Spiritual Autobiography

So there I was, a kid in high school, looking for some guidance about my life, and I wasn’t sure where to turn. I remember trying yoga. The meditation was kind of cool, but it didn’t fill the need. I decided to read a book about Sigmund Freud; he was supposed to be the big expert in human behavior. Please, please, please do not waste the precious hours of your life reading this man’s drivel. Most people in the mental health field have pretty much abandoned his cockeyed ideas. So I read some self help books. I was searching, but I wasn’t finding what I needed.

Now I’m sure you’re probably thinking, “But Mark, you were a Christian boy. Why didn’t you just crack open your Bible and find some answers in there?” I suppose I would have done that if it had occurred to me, but remember, I didn’t really have an role models when it came to Bible study. But one day, when I was down in the basement lifting weights, this program came on the TV. They were offering a free book called “Planet in Rebellion,” that was supposed to help you understand about our place in the cosmos. Well, that sounded a bit like science fiction to me, and I was reading a lot of science fiction at the time. So I sent for the book.

It turns out that the people on the TV were Christians and with the book came an offer for a free Bible study course. So I sent for that sucker and started to work on it when it arrived. I was studying the Bible. Imagine that.

Meanwhile, my mom had become good friends with this Baptist lady. She came from the kind of Baptist church where the pastor still believed in the Bible and actually had something to say that was worth hearing when he preached.

Now the only Bible I had was the Revised Standard Version. It was okay, but it was a little bit much for a junior in high school to handle. But the Baptist lady gave everyone in our family a translation of the New Testament in modern English by a man named J.B. Phillips. The only problem was, she was short one copy. So I didn’t get one. I believe the reasoning was that I was already the resident religious fanatic, doing a Bible study on my own of all things, so I probably didn’t need another Bible. Well! This peeved me. I decided I would go and buy a copy. And I did.

I think I was done with the other Bible study by this point, so I decided to just open this New Testament and read it like a book. The Bible study I had done had sent me from verse to verse, spread out all over the Bible, to teach you things. But this was going to be different. I would read the New Testament just like you would read any other book.

Matthew is the first book in the New Testament. It begins with a chapter of so and so begat so and so. Boring, but I decided to persevere. Then it got talking about the dude named John the Baptist. That was a little more interesting. And then I got to chapter five, the beginning of the sermon on the mount. I can still remember reading it for the first time (this was a little before we voted not to study it in Sunday school). I couldn’t believe all this stuff was in there and nobody had told me about it. I couldn’t believe that a pastor could preach week after week, year after year, and never get around to teaching people about the sermon on the mount. I was absolutely dumfounded.

And then I reached the end of the sermon and read what Matthew had to say about the crowd’s reaction to what Jesus had to say. “The crowd was astonished at the power behind his teaching. For his words had the ring of authority, quite unlike those of their scribes.” Apparently the teaching of their scribes and the preaching of my pastor had something in common and this problem of having unqualified, unequipped religious leaders has been around for a loooooooong time. That was my first reaction.

Then Holy Spirit inside me said, “This is what you have been looking for.” And I knew it was true. The Bible would help me to understand life and show me how to live.

(You probably can’t find a copy of the Phillips New Testament apart from a used book seller. If you wanted the modern equivalent, I would recommend the New Living Translation.)

To be continued . . .