Conference on Evangelism.
Woo hoo!
I can’t tell you how uninspired this made me, but there were a couple of things that sparked my interest. The first was they told me that we’d fly to Cincinnati. I had never been on a plane before. That was interesting. We were going to be staying in a hotel. I had never stayed in a hotel before – motels, but never a hotel which meant most of the meals in restaurants. And finally it meant that I had to take a week off from school.
A week off from school, staying in a hotel, meals in restaurants, a week off from school and flying in a plane. I could survive a conference on evangelism whatever that turned out to be. I was a good kid. I understood the whole “God” thing.
I went to Cincinnati. It was there I discovered people who actually knew Jesus. Now when I say that they knew Jesus I mean they talked with him more than they talked about him. I mean that they didn’t read the Bible because they were supposed to. They read it because they had to find out more about Jesus. They didn’t go to church because it was what you do. They went because this was the place where people who followed Jesus got together to talk about what he was doing in their lives.
The people I met had been prostitutes and runaways and drug addicts on the streets of Hollywood and they had been received and helped by the outreach of Hollywood Presbyterian Church. The people I met were running coffee houses and feeding stations and youth ministries to kids who were homeless and living at the beach. But the people I met were also doing something else and this was the thing that grabbed me. They were talking with God. They weren’t talking to God. They were talking with God about the decisions they had to make, about life and daily issues and they were expecting God to talk back to them. That’s where I discovered what I was missing.
I knew about God and I knew the Bible stuff and I knew the church stuff, but what I wasn’t doing was listening. I wasn’t listening to God. I expected God to be around me. I expected God to do stuff for me. But I didn’t think God really had anything to say to me except be good, be nice, and don’t mess up. I thought that was the whole thing.
But when I was in Cincinnati I learned from other people that God was alive and well and involved with the world. So, at the end of the conference we had this massive communion service. Plates of bread would only take care of one row and there were hundreds of rows. In the midst of that communion service the elder who was with me, and sitting right next to me at that moment broke down crying, sobbing. All these people reached in to hold him, to touch him and to tell him it was okay. He was overwhelmed with the presence of God.
And as I sat there looking at him and taking it all in, thinking through the whole last week and all the conversations I’d had, I gave up. The best word I have for it is, I surrendered. At that moment, from my loneliness and from my attitude of taking advantage of people and from my perspective that I should just be getting what I want when I want it, I surrendered. I didn’t know anything about God I realized. And that’s what I said.
I said, “I don’t understand all this. I don’t get it. I don’t know how to do what you want me to do. All I know is that I want you in my life, but the only way that’s going to happen is if you clean me out. I can’t do any of this. You need to clean me out and fill me up with you.”
And he did. I changed. I changed so radically that kids in school, when I got back home, kids I didn’t even know, asked me what happened to me.
I was lost, just wandering wherever in the world. I was lost but then I was found. And that’s made all the difference.
