Adrift

When I met him I was eighteen years old sitting with my mother in a television studio watching her favorite Christian program being broadcast live. I had just graduated from high school and was not sure what direction my life was going to take.

I was raised Lutheran and went to Lutheran schools. For nine years I not only attended church and Sunday school, but I took all the required religion classes at school and attended chapel weekly. By the tenth grade, however, not long after my confirmation of baptism and my first communion, my mother gave up making me go to church.

During my senior year, though, I accepted an invitation to a different kind of church. Their passionate worship and preaching moved me to tears. I would later learn that their teachings were false, but their enthusiasm for the Bible got me going to church and reading the Scriptures of my own free will for the first time in my life.

Weeks later, with her hand pressed against the hand of an evangelist on the TV screen, my mother prayed her own way into this new kind of Christianity. That is how I ended up at the TV station that summer evening.

The young man was riding a boom when he spotted me. He was busy running the camera, so he sent his brother to ask for my number. Weeks later he picked me up for our first date. We sped off in his red Corvette to meet a group of his friends for dinner.

He came from a prominent Christian family. He was charismatic. He was funny. And he was cruel. He delighted in mocking the weaknesses of others. One thing I had learned from reading my Bible was that Christians were supposed to be kind (1 Cor. 13.4, Gal. 5.22). That evening I went from attracted to troubled. When I got home I told my mother about my concerns. She arranged a conference call with two of her new church friends, the ones she looked up to as mature believers.

This relationship, they prophesied, was from God. This young man and I, they declared, would marry and have a national ministry. They told me, in other words, to disregard what the Scripture said and listen to them. I did. I let myself fall in love.

That phone call would become, for me, the portal to a secret world where I strained to hear the voice of God and where people who could hear voices that I couldn’t charted the course for my life. A year or so later, when that young man had an affair with his best friend’s wife and left me in the wake of his perfidy, that secret world became a world of fear and distrust. God became, to me, a cruel joker.

Yet deep beneath my terror of that secret world remained the quiet memory that, through the Scriptures, the Spirit of God had warned me that love is kind. God is not a trickster. He had spoken, and, through the Scriptures, He continues to speak.

I originally shared this story here several years ago. I share it again today because the world is fuller than ever of voices demanding our attention, competing for our time, vying for our loyalty. They batter us and they flatter us. They confuse and entice us. Many, like the ones that deceived me, even claim to be the voice of the Savior himself.

My prayer is that neither you nor I will waste our days and years as I did, adrift, like “children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph. 4:14), but that together we will devote ourselves to strengthening our grip on God’s Word until “we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).