"And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved."
-Acts 4:12

by Daniel Morgan

I had a fairly odd experience recently. I was with another Anglo at the local mosque, sitting barefoot and listening to some Muslims, particularly the brother of the imam, explain the virtues and necessity of Islam. What was so striking about his (we'll call him Abdul) discourse was the points he hit upon: the logic to the existence of a Creator, the anthropomorphic principle in creation, the eternal perspective to our actions, the moral imperative to right living and the reality of hell, his descriptions of Muhammad describing himself as merely the last worker on a building sliding in the last brick, they all sounded like someone had been transcribing the evangelical talks I give to my unit at boot camp each Sunday — just substitute Christ the cornerstone for the bits about Muhammad. As my friend commented later as we were walking down the street, it was creepy.

It was not so much that I was grieved by the guy's deception, but by the fact that he had strained out all the gnats and neglected to deal with the camel. One could have all the urgent worldview of an ardent monotheist without having the least understanding to the great and impending crisis of belief: what do I do with my guilt before a holy and righteous God? Washing my cuticles and behind my ears before I line up to pray only gets me so far.

But let me first take a more personal angle on the subject of spiritual journeys. Despite the rather inescapable injunctions we Christians have to be unabashedly vocal and transparent (in the most humble way of course), I've always found it odd that Augustine is given such lauds for his Confessions, and then later on Rousseau for fouling up all that Augustine did right. It's the problem with testimonies. We wink at poets like Donne for hiding their names and those they love within their sonnets, but what right has the common Christian to publicize his adventures? And yet they do, and we continue to follow them, hailing Luther and Spurgeon and Muller and Brother Andrew as "heroes of the faith."

And so they are. I think when we should be careful in presumptiously labeling Christian testimonies as narcissistic. It is usually jealousy that reduces us to such leery commentary, and I don't mean the godly type. We love the story of Luther throwing the inkpot at the devil, Spurgeon poking the belly of the corpulent fellow that raised the issue of his cigar smoking, and Muller's calm prayer in the bowels of the ship that dismissed the raging storm outside. One story after another, these guys traipse through plots that would render spy novels to jejune copy. Even Brother Andrew's alias is "God's Smuggler"!

Most of us feed off their larger-than-life stories with a sad subsistence and the view that God has seen fit to raise up some select demi-gods, an elite of apostolic superheroes each generation, but leave the vast majority of us to stumble about between Sunday School and the work week. Is it any wonder we are sometimes embarrassed by the dangling plotlines of our own exhibitionism, ahem, testimonies?

I submit my own by way of what milestones there have been by my reckoning. I was raised in the Church. In the South, that means Southern Baptist. In Houston, that might indicate some mega-church with stadium seating. And you'd be right. Most all of my family knows the Lord. Having heard the gospel since the womb, and had two siblings who surrendered their lives to Christ at the age of five, I was similarly drawn by the Holy Spirit my fifth year to ask my mother how to accept Jesus. Leading me aside to my grandparent's bedroom, she had me ask precisely what I wanted and why. When she was satisfied my desire was genuine, she led me in "the sinner's prayer." A year later I was baptized (despite now knowing the early church did it the same day), and asked my mother to tell me again the illustration she had given at the bedside a year before so I could tell it to my friends. It was that we are drowning and Jesus is the lifesaver we must reach for if we wish to be saved. In my early mind I associated our Savior with the fruity candy by the same name, but it sufficed.

Years passed. Around seventh grade, junk happened. I'm a pretty transparent guy, but that depends on the person and occasion. Let's just say I got into a pretty deep depression for a while. Part of that was due to the fact that I was pretty geeky. You could call me Peter Parker. I had a mind for science, and my uncle had introduced me to creationism through some seminars by the folks at Institute for Creation Research. Heady stuff that. I would privately challenge our biology teacher about the fallacies of evolution, though more out of intellectual pride sometimes than any desire to see the truth redeem her. And she wouldn't be the last teacher I challenged.

As far as theology was concerned, this was the year I attended a church beach retreat where one Bible teacher dared to raise the monstrosity of predestination over our heads, if in a somewhat manner-of-fact tone of looking at the book of Romans. You can guess what my words to him were like. But despite my bold rebuke the rest of my summer was wasted with anger at this heinous doctrine and the fiend who taught it.

Fast forward to my senior year in high school. A friend of mine, who was technically more of an acquaintance if geeks can be choosy about that sort of thing, was preaching to me about the blessings of socialism, even if his own party was something of a splinter off the Marxist-Leninist platform. Oddly enough, he got through to me (I'm an impressionable guy). Though I didn't buy what he was selling with the purity of the proletariat, I did begin to see the cracks in an economic system that, far from early church, clamored it's way atop the world by usury and a materialism that would put Marx to shame. Seeing a solution in neither path, I invented my own polity where the mass of people could have their own property to be self-sufficient yeomen, with only a minimalist Jeffersonian government for hedges. I would later learn this was called Distributism.

College was more of a catalyst than anything. It was then that the "monstrosity of predestination" had again surfaced in my heart, though this time as a salve rather than a spur. God massaged its Reformed sweetness along with the doctrine of headship into my heart just in time for what was to come next. Since the first class of my first day, I was taken with a curly-haired brunette with a literary bent by way of high school theatre and countless rainy evenings. More than that, she had the simple way of a mystic, who could plumb the depths of God with the slightest efforts. And she had the most guileless laugh. But there are worse things than guile.

After two quarters passed and my feelings solidified into love, I broke my unspoken fast on relationships and tried to strike up an amiable courtship. We shared plenty of rainy evenings to ourselves. I could tell you about all the cool collusions that brought us together, but that would seem a bit silly if I wanted to convince you of His providential workings. What happened in the end is too well known to repeat. By now, it's played on nearly every song on the radio. I cut a special deal with the country western stations. When it was through, I was left like Job, not knowing whether up was up or down was down, but forced to proclaim, "Blessed be the Name of the Lord."

Never mind the fact that I hadn't walked close to Him all at since I had professed my faith in Him. I wasn't out there sinning my heart out, but there were plenty of private predilections I held a strangle hold on. But I knew my Word. And I knew He was sovereign and to be trusted. The scars of that love sprang roots of bitterness and anger that lingered until two years later (a year after college for those keeping track) when God touched my heart with two keys lessons on a mission trip to Mexico. 1) As a Christian, I had no right to be offended. It simply wasn't given to a follower of Christ. So there went the bitterness and unforgiveness. And 2) I had no corner on God. He showed me my nice theological boxes and blew them to smithereens by showing the mysteries of the Holy Spirit's ministry. And everything in the Bible now has starker letters. How did I ever missed the fact that the Church is called "the fullness of Him who fills all in all"?

Now, I am working part-time, living at home, with romanticized dreams of going overseas to translate the gospel into unknown tongues. God's been kind enough to equip me with an evangelist's course here, a missionary's course there. Now it's no big deal to preach on street corners downtown. (Just don't ask me to talk to my neighbors.)

My current sphere is mostly around Muslims. Which brings us back to where we started with Abdul. Which is not as far as I'd have liked. You see, most of my spiritual life has been stunted by one stronghold or another. At this point, I am nearly a quarter century old and as you've seen there's no great abundance of filler for that epic chronicle of my godly adventures. John Wesley had already been ordained, preached to masses, and crossed the Atlantic by that time, having chatted up some curious Moravians onboard — and he wasn't even saved yet. That would come at Aldersgate when he was thirty-five. In the end he would have given 40,000 sermons and founded numerous charitable institutions beside his brother's prolific penning of 7,000 hymns. Sigh. But I digress.

Like Abdul, I've had a surfeit of learning, but little experience of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Sadly, Abdul does not even know enough to worship Him in spirit and in truth. More the fool me. I do know the way to His presence, and I've neglected it to much pain and complacency. I know of plenty of times He's saved me from death, and a couple when He spoke directly to my spirit on things, but on the whole we've been strangers. Only recently, I've begun to reclaim some of that which was lost, but I'd liked to think it is the kindness of God that leads me to repentance and that'd you'll be around in a few when I've walked with my God for a pace and developed what the Hutterites called Gelassenheit, or yieldedness. Cause I know He's up to something and I'm holding my breath. Cause He's nothing if not a glutton for a good plot twist.

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