'You shall go in and out and find pasture'

This week sees a couple of significant personal anniversaries.

40 years ago, on Sunday 16th December 1973 I experienced a Christian conversion. The word describes a ‘turning round’, a turning to God, a setting-out on a new direction in life. The conversions I heard of when I was young were often dramatic and emotional, but I have learned that for many of us, turning to God is a process rather than a single dramatic event.

In December 1973 I was 21, and messed up by a combination of my anxious nature, some of the Christian beliefs I was exposed to, and a sense that, full of questions as I was, I was different from other Christians and therefore must in some significant sense be failing. I believed in God, and in Jesus Christ, but felt forever on the outside. In 1973 during an autumn of political crisis in the UK and war in the Middle East the Christians I knew – mainstream evangelicals - believed that God must soon intervene in history, and I was certain that when that happened, I would be forever cut off from God.

I was at the evening service at Carluke Gospel Hall that December Sunday. The Bible reading was Jesus’ story about the rich man, and Lazarus, a beggar. Both die. Lazarus ends up in heaven, the rich man in hell. ‘Please,’ begs the latter, ‘send Lazarus back to warn my brothers so they don’t end up here to.’

He is told that the brothers have the scriptures (the first part of our Bible.) If they won’t believe what they read there, they wouldn’t believe even if someone were to return from death.

And I realised, instantly, that I had not just part of the Bible, but the whole Bible, and not only that, I had the evidence of someone who had returned from death, Jesus himself. And if I was blind to all this evidence, still insisting I needed something more to bring me ‘inside’ then I was in a very bad place indeed.

Later that evening, in the workbook used in the Bible Class I assisted with there were words to pray ‘if you are not sure that you have believed’ – a phrase exactly describing my position. I prayed this prayer.

I believe my insights that evening were a gift from God, sown within me, not self-generated. Something joyful and unforgettable happened to me – and the effect was lasting as there was in my life a new prompting of what I can only call grace.

Thus shortly afterwards I bought a Bible in a newer translation, and resolved to read it. Thus I arranged to work with children for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1974 as a Scripture Union volunteer.

So I see that night as a coming home to God, a watershed from which has flowed the rest of my life.

Ten years later, this fearful, wet-behind-the-ears 31-year-old finally found the courage to move out of his parents’ house into his own flat, on 10^th December 2013. This scary, but positive move was made possible through the support of friends I’d made when I began attending Airdrie Baptist Church.

It took me far, far too long to learn the importance of being my own person. It is easier, sometimes to be satisfied with living out other people’s expectations for us – because it saves us thinking for ourselves, or because we crave approval. And we believe that God has given us potential to fulfil. Sometimes we thoughtlessly read the expectations Christian leaders, parents and friends have for us - what they think we should be and do and believe - as if these automatically came from God.

My misunderstanding in 1973 was my impression that if I shared the faith of the Christians I knew then I would become like them, with, as it seemed, few questions, few doubts and uncertainties. What I had to learn was that faith doesn’t change your personality – I am called to follow God with all my questions, doubts and struggles, and from the point of view of the God who loves me is more than OK.

And so we can confidently go out from the house of other people’s expectations, secure in God, in openness to God seeking to become the people we were created to be.

I have very falteringly followed this model over the years and that December Saturday in 1983, however uncertain I was about my move at the time, I took a huge step forward in discovering and being who I am as God’s child.

And so this week’s anniversaries symbolise two key movements in Christian life and faith. Coming home. Leaving home. Coming in to God’s embrace. Going out, going forward with God.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 12th December 2013)