March 8, 1995 was a Wednesday night and they let the Youth Minister do the preaching that night. I was 10 years old. I don’t remember anything about the lesson because I was really focused on my cue. He was supposed to say, “blah blah blah. Come now while we stand and sing.” He didn’t! The youth minister botched his most important line! Mom and Dad looked at me during the closing song and asked if I had changed my mind. We found one of the ministers or elders and let them know that I wanted to be baptized and they did everything they could to gather people around for this wonderful event. My dad baptized me. It is a very clear memory I cherish. I remember the hugs and so many people telling me they were proud of me and referring to me as Brother.
I had made the decision the night before and talked to my parents about it. The math made sense in my head. I knew I was a sinner, I was going to hell, and I needed Jesus in my life so that wouldn’t happen. I’m not sure what I thought my big sins were at the age of 10 but it was clear to me that I needed Jesus. Looking back, there wasn’t a time in my life that Jesus wasn’t part of it. It seemed like all of the Youth Rallies had speakers who talked about their major turning point in life where they left drugs or woke up in a ditch somewhere and found Jesus, or Jesus found them, I can’t quite remember. I just remember thinking that I wish I had a bigger “conversion story.”
Over the next decade I moved from the “I need Jesus, so I don’t go to hell” phase to the “I want to please God and make him happy” phase and in the years following college I moved into desiring a relationship with God. Looking back, I see defining moments and key people who helped me move forward in my walk with Christ. My friend Luke and I decided in college that we’d experiment with fasting together since the Bible talked so much about it. We would end our day sharing our experiences with God throughout the day and end in prayer together. My other good friend Kent has become a lifelong companion in my walk with God. We’ve challenged one another in our thinking, to go deeper with spiritual practices, and have held each other accountable to a higher calling in how we live out the Christian walk. He has become closer than a brother, what the Celtic Christians call anamchara, or “soul friend.” There are also a whole list of people who are older who modeled Christ to me, pushed me to go deeper, and walked with me where I was to model what faithful discipleship looks like.
While I don’t have a “conversion moment” that I can look back and see a drastic change, I do have moments and people I can look back on and see where while I was looking for Jesus, I found out that Jesus was looking for me. The mutual pursuit of relationship is one of the beautiful pictures that John is painting in the opening scenes of his gospel account. Too often we think of God as far off but what we see in the gospels is that God left his high place to come and be with us, pursuing us, chasing after us. He desires relationship, not just faithful obedience to an arbitrary list of rules (I say arbitrary because the list of rules often gets added to and taken from by us more so than God).
Closing out the first chapter of John, Jesus calls his first disciples to follow him (walk the way he walks and do life the way he does it). The natural reaction to following Jesus for Andrew and Philip was to invite someone else to follow Jesus with them. Andrew invited Peter and Philip invited Nathanael (John 1:35-51).
The walk with Christ, the walk of discipleship, was never intended to be a personal, individualistic, endeavor. It was always intended to be shared with someone else, done in community, where iron sharpens iron. Who is someone that you companion with in your walk with Christ? Someone other than your spouse who is the same gender as you? How do you go about starting a “soul friendship” that is eternally meaningful? My friend Kent, who I mentioned earlier, and I developed a tool for cultivating mutually beneficial soul friendships. You can find this tool here. This is not a program that we are “doing” as a church but a tool we are providing for anyone who wants to develop relationships on a deeper spiritual level. This tool can be adapted to what is best for you. I pray that our church will be a place where spiritual relationships are cultivated and our walk with Christ is deepened and strengthened.