what's your story? (pt. 1)

Since the beginning of my rectorship, a number of folks have asked for more details about my conversion to Christianity, so the thought occurred to me: why not put it in writing?

The story begins with my de-conversion. I sometimes forget that I was born a Quaker. My earliest memories of church are of gatherings of the Society of Friends in a small house just northwest of downtown Houston, TX. (It’s where I had my first taste of pumpkin pie.) Around my fifth birthday, my parents returned to the United Methodist Church, at which point I was baptized in my parents’ living room by my grandfather, a retired Methodist pastor. Ironically, it was in a church youth group meeting, when I was about 13 years old, that I became an atheist. As the youth minister was giving the lesson of the week, one of the older kids, an impressive and seemingly learned high schooler, leaned over and said to me matter-of-factly, “If God is really all powerful and all loving, why is there so much suffering in the world?”

This really is the only question.

My parents insisted that I continue going to church, and I didn’t mind too much, as I had a few friends in the youth group that I enjoyed hanging out with. Perhaps this was because it was among these friends that I learned to drink beverages restricted to minors (but sold by unscrupulous convenience store clerks to 16-year-olds) and to smoke a substance that only recently has been legalized in certain states. (Not much has changed since the 60s—or maybe since Adam. I’ve been told that if parents want to know what kids today are facing, they should watch Euphoria [this is not an endorsement, as I’ve never seen the show, but what I hear about it is terrifying].)

It was around this time that my family and I visited my grandfather in Missouri. It would be the last time that we saw him. As always, he prayed for safe travels on our return home, but this time with a twist. He prayed that I would become an ordained minister. My parents, brother, and I all looked at each other and thought the same thing: “Not in a million years.”

Although I was uninterested in God, I was not without gods. In middle school I had wanted to be a rock star. Then at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, I became a “jazz snob.” It’s a real phenomenon (strangely predominant among white males); you can look it up. Miles Teller’s character in Whiplash is an extreme, but accurate-in-spirit, portrait of what I was growing into. By my senior year, my shoulder length hair and I were determined to be the next Pat Metheny:

Behold my god. Myself? Maybe. I was definitely a slave to the pursuit of an identity as an “artist,” as someone “important.” As John Calvin famously put it, the human heart is a “perpetual forge of idols.” Where God is not recognized and sought as the summum bonum, other goods are thirstily consumed to fill the void. For me, money was attractive, but not as attractive as what this piece of gold represents:

So, I’ve run out of time and didn’t get to my conversion. Perhaps next week.

For now, I leave you with these questions: What is your highest good? And what are some of the lesser goods in your story that seemed to promise fulfillment and satisfaction and meaning but left you empty or disillusioned? In what ways have you found satisfaction in the true bread that comes down from heaven?

Read: what's your story? (pt. 2)

Read: what's your story? (pt. 3)