Maryam (who has just launched a beautiful new site design) has kindly commissioned a post from me. She’s promised $50 if I write a post on the beginning of my journey of faith.

Well this could be a little longer than a 15 minute post - I might work on it for a while between posting on other things.

When did I begin my journey of faith? Well I guess the journey began in a sense before I was a twinkle in my father’s eyes. I was actually born into a very Christian family. My Dad was/is a minister in the Baptist Church. In a sense the first 18 or so years of my life I lived and breathed church. My friends were Christian, the music I listened to was Christian, many of the books I read were Christian, the social stuff that I did often revolved around the church community that we were a part of.

I was never forced to say ‘the prayer’ or convert but I guess the house I grew up in and the people that were influential in my life lived lives where their faith kind of oozed out and infected me. I did the Sunday school thing and filled my head with lots of bible stuff and I guess over time it had an impact.

I remember a morning when I must have been about 4 or so when I was in bed with Mum, Dad and my brother and I decided that I wanted to be a ‘friend of Jesus’. It was all very simple - simplistic perhaps - but for me that was the earliest memory of me deciding that I wanted to investigate faith.

The years rolled on and I guess there have been many times when I’ve reassessed and remade that decision on a whole heaps of levels. For most kids growing up in a religious family or environment the choice has to be made to either confirm, reject or modify faith of one’s parents. For me that time came as a young adult out of a pretty turbulent time where for a period I put many of my beliefs and values ‘on hold’ or even ‘to the test’. University is pretty good at putting one’s value system to the test I guess and for me was a pretty chaotic time.

Over the three years that I studied at uni (I did Marketing) I had a whole heap of challenges including:

- my first real experience of love (romantic) and my first real experience of betrayal by someone I loved

- my first experience of death and the consequences of that

- two trips to Thailand where I spent a couple of months living in an Aids hospice and drug rehab centre in a Bangkok slum as a volunteer worker

There is a post or ten in each of those points! The pressure took its toll on me to say the least and over the few years I guess I went through times of both turning my back on and simultaneously searching out God. The God of my childhood didn’t quite seem to match up with the life I found myself leading and i guess those years were (whilst quite painful) incredibly rich in terms of the shaping of my identity and understanding of the transcendent.

To cut a long (and quite personal) story short I seem to have emerged out of the other side of those experiences with some hope and with a quiet hope that perhaps, for me, there is more to life than either a life without God or a life with a God of the black and white Sunday School faith that I perhaps grasped onto as a child.

People ask me every now and again when I ‘got converted’ - I tend to answer that these days with the answer ‘most days’. Faith for me is very much a journey of discovery and evolution. I know where I’m at presently is my final destination in terms of my understanding of God - I’ve got so far to go but I’m also content with where I am at present because the journey has led me into relationships with some wonderful people (both in real life and in the ‘virtual world’). Life goes on…

Hope that answers your question and is good enough for your donation Maryam. Feel free to ask for clarification or more information.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20th, 2005 at 11:07 am and is filed under Speaking Spiritually. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.