By Jackson Posey | Sports Writer
I grew up terrified of hell.
It was inexplicable. I had two loving parents who took me to church. I tried to do all the right things in all the right places. But the nice words about Jesus and the Bible couldn’t stop my first-grade self from crying myself to sleep with a morbid version of the sinner’s prayer: “Please forgive me, in case I die in my sleep.”
Round and round, the carousel spun. I earned social acclaim for my religion, earning the moniker “the Christian kid” as much for my lack of profanity as anything I actually believed. I spoke at FCA meetings and behaved in church. It was all hollow, just echoes with no substance. Until one day, my spiritual house of cards began to collapse.
Straining to live in perfect Christian morality on my own proved impossible. Suddenly, the fate I so dreaded began to feel nearer and nearer. I turned to poetry, desperate to find an emotional release valve. I wrote a short novel called “Praying for Nightmares,” which climaxes with the main character giving his life to a demon. My friends called it concerning; I called it cathartic.
But amid my emotional wreckage, with no warning at all, God showed up.
And in a single moment, he changed everything.
The preacher spoke on 2 Kings 6:8-17, a relatively obscure Biblical passage detailing the Syrian army’s attempt to kill the prophet Elisha. Upon hearing that his safe house is surrounded, Elisha neglects every option I would’ve considered — running away, stockpiling weapons, trying to tunnel out with a spoon like in a prison break movie. He doesn’t even seem to look out the window. Instead, he drops down to his knees.
“Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them,” Elisha tells his anxious servant before looking to heaven. “O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see.”
The second those words brushed past Elisha’s lips, the hills bloomed into fiery life. Horses and chariots, fiery swords and arrows, appeared and assembled to defend the people of God. The enemy was fully at the mercy of heaven’s mighty army.
“The enemy may be surrounding you,” the story seems to say, “but God will have the last word.” The servant’s life was forever changed. Gone were the days of second-guessing, of living in fear. His security rested fully in the Lord. His ultimate general came through.
I barely noticed when the pastor closed his message; I had bigger fish to fry.
As the servant’s eyes were opened, so too were mine. Soundtracked by the worship band’s rendition of “Fight My Battles,” I looked up toward a ceiling that suddenly wasn’t there anymore.
I looked up and up, past the ceiling, the clouds and the stars, far beyond where any human being should be able to look. And I peered into what I can only assume to be the throne room of heaven. The background was faded and dark, as if to avoid distracting me from what sat in the center of the room.
Sitting on the throne was an indescribable being of pure light, weeping with joy. Somehow, I knew this joy to be more than a passing fad, or some twisted infliction of suffering. I was looking at a being of love. And he was weeping over the joy and worship found in the room that night.
God, weeping with joy.
In a single moment, in the drop of an eyelash, in the cuckoo bird’s cry — everything changed. The fear I’d lived with my entire life disappeared. Depression bowed its knee. In their place stood a towering joy, one I’d never known but always longed for. Like cracked soil rejecting the soft pail of its gardener, I couldn’t receive everything at once. But God is patient. He walks with us. I learned to walk in his garden.
I make my living through words. Between articles like this one, podcasting, broadcasting high school football games and covering Baylor sports, I spend most of my days yammering on about nothing in particular. I could filibuster the cord out of its socket.
But something about that moment has always left me speechless. God is funny like that. He’ll give us exactly what we need, with a friendly reminder that we didn’t supply it ourselves. I had every opportunity to find God and didn’t, so he found me. For that, I am eternally grateful.
The narrative of “Doubting Thomas” portrays a man paralyzed by uncertainty and straining for answers. “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe,” the weary disciple says in John 20:25. Jesus responds not with rebuke, but by returning, offering Thomas his hands and side, and offering those assembled a lesson.
“Do not disbelieve, but believe,” Jesus tells the small crowd before turning back to Thomas. “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
I am Thomas. I had every reason to believe, to understand, to follow — I didn’t. I am not the blessed man in this teaching, and I will always have to wrestle with that.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love, reached down from heaven to a lost little boy and brought me home. I am the prodigal son. I was lost and now I am found. I was blind and now I see. All of my efforts to play God were laid bare when I saw a reflection of his glory. And nothing has ever been the same.
“God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved,” the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2. “And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
