The Beginning

I became a Christian when I was 15. I don't remember the date I made this decision, so I have chosen October of 1971 as a "guestimate". I have no idea if that's right or not, but I think it was in the Fall and it was definitely during my sophomore year in high school.

I grew up with my family attending Sunday School and going to church, but I never cracked open the Bibles I got from my Sunday School classes. You had to be in a certain grade in school to get a Bible. And at Christmas, we got a different piece of the Nativity scene each year. One year it was a sheep, the next it was a donkey, the next it was Mary, until you had the whole set. For me, the Bible was a reference book; something you were supposed to have but not actually read.

In my sophomore year of high school, I made friends with a girl named Ruth. We spent a lot of time together during the summer, going to the beach and hanging out. She brought her Bible with her to the beach one day, and I was surprised at how effortlessly she opened it and read from it. I was so intrigued. It was like a V8 Vegetable Juice moment. The Bible stories I was told when I was little, and the stories about Jesus, were treated like they were relevant for today. She invited me to the weekly high school youth group bible study at a church in Alhambra, and I followed. I had never heard Jesus or the Gospel preached like that before.

It was during the Jesus Movement of the late 60's and early 70's. Jesus felt so reachable. He looked like a hippie and he taught about peace. And he stood up against the Religious Establishment of his day. And he cared. He went to the cross for me and died for my sins. I was thrilled that the Jesus from my childhood who loved everybody was somebody I could now cling to. I bought a new Bible and wrote this phrase in it: "The only one who won't love somebody else more than you is Jesus." That was super important to me. I believed I was low man on the totem pole in life, at home and at school. Jesus understood. Finally somebody understood. I read the Bible and I tried to be "good".

I thought the high school youth group was supposed to be like Shangri-La (my exact thoughts), a perfect place where everybody accepted everybody else because, of course, Jesus accepted everybody. I thought nobody would care about my social status and my shy, awkward ways. What I didn't realize was that the high school church group was full of cliques and jocks and cheerleaders and wannabees, just like school was. Imperfect, immature people, just like me. And I got treated in the church group just like I got treated at school. Ruth was beautiful and outgoing, and the guys naturally gravitated towards her and ignored me, just like at school. Other girls seemed to want to get to know her and bypass me, just like at school. And I got tongue-tied around people and felt like an idiot, just like at school. Nothing was any different. My expectations that Christians would want to be nice to me and get to know me weren't met. I began to believe that I was better off with my non-Christian friends at school because at least they didn't pretend to be something they weren't.

Eventually I stopped going to youth group. I became very disenchanted with the whole Christian scene. Once, a group of us had piled in to the youth pastor's car to go somewhere, and the car wouldn't start, even after several attempts. So we all prayed. The car never started, so we got out and walked. Praying seemed pretty stupid to me if you weren't going to get any help. At the same time, Ruth had been dating another youth pastor, who began pressuring Ruth to have a more physical relationship with him. She left the group saying that Christians shouldn't act like that, especially pastors. And they shouldn't. But she decided she was never going back. I finally left, too. I decided that it was impossible to be a Christian, because Christianity asks too much. My exact thoughts were: "Being a Christian is a physical impossibility." No more youth group or Jesus Movement for me.

When I got to college, I was attending church weekly with my parents but leaving it at that, just in case someone would think I was one of those Jesus Freaks. I saw Christians at school who carried their Bibles around with them, and I felt sorry for them. I heard the things other people were saying about them behind their backs, and I was embarrassed for them. Been there, done that, never again.

One day I was at my friend Sue's apartment between school and show choir rehearsal and I didn't have my car with me. Sue said she had a Bible study to go to before rehearsal, and asked me to go with her. I was stuck. I didn't have a way to decline without missing rehearsal. So I went with her. It was a group of people from our show choir and a few other students. I felt like the elephant in the room - the tribal heathen in the midst of the missionaries. But something was different this time. They weren't trying to be cool, or showing off, they were real. They talked about how living for Christ was the most natural thing in the world because it's what we were created to do. It didn't have to feel like hard work or a struggle to be "good enough". It was a relationship with Him, and it made all other relationships possible. The biggest difference was that they were obviously in love with Jesus. They admitted that they weren't perfect and they couldn't do life alone. They needed the Savior. Instead of wondering if everyone was going being nice to me, and judging people from a self-centered perspective, I realized I missed Jesus so much, and that there was so much more to know about Him.

One of the sticking points for me in my Christian infancy was the concept that Jesus is God. I believed he was only a man, just like anyone else. I was bothered by this constantly. It became a deal breaker for me. Either he was God, which I couldn't accept, or he was a man.

One of the people in the room at that fateful Bible study that Sue dragged me to was my future husband, Don. We began dating and I began trying to learn as much about Jesus from the Bible as I could. One day Don was driving me home after a date, and I asked him, out of the blue: "Was Jesus really God?"

He paused for a second, and his answer was: "Yes. And he still is."

I continued studying the deity of Christ in the Bible, reading what he had to say about himself as well as what the apostles and other people said, and when the light bulb finally went on, the puzzle pieces began to fall into place. The Jesus I had put my faith in in high school, the one who loves everybody, loves peace and confronted the Religious Establishment, has the power to change my life, forgive my sins, clean me up and make me his own, because he is fully God and fully man. And it's still true: "The only one who won't love somebody else more than you (or me) is Jesus."