God's not dead, neither are memes

The other day I saw a meme about faith, that prompted the viewer to share if you believe. And while I do believe, I'd rather not share it, for two reasons.

First, the meme is an urban legend. I always try to make sure things that I post on social media come from reputable sources, or are at least truthful. While and while I appreciate the notion of sharing one's faith, and sharing stories about sharing faith, I don't agree with trying to pass off fabricated stories just to further a point. So I'm not going to repost it. You can go look it up on Snopes if you want; just look for God, college professor, chalk, and you should find it.

Second, and perhaps more important, the meme paints college professors, as well as their students, in a bad light, perpetuating the stereotype that they are anti-religion. That if you go to college, some professor is going to challenge your deeply held religious beliefs, and perhaps even cause you to lose faith. This feeds into the anti-intellectual trend that plagues America today. We already have plenty of that.

So while I won't repost the meme, what I will do is share my own personal conversion experience. Because as the meme does, sharing these things is good, and if there's anyone out there who is now where I was back then, I want to present something for them to consider. Something that will hopefully change their life for the better, and lead them into a happiness that they never knew was possible. And where the meme falls short by presenting a fictional account as though it were real, this story is real, none of the names were changed to protect the innocent. If you're susceptible to getting "tingles," well, you have been warned! And I always get a kick out of hearing stories like these, so maybe you will too.

Although the bulk of the story takes place about six years ago, I'd have to way back to my childhood to really put things into perspective. My dad was raised Roman Catholic, and later in life got into Yoga (the religion, not just the stretches), and my mom was a non-specific "Protestant." We never went to church, other than for weddings, and I think most of my church experiences growing up were after spending the night with friends and going with them to their Kingdom Hall of the Jehova's Witnesses. And they'd tell me to bring a book with me in case I got bored, and I was pretty into dinosaurs as a kid, so in retrospect I'm sure all those dinosaur books didn't go over well with the congregation. The first time I ever had Communion was during a scout Camp-o-ree, because nobody told me that you had to be baptized in the Catholic church to be eligible. So yeah, I was really the textbook definition of "the Un-churched."

As I grew up, I got into Taoism as a philosophy and pseudo-religion. I didn't believe in God, but I also didn't outright reject the possibility that He was real. I figured He'd show up if He ever had anything worth telling me and wanted me to know, and since He never did, that meant that He wasn't real. I thought that people who actually did go to church were pretty much wasting their time and using religion as a crutch to get through life.

I had to strongly start reconsidering when I met my wife's godmother. "Nana" as the grandkids and great-grand-godkids call her, had the direct line to the almighty, more so than anyone I'd ever met or heard of. She had plenty of stories about how God had spoken to her, and had given her critical information that helped her make important decisions, and remedy problems that she didn't even know she had. Information that there was no conceivable physical explanation for her knowing. It made me start thinking that maybe I was missing something. My wife, who had been raised Roman Catholic, had done church all her life, had played in praise bands doing music during the services, had been a lector and eucharistic minister. She taught me about how when people feel that there is something "missing" in their life that they can't quite describe, it's usually because we have a "God-sized hole in our heart." So I started going to church with her, we got married in a Catholic church by a priest (Joe) who was a friend of her family, and we started attending the Catholic church in our new town. When we had our first daughter, she was baptized in our new church (by "Zio" Joe).

Our church was pretty progressive, and one of the lay-led things that they did was talk about how the LGBT community was welcomed there, even if they weren't allowed by the church hierarchy to perform marriages for them. So when you really get into it, they were only "welcomed" up to a certain point, but they did the best they could and kept fighting to make progress. Ultimately we left the church because we were sickened that the hierarchy tried to tell us how we should and shouldn't vote in governmental elections, pushing the Church's agenda, all the while trying to cover up disgusting incidents of sex abuse by priests against minors. So we left the church, and dabbled a bit in new-age mysticism and "intention manifestation" theory. We are all one entity, and that kind of thing. Which tied in very nicely with my long-held Taoist beliefs.

Then we had our second daughter, and we had moved to a different town. We didn't really belong to a community, and when we started thinking about what kind of structure we wanted our kids to grow up in, and how we wanted them to learn about their place in the world, my wife commented that it would be easier if we were in a church. But at that point we didn't really want to deal with all the hierarchy nonsense. While driving around on the way to dropping our older daughter off at school, my wife noticed St. George's Episcopal Church on the way. It was a nice looking church, very different than what she had grown up with, but we didn't know anything about the Episcopal faith so we didn't look into it at the time.

One day while driving by, she noticed a man sitting behind a table along the sidewalk in front of the church, with a big sign that read, "Drive Up For a Free Prayer." She thought it was a pretty funny gimmick, but didn't really think much more of it, other than wondering what this Episcopal stuff was all about. Every week, she continued to see him out there with his funny sign. One week, while driving back to town on the Thruway, she was thinking more about what to do about the whole matter of religious education of our children, and thought about maybe checking out the church sometime if she saw him out there again.

At that moment, she asked God what she should do. And she glanced up, and right there up above the road, was a cross. It marks the Auriesville Shrine. She hadn't planned on it being there, but when she needed it, there it was. So she came home and told me about what had happened, and I said it seemed like maybe God was trying to tell her to check out this church. Why else would she have had that experience at that exact moment? Sure, there could have been a coincidence; but as I've since learned, coincidences usually aren't just coincidences. We can't always see that at the time, but if you take the "rear-view mirror" approach to life and spirituality, you see how everything happens for a reason.

So she decided that this week, if the guy was out with his sign again, she was actually going to pull up and talk to him on her way home. He had been out there every Wednesday for a few weeks in a row. Wednesday came, it was time to drive our daughter to school, and it was pouring rain. And I'm talking thick, torrential, Upstate New York summertime rain. And so she drove by, figuring he wouldn't be dumb enough to be out there with his sign in the rain. And sure enough, there he was, in the thick of it. So she dropped our daughter off, called me at work to tell me she had seen him, and I confirmed that she should go talk to him. Seeing that kind of dedication was inspiring. So she drove back, pulled over, and met Deacon Scott, and got introduced to the Episcopal church for the first time. Wednesday also happens to be when St. George's does a healing service, and my wife had our other daughter, Kirin, with her. If you've read some of my other posts, you may remember that Kirin was born with some heart defects, and at that point in her life, we were pretty concerned about how things were going to go with her heart as she got older. We knew that she'd need a valve replaced someday, but now when that day would come. So she got right into the healing service, they prayed over her, and it felt like being home.

After that, we all started going to St. George's weekly. We made great friends there, who are like family to us. Deacon Scott came over to our house to talk with my about his religious experiences, because I had a lot of questions, and I wanted to get a different perspective than what I had grown up with, the kinds of more critical and sarcastic opinions my friends and I shared growing up. And he told me about the ways that he talked to God, and how God talked back to him and told him the important things he should do in life. The kinds of things that you or I would call our "personal mission." Like going into the mean streets of poverty-stricken Schenectady, setting up a table, and offering to pray with people passing by. Feeding the poor, taking care of the lowest among us, sharing some humanity with them, reminding them that God loves them, and that other people love them too. Doing the prayer table thing again after moving up to Clifton Park. Becoming a Deacon in the first place. All of these things got me thinking, and after he left, I made a conscious decision that I wanted to have conversation with God in my life too. So I said, in my head, "God, I'm sorry for doubting you for so long. I'm ready. Start talking to me, and I'll start listening." And you know what I heard? Nothing.

But I didn't give up. I went about cleaning up the house, just doing regular stuff. I happened to walk past the computer, and the Word Of The Day screen saver was running on it. Where all these words zip by at various depths, and eventually one word stops at center screen, and all the other words fade away, and it writes out the definition of the word. And this time, right when I needed it, the word was "faith." And I stopped dead in my tracks and just stood there for a moment. And then I smiled, and said "Thank you." And I decided right then and there that I was going to get further into this whole Christianity thing, and get myself baptized, and be a full-fledged member of the church community, because I really liked where this was going, and I wanted God to be a bigger part of my life.

A little while later, when I passed by the computer again, I stopped again to check out what word would come up. This time, the word was, "martyr," and I said, "OK, I heard you the first time!"

So as soon as I could, I went over to the church and met with Fr. John Henry and Mother Karen, and told them the story of what had happened. And their jaws dropped a bit, and they both said, "Woah....." And they explained how "martyr" was a perfect word for someone who was deciding to start down the road of baptism, because we symbolically die off from our "old" life, and get "reborn" in Jesus. So, again, the tingles. I spent the next several months learning a lot about church history, tradition, and how the Episcopal church's outlook and dogma were different from the Roman Catholic's. The best analogy I heard was that if the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury get together for dinner, the Pope gets to sit at the head of the table as a show of respect, but he doesn't get to tell everyone else what to eat. I eventually did get baptized, and then the next year Kirin got baptized, with Deacon Scott as one of her godfathers. Down the road we met Fr. Henry and Mother Karen's son, John, and now "Uncle John" is one of our daughters' favorites. And Aunt Stacy, Uncle Rob, Aunt Suzie, and the rest of our extended "family" is a big part of our lives. I took three years of a four year, college level course on Christian history and theology, read pretty much the entire bible in the first two years, and came to terms with things like the Crusades that I had grown up thinking were an unforgivable condemnation of Christianity. I even learned a lot about Islam and how the mainstream media really missed the ball on it and vilified it. And I learned a bit about Judaism, and started looking at the Israel-Palestine conflict with more context and compassion for both sides. My wife and I took the Financial Peace University course through our church, lead by Deacon Scott and one of our congregation members who did financial planning for a living, and we learned that God had bigger plans for us than living in debt. And while we had already gotten off to a great start, we're now in a much better financial position thanks to what we learned. My wife got commissioned as an official Evangelist, and got involved in a lay-led "seeker church" that they spun off, for people who are interested in having a relationship with God, but aren't ready, or comfortable, or whatever, with the full "church" experience. If that's you, then you should check them out. And she's always out there, sharing experiences like these, and talking about "God in my life" with anyone who wants, or especially needs, to hear it. And as a lot of our friends are in the LGBT community, and all hear plenty in the news, social media, talk radio or wherever about how they're "sinful," or God "hates" them, or whatever, she's out there letting them know not to believe the hype, and that God really does love them, and they're always welcome at the table, and we'll accept them and love them for who they are, because God made them that way. As my grandfather said, "I must be OK, because God don't make no junk." And this year, the Episcopal church is moving toward performing same sex marriages, so we're already seeing some progress, and thank God for that, but we still have far to go.

So that's the "short" version of my experience. I've heard lots of stories like these over the past few years, and I find that when you're looking for them, they have a way of finding you. "Seek, and you will find." So while the meme might get some folks to repost it and convince others that God is real, I still feel that authentic experiences like these do a better job. So if you share something, I'd rather it be this post than a meme. Thanks for reading.