Growing up in evangelical culture, you quickly become familiar with the art of the testimony: the personal recounting of what you were pre-Christ, and how and when God saved you.
I have an embarrassing memory I wish I could erase from my conscience of my awkward teenage self, standing in front of the entire church reading my testimony — which opened with the world’s worst joke. For those of us raised evangelical, who hadn’t done much of interest in our young lives (hadn’t been saved from drugs, sex, and alcohol), we embellished where we could. I remember hearing kids and teens exaggerating their badness, telling stories of childhood rebellion or naughtiness. There was a certain jealousy for the more colorful, interesting testimonies.
In Christian circles, meeting new people often starts with the telling of a testimony (how did you come to know Jesus? Just how lost were you before Christ?) In joining a new church, it’s common to share your testimony, at least with the pastor or elders or new small group.
The testimony is like a right of passage, a confirmation of a floundering, sinful life before Christ entered in.
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We are drawn to people’s stories. We want to know and be known, to glorify God, to declare transformation.
But I think a problem with dwelling on befores-and-afters is a negating of human complexity. We don’t just grow upwards. The Christian life is not one of simple forward movement, continuous growth. As humans, we experience mountains and valleys, seasons of joy and periods of intense darkness, acedia, despair. To live a life of faith is one of continuous working out, wrestling. It is hard things and trials that may knock us down repeatedly before ever getting back up.
Many Christians assume salvation equals linear growth. There’s a certain expectation of predictability, sameness. On the one hand Christians are expected to mature and grow in love of Christ, but there’s rarely accommodation for questioning, retreating, deconstructing.
I think the Christian life is far more complex than we’ve been taught. In looking for “fruit,” we forget that fruit can take a while to blossom, that it too grows and flourishes within seasons.
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In scripture, there are countless examples of men and women who see God and forget, converse with God and go their own way. They are wise and devout, flawed and wayward. Here are people who know God, and in their knowing and seeing, sin horrifically, commit acts of violence; they doubt, repent, wander, despair, etc.
In the New Testament, the disciples constantly wrestle with culture, religion, the radical Jesus, and their own prejudice. They’re shocked by Mary’s forwardness in washing Jesus’ feet with her hair, they make assumptions, contradict Jesus, disbelieve the women’s witness of Christ’s resurrection.
Their lives are not linear, their growth is all over the place.
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I came of age around a lot of seemingly mature teenagers. We acted in Bible plays and had worship and prayer nights. Even then, while sharing my testimony amongst other teens with incredibly similar testimonies, I felt like a fraud. It was a kind of peer pressure of presumed holiness, presenting our salvation, lifting our hands, collectively “saving ourselves for marriage.” Inside, questions raged and doubt trickled down. But I suppressed it. I was on the other side of the testimony arc and couldn’t go back. I didn’t swear or drink or do drugs. I didn’t do any of the things that made for really juicy testimonies. I just existed, not in complete goodness, but hopefully goodness enough.
The past few years have been an honest encounter with emotions and questions I quelled for ages. It’s been a genuine working out of faith, but also a working out of my own convictions, turning around, turning over, and fumbling along.
I’ve discovered prior convictions I held that were rooted in prejudice, beliefs influenced by ignorance rather than rightness. My testimony can only be one of continuous learning, finding further comfort in the ability to acknowledge “I don’t know.”
At 32, I am far more trepidatious. Dances with doubt and long walks in the wilderness. My faith was inherited by not fully adopted, a muttering of belief, cries of “God help me in my unbelief.”
Instead of trading testimonies, relishing in before-and-after accounts, I want to learn to sit with the discomfort of the unknown. To tell our stories that may not have tidy endings, to create liminal spaces for contemplative thought and smart questions. We complex creatures grow and move like the tides. I cannot give you an account of who I was prior to the five-year-old who prayed a prayer more likely influenced by kids around me than my own heart for God.
Surely, my story is more complex, my belief in and love of God more nuanced than the blind faith of an impressionable child.
We grow, we falter, we believe, we despair. We do not arrive at a point of salvation. We work through it, two steps forward, three steps back.
God meets us where we are. Like Hagar in the wilderness, ambivalent or unaware of what we do not know. And God reveals it, little by little, year by year, loving us, holding us through every single cry of despair.
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For the next two weeks, I will be out of town so the next issue of the Bread Box won’t be sent out until July 9th.