Nowhere Near Finding What I Was Looking For 👓

a segment of my work-in-progress

Taking a Walk on the Cliffs of Sainte-Adresse (1867), by Claude Monet #

Every honest Christian wishes they had some amazing story to tell about how they found Jesus. It is those folks whose stories we elevate with Very Special Evenings to hear their testimony, from drug-addled homelessness to on-fire evangelist; from staunchly argumentative atheist to viral apologist. That is not my story. My story of coming to know Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior is a cookie-cutter copy of millions of Americans roughly my age, plus or minus fifty years.

I grew up in a loving Christian home, complete with nightly family dinners after ballet class and suburban summertime bike rides with drinks from the water hose at the side yard. Now, a “Christian home” isn’t to say my earliest memories are of Wednesday evening tent revivals or post-sermon potlucks in the fellowship hall; mine are mostly the ordinary playing-in-the-backyard, watching Saved by the Bell on Saturday mornings variety, but nonetheless, they were all infused with a base-level assumption that in our household, we go to church and we call ourselves Christians.

I never sensed we were unusual in any particular way. Perhaps this is the Moral Majority-era raised Southerner in me, but my early immature perspective on life assumed everyone around me hailed from a family and home life that went to church on Sundays and found swear words and beer offensive. It wasn’t until fourth grade, when I’d join friends after school in their homes, that I discovered parents whose album collections included hair bands—men in actual tights and makeup and insane hair—and parents who actually swore in front of their children as though they were in a PG-13 movie. Living rooms that allowed a TV parked on MTV debuting the latest Billy Idol.

My parents weren’t strict the way some of my Reformed evangelical counterparts’ were: we had cable TV and junk food, and my latchkey kid status meant mainlining The Brady Bunch, Growing Pains, and The Facts of Life reruns after school until my mom walked through the front door (my brother, five years my junior, preferred Thundercats, He-Man, and Transformers by the time I had any real memory of my own pop culture oeuvre). I was allowed a radio in my bedroom, so I knew of Duran Duran and Pet Shop Boys and bragged as much out on the second-grade playground. I was jealous of friends whose parents, in the fourth grade, mind you, took them to see Prince and Bon Jovi live. My first concert wasn’t until the ripe old age of eleven in the sixth grade, when I saved up my own allowance money to see Debbie Gibson with my group of girlfriends, and yes, of course I wore a copy of her ubiquitous hat.

I conjure up these dated names only to timestamp my childhood, as well as to make clear that I did not grow up in a super-strict fundamentalist household. My mom routinely had to go on the defensive with certain extended family members as to why she allowed me to take dance classes that included, in addition to ballet, tap and jazz classes that performed on stage to the latest Top 40. We watched Ghostbusters on HBO and a few weeks later, my three-year-old brother mimicked an entirely inappropriate line from the film right in front of our grandparents.