Spiritual Autobiography

It was the second semester of my senior year in high school, and the pressure was on. I was born at the height of the baby boom, and if you wanted to get into a good many colleges and universities, you had to be accepted by the spring of your junior year. There were just too many of us clamoring for the available places.

On top of everything else, I had the full weight of my mother's expectations and insecurities bearing down on me. I was the second child. My older brother had dropped out of college. (He has since gone on to finish his degree and then get a master's.) And my mom was a house wife. The kids were what she did for a living. The way we turned out either validated her or made her feel like a failure. My dad, as usual, was keeping it low key. My dear old mom probably didn't have a low key to keep it in. "What are you going to do? Would you please make up your mind? You're running out of time."

The problem was that I didn't feel like I had the right to decide what to do. I felt like I needed to do whatever God wanted me to do, but I wasn't hearing anything from Him. So as the pressure mounted, I got mad at God and told Him off. "You have no right to make promises in Your word that You don't keep!" I remember saying to Him. And then I stopped praying and reading my Bible.

Looking back after all these years, I hardly know what to say about this. I was beginning to know God. I was beginning to understand how wonderful He was. But my understanding was so limited.

Let me tell you about my God. He can't lie. I'm not saying that He has decided not to lie; He can't lie. Everything about God is perfect and perfectly beautiful. If God could get better, He wouldn't be perfect, He would be on the way to perfection. If He could somehow get worse, then He wouldn't be perfect. If you really are perfect, you can't get worse. You lack the capacity to become imperfect. If you had the capacity to become imperfect, that in and of itself would be an imperfection.

I was having my first crises of faith and trust, and I wasn't doing very well. I should have trusted Him. I should never, ever have said that to Him. I didn't know it at the time, but all I had to do was wait two more weeks. The answer was on it's way.

And the answer, when it came, was going to go off like an explosion in my young life.

To be continued . . .