Mistaking Castles For The Sand

In my previous posts, “What is Jesus?” and “What Are You Doing With Jesus?”, I briefly shared my joyous experience of becoming a Christian, and my soon after, less joyful experience with American Evangelicalism. In this post, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into my early experience, and the odd path I’ve traveled in my walk with Jesus.

To recap, my adventure starts just shy of my 48th birthday, when I had a small and simple moment of surrender (I GIVE UP!) at an AA member’s kitchen table and God answered my plea.

I was a drowning man and He washed me ashore His beach.

If you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of nearly drowning, you know there is an invigorating tactile feeling of being reunited with terra firma. Its as if you’ve never noticed solid ground before and now it’s the only thing that you can see and feel.

My experience in meeting God was like that.

God was the sand of the beach, and He was all over. More importantly, He was safety, and I was so happy to be safe.

What little I remember of those first few weeks is that they were a state of joyous lunacy. I saw God everywhere and in everything.

An EDM song on the radio? God. The sun setting on the horizon? God. I even saw God when my employer reprimanded me (I think that really freaked my boss out. I’m sorry, Tom, but…it was God).

Now up until this point, I certainly wouldn’t call this a Christian experience. But as odd as this may sound following my last statement, it was a Jesus experience. Somehow, I really can’t explain how, this presence that I had taken to calling God let me know He was Jesus.

Jesus loved me. And Jesus wanted a relationship with me.

I told a friend from work, Tijuana, about what was going on in my life, and she took me to her family’s church in East Chicago. As the only white guy in an African American church, I felt like John Belushi in Blue’s Brothers. And when the presence of God felt like it would rip the roof off the building, I thought about doing some cartwheels myself down the center aisle.

This Jesus thing was lit!

I was high from on High, and like any good addictive person, I wanted to be even higher.

This was a no-brainer. I needed to get to know Jesus.

Seemed pretty straightforward, too. There was a worldwide religion based on his last name. Shouldn’t be that difficult.

(Yes, I was that naïve.)

Oh, I certainly “knew of” Christianity. I had gone to Catholic church a few times as a kid, and I had sent my own kids to a Catholic elementary school (turns out they knew less than I did…calm down, my Catholic brothers and sisters, I’m just teasing). But I didn’t know anything “about” Christianity.

I really didn’t.

I didn’t know that there were four Gospels, let alone why someone had compiled four stories about Jesus in the same book. And as a sales and marketing guy, it seemed odd that the hero of the book waits three quarters of the way to get involved.

So I took a trip to my local Christian bookstore. I bounced in and told the lady who owned the store that I was a “new Christian” and asked, “where do I start?” She hooked me up with a Bible, and as I was a walking, talking billboard for my conversion story, we started to chat.

And here, I rubbed up against mainstream Evangelicalism for the first time.

She pulled out a book written by a lesbian lady who had become a Jesus follower. She said it had a great ending. Not only had she converted to Christianity but that she had converted to being straight and that she ended up marrying the pastor who had brought her to faith.

She was smiling ear to ear, and she said to me “Isn’t that a great ending?”

Maybe because I was new to this club, I asked earnestly, “wouldn’t it still be a great story if she became a Christian but remained a lesbian?”

I’ll never forget how that smile started to fade and she asked “what do you mean?” I repeated myself and her smile faded further. She quizzically said, “I’m not sure what you are saying.”

It was if I had suggested moving Christmas to July or adding an 8th day to the week. She was truly and totally stumped.

In the weeks and months that followed, I kept on bumping into the sharp edges of Evangelicalism. I spoke with a pastor who told me that my dead Catholic father was in Hell. I stumbled into an argument about dinosaurs and how the Earth was 8000 years old. And I abruptly brought a conversation with a church leader to a halt by saying I didn’t have a problem with Buddhists.

As a recent “pagan”, I shouldn’t have been shocked by any of this. I had always disliked Christians because they seemed to have a bunch of hang-ups. From my outside perspective, they seemed to be running an exclusive country club. Now, though, that I was in the club, I somehow expected that I would realize that my former perspective was mistaken.

But what I came to see was that my experience with Jesus wasn’t the same experience that most of my new friends in Christendom were having.

I was back on God’s beach, but I was coming to see that much of the beach was dotted with castles of sand. Where I saw sand, they saw potential castles. What I perceived as Jesus, they were fashioning into elaborate structures of their own design.

This left me in an untenable position. I looked like a religious kook to my secular friends, and to most of my religious acquaintances, I was a budding heretic. So I decided when in Rome…to be my old self around my old friends, and to be quiet around my new ones.

I’m guessing that I looked spiritually schizophrenic. Privately, I felt completely alienated. Completely alienated, except for…Jesus.

The next 6 years were a dark struggle for me. Every fiber in my body wanted to go back to being a godless pagan. I really, REALLY loved playing at being God, and I did so most of the time. Except when I couldn’t ignore…Jesus.

This really culminated during the lockdown in the Spring of 2020 when “Jesus Loving Tim” roomed with “Jesus Ignoring Tim”. For every decent thing I did, and I was the most decent I’ve ever been in my entire life, I countered with the most savage behavior I could muster.

So in early June 2020, I found myself at another kitchen table just like in March 2014. This time it was early in the morning after a long night of debauchery, yet it was the same decision point. Except for…Jesus.

Whereas 6 years prior, I had no idea what I was giving up to, this time I was well aware. Jesus had been ride or die with me the whole time. He’d always been there my entire life, but since 2014, I was acutely aware of His presence.

No matter how savage, how obscene, or how utterly un-Jesus like I acted, He was waiting patiently for me. Waiting patiently for me to decide to be the man He intended me to be.

I’m now two years plus into that journey. Its not always pretty, but its always a new life.

You might suspect that I’ve shared this with you because I blame American Evangelicalism for me being so late to participate in this new life.

I don’t blame them one bit.

Making castles out of sand is thoroughly human, as is the tendency to shape God into some structure. I know I’m building my own castle, my own idea of theology.

My hope, though, is that my experience with the negatives of organized religion will lead me to design a structure that serves God rather than shaping God into what serves me.

No, I share my story as a testimony that you can’t fall so far to be out of the reach of Jesus. And I share because I know that mainstream American Christianity, in all its flavors, has many Americans saying “no thanks”.

But I’m certain, as certain as certain can be, that people are looking for a spiritual solution for the troubled times that we live in.

So maybe this walk on the spiritual beach I took prepped me to relate to my fellow man and woman during these tumultuous times. If so, I invite you to stick around, and kibitz with me about Jesus.