Tuesday, November 15, 2022 My Story Part 7

In my journal, I was more brutally honest about my questions. “Am I a Christian or aren’t I? Do I want to be? Do I have a choice? Why is it so desirable and so repulsive at the same time? Why does admitting I am a sinner seem so dramatic and zealous? What are my sins – not being perfect? Why is this such a struggle? Where is this pressure coming from? Why do I keep meeting Christians who want to persuade me? Who can I ask all these questions?”

Who, indeed? I wanted to talk to someone who was completely out of the context of my life, but with whom I’d feel comfortable. Then I remembered Reverend Ramstad. Good old Reverend Ramstad! I had heard that he’d taken a call to a Methodist church up in Duluth. I found the phone number, screwed up my courage and called him. I preferred a face-to-face conversation, so I made an appointment with him, just saying that I had some questions about faith. This was a secret mission – I told no one that I was going.

When the day came, I was nervous. What was I doing here? I sat across from his desk in his office and poured out all my questions, my doubts, my struggles, my fears. He listened carefully and when I was done, he told me I was never going to find the answers to who Christ was by standing on the outside of the relationship. I needed to be willing to enter in. To that end, he gave me a couple books – one was a workbook of sorts with scripture readings and a place to answer questions. The other was a small paperback called “Speak, Lord, Your Servant is Listening.” The title was based on the episode in the prophet Samuel’s life in which he kept hearing his name called in the night and upon waking, he’d go to the old priest Eli asking if he’d called him. After this happened two times, Eli figured out what was going on and told him that the next time it happened, Samuel should answer the voice saying, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” The book was very simple – just one verse or one short passage of Scripture each day to read, adopting the attitude of listening to the Lord. I don’t remember anything else about our conversation, but I bet he prayed for me before I left.

I took my “assignments” very seriously. I worked my way through the workbook and did a reading out of the other book every day. And thus began my double life. My outward life was just as usual. There was no one that I rubbed shoulders with regularly who took all this stuff seriously, so I kept it on the down-low. Part of me was interested in what the Bible had to say, the other part of me was horrified at this interest. It would be a betrayal of everything I knew to follow this path. I kept telling myself that even if I became a Christian, I didn’t have to be one of “those” kinds of Christians – the obnoxious Moral Majority types. Or the ones who were constantly pestering you on campus, standing around holding out tracts saying, “Are you saved?” I used to take the tracts and throw them away right in front of the giver, just to show my disdain. But I was also sporadically (and secretly) visiting churches and writing poems like this one:

Alleluia
Every church choir
Eyes glistening
Chins, noses, mouths, each angled upward
Like such physical prayer.
Voices tremor with excitement,
Waiting, watching, straining, groping…
For what?
What am I not glimpsing?
My eyes follow theirs
To see only
Cobwebs
On the ceiling.

I confided to a friend at my job the kinds of things I’d been thinking about concerning Christianity. “Just be careful, Lynn,” she cautioned soberly. “You don’t want to get involved in some kind of cult.” Yes! Was this just some sort of cult? Be careful, Lynn, be very careful. I wrote in my journal: “So many people who are not Christians are perfectly happy. Why am I drawn to this? O God, Thou art my God, my soul thirsts for Thee.”

In short, I was conflicted.