How I Became a Christian at Age 28

(This is the first in a five part series about my journey to Christianity and back.)

The best way to tell a story is to start at the beginning, so before I get into how I became an ex-Christian, I thought I would tell you how I became a Christian in the first place.

I’ll start with a little background.

I was not raised in a Christian home.  My mother was deeply wounded by her religious upbringing and, as a result, decided to raise her children without religion, allowing us to decide for ourselves when we became adults.

As much as I admire her intention, do not raise your children without religion.  Raise them without indoctrination into a religion, but give them a well-rounded religious education.  As my story unfolds, the reason why will become clear.

Growing up, I never really thought about god.  I guess I wasn’t really an atheist, in the sense that I actively chose not to believe.  I just didn’t think about it.

As I got older, I saw that there were so many religions.  I figured, since they can’t all be right, we can’t really know about god.  I was firmly agnostic in my beliefs for many years.

When I was 19, and a junior in college, I got pregnant.  I decided to keep the baby and try to have a family with the baby’s father.  That didn’t work out very well.  He turned out to be abusive and unfaithful, and a week before my first child’s second birthday, I threw him out for good.

So, here I was, 22 years-old, freshly graduated from college, and a single mom of a two-year-old and an eight-month-old.

It was then that I decided that I needed to do the right thing and turn my life around.  I would never again get involved with a man who was not good enough for me.  I would get a full-time job and focus on raising my children in a respectable manner.

I had been listening to Dr. Laura Schlessinger on the radio and all of her forecasts of doom and gloom that result from pre-marital sex had come true in my life.  I saw the wisdom in the Judeo-Christian value of waiting until marriage.  I was determined to follow the Dr. Laura way – don’t live together before marriage, know each other for a year before committing, the whole 9-yards.  (Not that I was a saint completely.)

Long story short, I met a guy at work and the two of us became good friends. Eventually, we dated off and on, and then on for good. The next thing you know – three-and-a-half years later, actually – we were married and he moved in with me and the boys.

Being married had its challenges, especially since we were both used to living alone, he was not used to living with kids, and my kids were not used to having another authority figure.  Somehow we made it through the first year and things were going pretty well.  The boys were both in school and I was staying home with the baby boy we had just after our first anniversary.  I was writing a monthly column for our local daily paper – a dream of mine – and I was the chair of the local Republican Party.  Life was good.

One day, in 2004, I was driving to the beach with my kids, then 7, 6, and almost 1, and the older boys and I were singing the song on the local alternative rock station.  I can’t remember the song, but it was euphemistically talking about sex.  It occurred to me that the boys would know what that meant before long and I was NOT ready for that.  I decided that I shouldn’t listen to that kind of music around the kids anymore.

I scanned the radio and landed on a station with alternative-sounding music that billed itself “the positive alternative.”  It didn’t take long to realize the station was Christian.  I didn’t really mind so much.  Even though I was not a Christian, I had nothing against Christianity – I knew nothing about Christianity.

One day, a few months later, I was lying on the floor of my baby’s room, listening to the song “Even When,” by Seven Places, and I had my big epiphany.

If you look at them, you can see that they look like your typical mainstream alt-rock group.

Seven Places

If you listen to that song (or even just the beginning), you can hear that they sound like your typical mainstream alt-rock group (though a bit on the poppy side).

So, why did they have lyrics like “I exist for You”?  How can these normal-looking guys exist for Jesus?  I thought people who said that looked more like this.

Religious People

I exist for you.  That was some pretty heavy stuff.

I was intrigued.

I spent the next few months scouring the internet for everything I could find about this Jesus.

I started listening to a podcast called, “Living on the Edge, with Chip Ingram,” where I learned a lot about the Bible and its application.  The more I heard him talk about why we needed Jesus, the more I felt like I needed Jesus.  The final straw was when he did a series about the Ten Commandments, “God’s Boundaries for Abundant Living.”  I realized that I needed to be forgiven for my past and I needed God in my life.

I still had a couple of hang-ups about Christianity.  One was that I had always been into science and I thought that it contradicted the Bible.  The other was that I doubted the Bible’s authenticity.  I had always heard it was written by men, but here I was supposed to believe it was God’s word.

Whether or not the Bible is true was important to me.  I thought, and still do, that the only way to really believe all of the good stuff about Jesus and salvation is if I can believe the whole Bible.  In my mind, any doubt about any part of it called into question the validity of the whole thing, including the stuff I wanted – no, needed – to believe.

So, I spent countless hours on message boards where people argued about creation vs evolution.  I decided that no one can really know how life began and I didn’t really care.  Since I only studied the physical sciences, not biological, I just didn’t care enough either way.  I could believe that God created the world.

There was still the question of biblical accuracy.  Once I read “The Case for Christ,” by Lee Strobel, I was convinced enough to believe that the Bible could be true, and that Jesus really existed and was god.  That was all I needed because at this point, after listening to several Living on the Edge podcasts and months of Christian music, I had realized how damaged I really was and how badly I needed a savior.  I needed to believe that I had found one.

One afternoon, I was listening to “Living on the Edge” on the computer while I cleaned my room.  At the end, he asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus as their own personal Lord and Savior.  I got down on my knees and said a prayer with Chip.

I was saved!

(Read part two in this series.)