Who am I? Part II

It is easier to have an experience than to explain it and it is easier to explain away an experience when you have not had it and are not interested, than to be confronted by it. Conveniently explaining away something is the best way to maintain stasis, that is to remain unchanged. Normally, human beings (and plants and animals) do not seek change unless the stress of the current circumstances force us to seek new directions or we find ourselves, in an instant, confronted with something that is so plainly superior that it demands attention.

I had been raised in the Lutheran church and we were a religious family, and I was perhaps the most so. So, when I entered college, I was very comfortable with where I was. Intellectually religious and aware of Reformation doctrine, and though not yet seventeen, I was thoroughly capable of debate in any matter religious, political or philosophical, or so it seemed to me. I was a debater and combative by nature.

Actually, though, I had had only a cursory interest in the campus Christian organization - the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. My interest was the same as my interest had been in high school - chess. There was a player at the school who would eventually become a grandmaster who I wanted to see play and hoped eventually to play. Actually, I was totally outclassed by him, but my vanity had the best of me.

Perhaps, some of you who know the game might and what "chess for blood" means, might ask how I could justify playing the most violent game ever devised by men and still consider myself a Christian (for those of you who don't get it, most highly physical sports go to the punishment of the body until it can no longer go on or can no longer go on, psyching out the opponent(s) being part of the process, but competitive chess bypasses the body and goes straight for the heart, the mind, the soul - it has no interest in the submission of the body, its purpose being to subdue the soul.

The point is, that if you submit to your religion on an intellectual level, you can detach your spiritual, emotional and moral decision from your religion in your actual life. That is why so much ill has been done by people who have accounted themselves Christians.

As it turned out, during the course of my college career I was not free to attend the chess club due to programming conflicts, until my interest waned. On the other hand, most semesters I was free to go to IVCF.

It was there that I became acutely aware that there were people there who were different from me. It wasn't so much in doctrine as in a vitality that I was unaware existed. They had a kind of life I was missing. They would say they were born again and certainly, there was something about them that did not equate to religion though they had there own share of it.

I suppose that if I had not been so religious, I would have guessed it was religion at work, but you can't convince a blacksmith that lace has been made upon an anvil. So it is that when a man, woman or child comes to Christ and is born from above, it is not a religious experience, is an encounter with the living God. Mine came several months later.

Some of you may object.