BORN AGAIN (Excerpt 3 of 8)
Damned, Part 1
Hi friends, I had intentions of publishing a different piece that I’ve been working on, but life has gotten the better of me. My husband and I took a whirlwind 10-day trip to California to tend to some business, arriving back in Milan this past Sunday after a 21-hour journey. By that evening, I was down with either food poisoning or the stomach flu. Between that and the jet lag, I was feeling pretty miserable, so I decided to make it a triple whammy(!) and also try to finally quit coffee, an idea I’d been entertaining for a long time. So suffice it to say that I’ve not been firing on all cylinders this week.
However, it’s been far from all bad. The robust response to the launch of my paid subscription options has been wildly encouraging! In just three weeks, I’m over 90% of the way to the goal I had set for myself for all of 2024. Wow. I will be starting to include shout-outs to my paid subscribers in my upcoming posts, but for now, let me just offer a giant THANK YOU to everyone who has supported me!
Finally, before I get into the next Born Again excerpt, I’ll just tease the fact that something exciting happened this week, which I’ll share at the end of this post.
This is the third in a series of excerpts I am doing from my book “Born Again.” It’s from the second chapter of the book, which is called Damned. If you’ve not yet read the previous installments, you can find them here: First | Second
“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” (Isaiah 64:6)
What we hear and what we retain aren’t necessarily the same thing, or at least aren’t proportional. So while it’s true that I heard a great deal throughout my childhood about how God loves the world, and how Jesus loves me, those beliefs were largely drowned out by the other things I heard. For me, the idea of “salvation” had virtually nothing to do with love, and everything to do with fear, shame, and guilt.
Growing up, I had the unfortunate distinction of being both a follower and a doubter. I had the worst of both, without the full benefits of either. I believed enough to be frightened and consumed by what I was taught, yet seldom comforted by it. But I also questioned enough that I simply didn’t and couldn’t believe that everything I was taught was true, which meant that I was in constant turmoil. Many of my peers seemingly either swallowed everything hook, line, and sinker, which gave them great happiness and comfort because God loved them and they were going to live in heaven on streets of gold forever while everyone else burned, OR they questioned everything and thus were fairly easily able to reject it and move on with their lives, leaving those teachings behind. I, on the other hand, spent decades in limbo, being torn in two.
Early 1990s journal entry, while I was a full-time Bible college student:
I want to be the ideal Christian, never doubting, never failing. But I simply can NOT be that person. I fail God so often. I just don’t know how to improve. I don’t know how to walk in the Spirit, only in the flesh. I must be a carnal Christian. I desert God so often … How can you still love me? Lord God, I need your strengthening. I feel I am faltering. I’m tired, I’m weary, I’m doubting, I’m hurting.
I spent much of my childhood trying to defuse anger—anger in our home, anger in our church, anger in my school. Most of the anger emanated from the male authority figures who ruled the world I inhabited, and that anger made me deeply uncomfortable, anxious, and afraid. So I would go to great lengths to try to keep those men from getting angry—at me, at my siblings, at my friends, at my classmates. I hated the conflict, I hated their tempers, I hated the way they would yell about stupid things like minor dress code infractions (“Bob! Why aren’t you wearing a belt?”), and I hated the way many of the kids would yell right back at them. It felt like the power structures of nearly the entire world I lived in were so self-absorbed, so micro-focused on irrelevant minutiae that had nothing to do with anything in life that I believed actually mattered.
I don’t know why so many of these men were angry, and so obviously deeply unhappy with their own lives. But I hate that they let that anger spill over and impact all of us. And I hate that I felt responsible that I had, in some way, to try to stop it.
Journal Entry — February 23, 1991
There has never been anything that caused me more doubts about God than the people who say they love him.
But it wasn’t just the men who were angry; it was also God. Especially God.
I recall the first time I prayed what is referred to as “the sinner’s prayer.” It was a warm summer day, and for some reason my family had attended the evening service at Berlin Baptist Church, which was closer to our house than our home church of Grandville Baptist.
The pastor preached in vivid detail about hell. How hot it was, more scorching than the fire of a thousand suns. How dark it was, darker than the darkest midnight. How it was filled with shrieks of agony and anguish, screams of torment, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, as the vast majority of everyone who had ever lived on earth endured one year, ten years, a hundred years there, all with the full realization that they were going to spend literally all of eternity—millions and billions and trillions of years, followed by trillions more—being burned alive because they had not been born again and trusted Jesus as their Savior before they died.
While we in the congregation sang emotional hymns of repentance, accompanied by the church organ, the preacher gave an altar call, where he invited those who wanted to be “saved” to come down the center aisle and confess their faith in front of all.
I did not walk the aisle that evening, but I was no dummy: I didn’t want to burn in hell forever and ever! So when we got home, I asked my dad if he would pray with me and help me get saved. We went into the basement, got down on our knees, and I told Jesus that I was sorry for my sins, and I asked him to forgive me and “come into my heart” and save me so that when I died, I would go to heaven and live in a mansion forever.
And so it happened: I was born again. As the Apostle Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 5:17, God had made me a new creature; the old things passed away, and all things became new.
I was five years old.
…..
You can read the next excerpt here.
…..
Featured on “The Photowalk” podcast!
I am excited and truly honored that one of my photographs was recently mentioned on the UK podcast "The Photowalk"! The host, photographer Neale James, discusses a picture I took at Lake Como and submitted as part of the show's Jan/Feb "assignment" on the theme of resilience. He also puts in a kind word about my Substack page!
Neale is an entertaining and delightful host, and I always find “The Photowalk” to be a welcome respite from a harried and complicated world. I hope you'll check it out in Episode No. 419, released February 9; the approximately 3-minute portion about my photograph comes just moments after the 1-hour mark. It's available on Apple and Spotify, or you can listen on the episode's web page.
I intend for the foreseeable future for my posts to remain free, including the excerpts from Born Again. But if you’d like the full book, you have two options:
You can purchase it directly from Blurb.
Or, for a limited time only, I am offering a FREE copy to all new Yearly subscribers to this newsletter! This is a $20 value—and I’ll even cover the cost of standard shipping.
(Note: The Substack back-end tech appears to be unable to accommodate the logistics of this offer, so I will reach out to you directly after you subscribe to get your shipping details and then place the book order for you myself.)
looking forward to reading your book!