If you had to characterize the impact with which God had on my life, it could only be described by understanding the rebellious, inherent nature in my character. Calling me a defector from the faith (at least the one with which I was expected to adhere) would be putting it mildly. The great weight of responsibility tailored to it, along with its ubiquitous and deeply meaningful presence, became a source of resentment for me. A family’s ideals can do that to you sometimes. In fact, the expectations of a family can present an enormous amount of pressure to conform.

But I wasn’t having any of that. No relationship with Christ. No faith to mention, if I’m speaking candidly. If I had the faith of my family and of my friends, I would miss out on what I thought was good and pleasurable in this life. Losing out on that wasn’t on my agenda.

So this is what I decided to do: Find friends that held the same views of faith-turned-resentment and exacerbate it so I wouldn’t be alone. It wasn’t hard. In fact, it came rather easy for me to pick up on the feelings of a few friends with whom I could empathize. For some reason, we were drawn to each other. I felt that I knew how to elicit more resentment from them.

For example, there were things I wanted to do, things that could make a highschooler look and say, “Yeah, that’s what life is about.” But, alas, they were activities that a devotee of our particular doctrine would find rather unpalatable. Sometimes the religious household comes with a degree of shelter, so all I would have to do is flail the willingness to engage in these “temptations” and, voila! I brought them to the same unprincipled arena where I was playing. My Grandpa, a preacher man and an arbiter of Christian doctrine, always told me, “You can’t choose your family, and you can’t choose your looks. But, you can choose your friends. Of those friends that you choose, you will become like them”. Unfortunately, I think his quote came from the assumption that I would be a follower, when I was, in fact, a leader. No grandpa, my friends became me. 

I wasn’t proud of what I was doing. Helping good souls turn to a life of disapproval doesn’t earn you any points. In fact, it backed me into the corner that put me at odds with every relationship I had.

Let me explain. At the time my associations with what was morally “good,” combined with my idea of church doctrine, brought me to a state of moral relativism. Because of my limited experience with the world outside the Christian community, I associated secular decency with the moral virtues of the church. Since I was proactively trying to move away from those moral qualities, my character slipped further than that of some of the lowest social standards. My actions were looked upon as though I was morally unprincipled- an outcast in terms of common decency.

My friends, my family, and all those who had hopes for me, looked away from me with pain and worry. And their hopes for the man that I would become evolved from exponentially hopeful to anxiously hopeless.

If you can’t tell, I’m being pointedly ambiguous with the exact degree of my character flaws. Nor am I readily willing to publish them. I’m not proud of a lot of the things I’ve done. But if you ever came to me in person, I would testify a change that I never thought could happen…with all of the details included. I feel as though I were a chunk of coal, smearing black soot on everything I touched. Emotionally, I was hardly stable. Physically, I was beaten and bloodied and weighing-in at 120 pounds at 5’10. Worst of all, I was afraid. I was really afraid of where this road would lead me, and for good reason. The law was on my back, while my friends dissociated from me as a result of my unpredictability. There were few toward whom I could turn.

I cried out for the “good”, and I made promises to the God who may or may not have been listening. I prayed, “Give me faith, Lord”. I prayed, “Save me, save me from myself. Be my rock.”

That’s what the Pastor’s said to do, and that’s what the teachers said to do. They told me that this is man’s nature. They told me that man’s rebellion is ubiquitous in nature and that it can be seen throughout history. I could easily recognize that because they were right. Evil and suffering are a fact of life. But what was their source? The biblical texts that revealed the truth of our nature- Man tends to the extremes of negative behavior.

Carl Jung, one of the most revered psychologists of modern academia, has described this nature in certain terms. He describes the universal characteristics of the human psyche. One of those, was human character–malevolent and selfish by nature. Though he was an atheist, he was iterating something that was not original. The Biblical texts were his primary source, whether he was willing to recognize them or not. There’s no denying that the impact of those texts have no small bearing on the direction of Western thought. Athen’s met Jerusalem in the most philosophical terms 2000 years ago when Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth.

Christ was endowed with great knowledge of the Hebrew texts and Judaic culture, and when his message of Man’s nature spread to the Hellenistic people (Greeks, Gentiles, etc.), history would never be the same. Christ, a man claiming divinity, touched the psyche of man, like none other since. His message was simple, but multifaceted. We are unrighteous and we know it. Anyone can recognize their failures, because they are inherit to who we are. We’ve lied, we’ve talked bad about others, we’ve hurt people emotionally, physically, verbally.

But within that message, was something far greater than we could ever expect. Christ’s life represents love for everyone, regardless of their moral corruptibility, the can be saved through individual recognition of their culpability.

Ya see, within us is the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of that good comes from God. The knowledge of evil comes from our abandonment of that good–and with it, the abandonment of God. The significance of Christ’s work on earth was to show us the way back. He lived a life of good, in order to set an example that each of us can look toward. When the Son of God was killed by man, he placed our culpability on himself. He was offered up as a sacrifice in order that we may look to Him to provide a journey back to our Creator, and the goodness that that entails. All it takes is the acknowledgement of the character flaws in each of our lives, however small, and the recognition of Christ’s divine choice to die as a substitute. Through that recognition, our culpability is relieved. However, he was clear that no amount of good works will bring us to God. But when we look toward Christ with the conscious choice to follow him, there is much work to do.

I asked God for that gift, in order that I, myself, could reach the source of good. In that moment, the thought of all the prayers that had been sent my way in my young adult life streamed into my head. The knowledge that something was coming to fruition inside of me was consciously realized. I thought of those prayers…from my Mom, from my Dad, from my grandparents, from my teachers. Even among the strangers and acquaintances that heard of me through the exasperated pleas of my loved ones, I knew that, yes, even those people were praying for me.

It was a worthwhile endeavor.

I knew I had been redeemed. I knew I had to claim Christ for myself and so I did. I heard but one command, “Continue to work out your Salvation with fear and trembling, for it is I that works in you, to will and to act, according to My good purpose.”

That was the first verse I learned in my Freshman Bible class. It’s funny how things from your childhood come back to you. I concluded It must have been divine. The spirit of Christ has echoed throughout humanity for generations, and made himself known to me. Now it commands my life to this day. I wish I could say I dropped the old life like a bad habit. Unfortunately, it resurfaces from time to time. But I continue to work it out.

I hope my words do this justice. Talk to me sometime, and I’ll expound on the depths of my religious experience. I wish you could see everything that I have seen. Wherever you are, it’s the Lord has the power to raise you out of any hell you are in. Science shows evidence of the religious impact through Christ in the lives of many, though many fall short in granting these effects to the divine experience. I can’t explain the experience in empirical terms, nor do I believe I ever will. But my comfort is not found in the empirical world. My comfort is found in my own subjective experience. And for generations and generations, those psychological universals of mankind’s character have formed the bedrock of our greatest societies, our most influential men and women, and our greatest thinkers.

My guarantee to you is that you can change your life given the worldview of man’s character that we have been given. Meanwhile, my plea is that you put your faith in the source of that worldview.

The responsibility is great, and the meaning runs deep, but the pressure to conform will turn your character to diamond.

Here’s to Christ, praying he transforms you too.

Regards,
The coal striving to be that diamond