I didn’t want to be a Christian.

I was raised in a household with your typical American morality. Character, not faith, is what mattered. Good people do good things. By the time I was in high school, if there was a God (and I was not convinced there was), he had no real bearing on my life. I knew what I wanted out of life and I intended to get it. I could do it on my own.

I do not remember much from my eleventh grade Chemistry class, but it was an important class for me nonetheless. It mattered because it was my lab partner who first invited me to go to church. I was not really interested in going to church, but I was interested in spending time with her and so Sunday morning I found myself in church. I even stuck around for youth group after the service.

I had been there for two or three weeks when the youth pastor began promoting the upcoming youth retreat. “Invite your friends,” he urged those present. And of course, being the new guy and obvious non-Christian in the room, I was the easy target. I had started to make some friends other than my lab partner, so the idea of spending a weekend with these Christians did not seem so bad. “What could it hurt?” I asked myself.

I anticipated a weekend with new friends. We would stay up late talking about video games and eating junk food. To be sure, we did all those things. But my trip to Roanoke was more reminiscent of Paul’s trip to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19). I remember sitting in one of the worship sessions and, as the preacher was delivering his message, something clicked. I do not know how else to describe it. I became painfully aware of my sin and hopefully aware that Jesus could be my Savior. I was no longer my own and could not live for myself. The world as I knew it was turned upside down and, like Paul on his journey, I was traumatized by God’s grace.

I am thankful for the attentiveness of the wise mother who drove our van back to Charlottesville. She was aware that something had happened to me. She could see it in the way I carried myself. She asked probing questions, but she mostly just listened. I spent many hours during the following week on the phone with the youth pastor. We hashed through the whole experience, along with my doubts and questions, until finally coming to a conclusion. I had become a Christian.

In this story, I was not looking for Jesus but he was looking for me. In fact, I was running from him but he outran me in his grace. He called me as his own. I didn’t want to be a Christian. But today I wouldn’t have it any other way.

How did Jesus find you? Some of you do not think that your story is all that impressive. Perhaps you cannot remember a time that you did not believe in Christ. Maybe he did not call you from a life of crime or addiction. But your story is amazing because it is the story of resurrection. The Bible tells us that we were once dead in sin, but Jesus found us and raised us to new life in him (Ephesians 2:1-7). If a story involves the dead coming back to life, it cannot be a boring story! So what is your story? How did Jesus raise you to new life?

In Him,

Tom