30 Years Ago

Time to get really personal today.

Over the weekend, while sitting or actually standing in church, singing a familiar tune, I realized that in the summer of 1982, a significant change occurred in my life.

I believe it was around the Three Rivers Festival.  My live-in girlfriend and I returned from watching a movie and the discussion led to our beliefs about God.

Having grown up in a Lutheran and Catholic environment, I knew about Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the concept of sin, forgiveness, heaven and hell.

I attended Concordia Lutheran High School which included a full year of Old Testament study in my freshman year and a semester of religion each year there after.

What I recalled from that upbringing was that we sin, God forgives, and that nagging guilty feeling was due to some presence of God in my life.  I knew the Jesus Story:

Born to a virgin (Mary) grew up and then around the age of 30 started wandering the holy lands, teaching, preaching, healing, and eventually being crucified on a cross, rising from the dead and going to heaven to live forever.

The concept was more head knowledge than a heart belief.  Sort of like knowing my multiplication tables, than a belief in something that was life transforming.

Up until I had this conversation with my girlfriend 30 years ago, I used to pray, “Lord forgive me for the sins I am about to commit” and then I’d go out and have fun.

Except the guilt was still there.

Which I’d try and bury.

Anyway, this girlfriend was someone I met via the radio station I worked for.  She called me late one night on the request line, I answered, and set up a blind date.  A month later we shared an apartment.

But her spiritual background was different from mine. In her life, people actually made a conscious decision to become a Christian instead of my upbringing where infants were baptized and automatically became Christians.

(That is still a point of controversy that I have not come to a conclusive answer on, but I do remember the moment 30 years ago, which is why I am sharing this with you today.)

What was really bugging me was the guilt I felt even though I had prayed before hand for forgiveness, to cover my bases with God.

So this discussion led me to get up and go into another room and pray again.

I said something like this:

“Lord, if this is true, that you want a personal relationship with me, one that transforms my life, then I invite you into my heart.”

I knew right then and there that my prayer was different than all the others I had heard and prayed before.

The guilt was gone.  I felt clean.  A new life was ahead.

But real life was still in front of me. We decided to marry, had three kids, went through tremendous struggles, survived.  After nearly 13 years as husband & wife we divorced and survived that too.

Both of us have remarried, remain friends, although that was tough at times, but our commitment as parents kept us in contact with each other.

I have also been blessed with a wonderful wife, Kathy who shares with me both faith and a crazy sense of humor, and the past dozen years have flown by in the blink of an eye.

But the main point of all of these words is a recognition of what happened 30 years ago, by asking for a personal relationship with God that has sustained me all these years no matter how much I screw up, or how tough life becomes, I know that there is more to this life than each of these moments.

My wife Kathy and I are members of a Lutheran church which a dozen years ago I had to make peace with from my growing up years, and now it is a source of peace and re-centering every weekend.

I’m not a monk, I have my crazy sense of humor, I make mistakes, I sin, and yet through it all I know that every day the slate is wiped clean in my spiritual relationship.

I hope and pray that you know this deep peace that “passes that passes understanding” is in your life too.