Transformations of a Church Kid

“I believe in
Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else” – C.S. Lewis

Have you ever not
understood something? A complicated math problem? The reason some author
decided to place a particular image at a certain place in a story? It could be
any nagging puzzlement really.

And then.

All of the sudden
it clicks.

This epigraph from
C.S. Lewis didn’t really ring true for me until just recently. I just didn’t get it…what it really meant to
follow Christ. It wasn’t so much that I was living in darkness…I just wouldn’t
open my eyes. You hear it all the time that the Christian faith is not just
another religion. Weil it is true…it is not just believing in a religion, but
by choosing to follow Christ, the way I view my life and the world is
completely altered.

I have spent most
of my life as one of those “church kids”…you know the kind. In my particular case I was the one who
accepted Christ into my heart when I was around 5 years old. I was sitting on
my bed with my foofy pink comforter around me and with my mom alongside me
explaining things and praying with me.

I am thankful for this fact.

However, there is something to be
said about this way of growing up…at least for me. Because I always had “this
thing” (namely the Christian faith) I
never really understood or appreciated my relationship with God. I think…and I could be mistaken about this I
suppose…but I think when I first realized that there was more to it that living
my life and then separately having this Jesus thing going on somewhere on the
side I was in Bolivia on a missions trip.

Traveling to a new
place, and being displaced from the familiar made me realize that there was
much more out there than the mundane life I had been leading. While there, I encountered people who had
never even heard of the thing my entire life was formed around. Such poverty.
Such destitution. Such hopelessness. After returning, my world was cast in an entirely
new light. I was beginning to understand
that without this faith the world would be meaningless (to mention that it
wouldn’t exist in the first place.)

My eyes opened.

The beauty of it
is that every day as a follower of Christ I have the potential to grow this
relationship more and have more of the world revealed to me. If I think I can “see
everything else” with my Christian faith now, it makes me all the more excited
about the potential of a deeper faith…and maybe, just maybe a deeper understanding
as well.