I grew up in a good home in Jackson Mississippi, with two wonderful parents – Don and Audrey, an older sister - Sharon, and two younger brothers – Jeff and Troy. As a family, we believed in God, but we were not regular church attenders. Yet every Easter and Christmas, all the kids got dressed up and went down to the First Baptist Church on the corner. I believe that made mom happy (once we made it through the struggle of getting us all dressed at the same time).
When I was about seven or eight years old, I was told that I could decide for myself if I wanted to go to church or stay home. At that time, Sunday school felt a lot like regular school. There were classes for different grades, lots of tests, and memory verses that I could never seem to learn from that hard to read King James Bible. Since I already had five days of school each week, I certainly didn't want one more, so I decided not to go to church anymore. Anyway, Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest right? So that’s what I did. I took a rest from church. It was just too hard.
My dear grandmother, the devote Christian that she was, became very concerned about my decision. So she, along with a few other relatives, tried very hard to explain to me the love of Jesus and the need to repent and be saved. I remember believing what she said about Jesus, but I had a terrible misunderstanding of what repentance truly meant. I wrongfully thought that to repent meant that I had to completely stop all my sinning, then, after I had come clean, I could ask for forgiveness and become a Christian. So I set out on a personal quest to stop sinning!
Well, you can imagine how quickly I discovered that I could not completely stop sinning. I was so angry with myself! No matter how hard I tried, I still fell short. As a result, I became painfully aware of my guilt, but I didn’t know how to stop sinning. To make matters worse, all my friends were going forward at church and claimed they had repented and were being baptized. This made me very angry inside. How could my friends claim to repent, when I knew they were all still sinning? In my mind, I started seeing the profession of repentance as hypocrisy, because no one could possibility stop sinning! How could Christians claim to be holy, when they were sinning? As a result, I wanted nothing to do with Christianity!
Unfortunately there was just one problem . . . what to do about that guilt thing? My way out was simply. All I had to do was deny the existence of God. Problem solved! Or so I thought.
