MAKE ME A BELIEVER

Everyone has a bias. I am no exception. I grew up in Christianity and I want it to be true. I've invested 32 years of my life into this faith system, I've laid out my life in a way that I thought would please God, and I've said no to a lifetime of sexual opportunities because I was waiting for Christian marriage like a good Christian girl should. I want Christianity to be true because I don't want to have built my entire life on a lie.

"You just need to repent," said a Christian acquaintance of mine recently. "You're just looking for an excuse to rebel and do things your own way." The accusation stung - because it couldn't be further from the truth. If ever there was a girl who was "sold out for Jesus", I used to be it. I was a full-on evangelizing, Bible memorizing, pleading/praying seeker of God.

It was never a perfect faith. Looking back on my childhood and the writings penned in that dark era, I see that I've always struggled with questions of 'why' and 'if,' wondering if God was really there and if he really cared about me. My struggle was not so much with the academic and reason side of things. I enjoyed studying Christian apologetics because I felt the need to resolve things more solidly in my own intellect so that I at least had logic and facts to fall back on when the doubts crept in. But for the most part I resolved myself to the fact that without holding degrees in science, history, archeology I had to trust the greater Christian minds whom I respected, and who have evidently done their homework.

They called it "running the ramp of reason before taking a leap of faith". And it kept me walking for a while. So long as I continued to drown my doubts with enough ministry and church involvement, my world was able to retain its status quo without too much disturbance. There were pebbles in my shoe that would continue to nag at me, but I successfully spent my teens and twenties ignoring them and flicking them around within my shoe.

Unfortunately, pebbles can't be ground into harmless dust while rubbing against a functional foot and sensitive skin. The questions I'd been asking about suffering and God and why... eventually lodged their way deep into my flesh, and I realized I couldn't keep walking in this direction so long as they were there.

So I "came out". To myself at first, and gradually to others. From born-again believer to dead-again agnostic.

But I'm not in rebellion. Not intentionally anyway. Heck, I'm still a 32 year-old virgin and I'd still like to marry someone who believes in that marriage is sacred and sex within marriage is the ideal (more on that later). I still want the Christian family with five kids in the mini-van, singing Veggie Tales tunes on the way to the Sunday School picnic. Please believe me when I say that I want to believe!

- Just don't ask me to ignore the pebbles or wear thicker socks.

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Make Me a Believer, by Jake.

"So make me a believer for once in my life
Right here and now touch me somehow
Let it be tonight
It's all on the line
I'm down on my knees
I don't know how but I'm ready to see
Clear every shadow of doubt in my mind
'Cause i want to believe"