My Story

I’m sitting in a coffee shop. My cute little chromebook and I have never made a trip outside the house before. I’ve never been one to sit down to write anywhere outside my home, but I have just over two hours to kill and one can only walk the mall for so long before fatigue sets in. As I was driving over here, I did a little bit of praying. “God, I think I’m going to sit down and blog. What do you want the world to hear?” I should probably be doing that more often, but I guess God has been using my work anyway. How gracious is He! As I was praying, the thought came to mind: I have two hours to write, maybe I should write a longer one. But what topic could I possibly write about that would last more than my usual thirty-minute maximum? I know! I’ll tell my story!

I call it “my story,” because I’m not sure what else to call it. I guess I wouldn’t be wrong in calling it my testimony, but that doesn’t really capture all of it. You see, I grew up christian (and, since my name is Christian, I was a christian christian. Beat that!) I was on the mission field in Kiev, Ukraine from age 4 til 18. Everything we did was Christian. I’m grateful for it, because I was kept from a lot of bad things, but my problem was always that I never felt like being a christian was a choice. Sure, there were little things like how I could say “no,” to spending every Saturday helping the poor and the needy, but I never felt like I had a lot of leeway outside of that. It was christian home, christian school, christian church, rinse and repeat. I felt like I was stapled to the ground, drowning in the struggles of trying to survive in the hectic, hyper-christian life that the mission field was. 

Then I went to a christian college. That was entirely my choice, and God opened the right doors to make it happen, but I felt a similar thing: I felt powerless to actually be a christian. I felt like being a christian was just a matter of going with the flow. When asked, I would have told you that I believed in God, I even had a few spiritual growth spurts, but iI felt like a plant that was being over-watered. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and I was right on the edge of it being a bad thing. Luckily, God pushed me into the philosophy department and helped me put a personal spin on my faith. I graduated with a faith that was taking form, but definitely with some  rough edges that needed work. 

After graduating college, I moved out here to Colorado. It was a bit of a rough landing. I signed up for a night class and an evening job in the dish pit of a chinese restaurant. If I wasn’t working, I was studying, with little time in between to recuperate in between. Then I saw openings for a position at Spirit Halloween. Out of sheer desire to work for a Halloween store, I applied and actually got the job! I was so excited. But this meant I had a morning job, an evening job, and a night class in between. I was working seven days a week before, but now I was reaching the point where if I wasn’t working, I was sleeping, with even less time in between. 

I didn’t even have two hours to sit down and watch a movie, let alone go look for a church! I remember one day I had a few minutes to eat before work and my landlord asked “so, have you found a church yet?” Let’s see, a college grad who hasn’t been in town more than a few months, works seven days a week, and you’re asking if I have found a church?!? Seriously?!?!

I wanted to laugh in his face (luckily, I didn’t, but the temptation was ripe.) 

I eventually did go hunting for a church, but I had no luck. Everywhere I went, something felt missing. I couldn’t tell what, but I knew I was in the wrong place. 

One thing that always seemed to irk me was how gay people were treated. I had friends in college that told me stories of how they were kicked out of their homes when they came out. That hurt me. How could someone do that? How could you be so callous to your own child that you’d rather see them homeless than in the wrong? There’s something wrong with that. I remember one church I went to had the issue come up in the first sermon I heard. It was in a very “fire and brimstone” type of way, too. I didn’t like it, but they had a young adults group, and it was on friday nights no less! That was very ideal for me. Looking back, I may have been able to thrive if I had stayed there, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. It was too big a mix of kids just getting out of high school, all the way up through their early 30’s. I was bringing my questions to the wrong crowd. I would come with questions and concerns that required a deeper understanding of the bible and someone who could reach me in the way that I think. I met one such person, but I didn’t stick around long enough to develop the relationship. I was looking for man, but I really needed God. 

I eventually wound up leaving that calvary chapel, with their Friday night youth groups. I hit the road and kept trying to find a church I could call home. I tried all sorts of churches from all sorts of denominations. I kept thinking “it must be the wrong fit that’s the problem. The wrong beliefs with the wrong rituals. If I just find the right one, everything will start to make sense.” Once again, I was looking for man. I was looking for friends and community. I wanted right practice and right ritual, but I wasn’t truly looking for the right God. You see, I was still the one on the throne. It was all about church serving me, when this whole thing is supposed to be the other way around. 

But here is where I began my descent towards rock-bottom. After I left calvary chapel, I was scrambling for friends. Friends, friends, friends, that was what life was all about for me. I wanted to always have lots of friends and lots of people around me. Now, I’m not going to say that friends are a bad thing. On the contrary! Life in community is how we were meant to live! But it just goes to show that anything can become an idol, an obsession, dare I even say: an addiction. I had to have people around me all the time. I had to keep my social circle big and secure. I had to have my hands in multiple groups so I could do everything with others. It was a rabbit hole I was falling down, and I kept telling myself it would get better, if only I had X. 

But X was never enough, and I couldn’t figure out why. 

Eventually, I reached a point where my demons started to get the best of me. I co-founded a Dungeons and Dragons group that met twice a week. It felt like I was getting somewhere, but I had to have control. I had to take the wheel and keep speeding towards more. More, more, more! I was speeding so fast, I would have made Vin Diesel proud (can I get an extra like from my Fast and Furious fans?) Eventually, I started getting crankier and crankier. My dissatisfaction with my addiction beat me to a bloody pulp. I had to be there for every event, every get-together, every party (I don’t even like parties!) I was wearing myself out and I couldn’t control myself to stop. 

Eventually, my rampage reached its peak and the Devil was lining me up for the killshot. You see, after a while, my Dungeons and Dragons friends became my work friends. One of the guys had an opening where he worked. Around the same time I was looking to make a career change, so I applied and landed myself a comfy tech job. But this also meant I spent 8 hours every day with these guys during the week, along with an extra 4 hours on Fridays and another 4 on saturdays. On top of which, they all lived on the other side of town, so I spent almost 2 hours every single Saturday driving back and forth between houses. This left me 0 days completely to myself, and a ton of time with the guys.

Once again, too much of a good thing, right?

So, naturally, we got a little tired of each other. Snipping turned into snarling and then, one day, the snarling turned into all-out war. I will spare you some of the details, but I will say this: my fears got the best of me, and I lashed out like an animal backed into a corner. It’s funny that I say it like that, because I was known as the dominant personality. I was the loud one, the “alpha.” (To paint the picture a little more, I worked at a gym for a while and picked up some of that “gymrat” energy, and those guys are nuts.) Needless to say, I started it and said a lot of royally stupid things in the heat of my fear. And, sadly, my reckless words cost me big time. Sometimes people rebuild from these kinds of fights. Sometimes we choose to forgive and forget. But, sadly, this was not one of those times. As I sat there duking it out in our discord chat room, it quickly became clear as day that we weren’t going to bounce back from this one. I immediately started looking for other groups, other social circles, anything to help me find something to bounce to next. 

My mind went back to my old church hunt. I remembered an old church I had passed a million times on my way to one of my old workplaces. I remember very distinctly looking at their website and seeing that they looked a bit…different. They had a unique approach to church. I remember reading that the pastor was a former drug addict, and they were trying to market themselves as a church for the broken. It was a very “come as you are” type of place, and I had tried every other church in a hundred-mile radius, so I figured I would give it a try. I remember I had to scroll through google maps, mentally driving the route to work until I found the spot that it was at: right between that other church and King Soopers, I had found it!  Except, this church (which, by the way, was called “edge church,”) wasn’t there anymore, and a new church had taken their place. I figured “screw it, I’ll check these guys out instead, I guess.” 

I had one other startup church on my list. I figured it would be cool to be able to fall out of bed and make it to church without even needing the car. But it was second on my list and I was so sold on One Life that I didn’t even check it out. On top of which, they didn’t have a young adults group and One LIfe did, a must-have on my personal checklist. I’ll never forget that experience, sitting there underneath my loft bed; my online war on one screen and this church service on the other. I clicked on their latest sermon and it was a woman pastor! (For all my non-church friends, that’s still a bit of a hot topic these days.) “Alright, guess these guys are kinda open-minded!” I thought to myself. I’m not a nut for “progressive thinking,” as we know it today; but it’s a bold move, a move you have to argue for and stand by. This, to me, indicated that they weren’t just going to go with the flow. It got my attention. 

It’s funny, I’ll never forget that sermon, even though it’s stuck in my brain in bits and pieces. The pastor started off talking about how God likes to party, and all the festivals that God commanded His people have in order to remember where they had come from. “Everyone wanders through the wilderness,” the clip from The Chosen sounded all the way through my headphones into every cell in my body.

Boy, was that true of me at that moment. 

As it so often does, my attention span slipped somewhere in the middle, but the sermon ended by talking about Moses. It ended by talking about how he would refuse to travel anywhere the pillar of fire, representing God’s presence, would not go before him. The takeaway was the prayer of “God, where your presence is not, I will not go.” I think that was the missing component: divine intervention. You can memorize the bible front to back, you can study all the philosophical arguments, be the best apologist this side of the grave, but without divine intervention, things go wrong somewhere. This was my divine intervention moment. 

That was a friday, and that sunday I decided I was going to bite the bullet and go check this place out. But this introvert was not going into a big loud room full of strangers on his own, no siree! Around this time, I had made friends with my neighbor, a middle-aged gentleman who was also a christian, jaded from the church-hunt. I went out on a limb and asked him to join me. He was a pickier man than most, so I figured he would hate it. “I sent you the site, did you happen to check it out?” I asked him, fairly confident he would have something negative to say about it. “No, I’m just going to go.” He replied in his usual “screw it” tone. Honestly, I didn’t really care. Much like Moses, I needed an extrovert to do my talking for me. 

“In twenty years, you were the first person to invite me to church.” He would later tell me. But off we went. Neither of us wanted to get up early on the weekend, so we went to the late service, which started at 10:45. That was more than enough time for us to sleep in. In fact, it was enough time for me to sleep in, have breakfast, get antsy, and get there 20 minutes early! We walked in and a service was going on. We started feeling unsure about the timing, so we snuck in the back and sat down. I still laugh as I remember that day. You see, we snuck in mid-prayer. We bowed our heads and heard “amen. Alright, see you guys next week!” We laughed a good hearty laugh: we were so early we made it to the end of the first service! “They’re not gawking at the clock, that’s how you know the Holy Spirit is here!” My neighbor said. I couldn’t believe it: my grumpy-lumpy of a neighbor paying this church a compliment! And that wasn’t the last one either! The next several hours would be nothing but him excitedly swinging from person to person, talking about how excited he was to be there. It was inspiring to see the radical transformation on this man’s face. Even Ebenezer Scrooge couldn’t have held a candle to the radical change that was happening right before my eyes. I would spend months trying to process what had just happened: we had found a church!

I still tremble when I think about it. It was a miraculous moment, for sure. I quickly learned what that missing piece was: I wanted a church that was active. All the other churches I had been to were an apathetic Sunday service, maybe one or two small groups, and that was about it. These guys had men’s retreats, women’s retreats, young adults, men’s bible study, marriage conferences, outreaches, these guys were busy, and I loved it! I had to start saying “no,” because my schedule was full! I could barely find a moment to myself! 

But as this high was sinking its teeth into me, something bit back. I had a few interactions that challenged how I saw things, particularly in the whole homosexuality issue. I had never been comfortable with it one way or the other. I used to think “just let the people get married! They aren’t hurting anyone.” But I also wasn’t settled on a church that just went with the culture. In philosophy, we were always taught that if something bites back at any point, there is a very good chance you have found something real. All good arguments will force you to accept an uncomfortable conclusion. That was what this felt like: something real that bit back at me. But there were so many things I didn’t understand, so many joys of disciplines I didn’t comprehend yet. All I saw was a pleasure denied and people that wouldn’t feel welcome at church. That irked me. So much so, that I quickly descended into doubts about whether or not we had truly found the right place. I wondered if I had found another dud and I had no idea what to do.  Thankfully, my neighbor-friend talked me down off the ledge, and encouraged me to go do some digging for myself. The only way I was going to get these questions answered was to dig into the source itself. I spent a very solid and respectable five minutes trying to fight back before I realized somehow, I didn’t care about the issue. “How could this be?” I thought to myself. I couldn’t figure out why this was bothering me. After all, I am straight, I have no stake in the claim. Why should I care? I kept digging, tying myself in knots as I searched for a solution to my angst. After a while, what stuck with me was this. I didn’t hear it as an audible voice, but an argument translated into first-person. We used to write dialogues like this in Philosophy classes all the time. 

“Kraze.” The argument started. “Who cares why you’re up in arms about this? Whether there’s a reason or not, who knows? But there’s something more important at stake, here: look at these things. You’d rather put them above Me. That’s what I’m worried about. Forget your traditional understanding of good and bad. They’re pharisee-concepts. Focus on the things you’d rather horde than come to me. Picture it like this: if I were to ask you to give this up, would you? Would you give up a “good” thing if I asked you to? If your answer is a sharp ‘no!’ then we have something to work on.” I have a separate post titled “idols” that explains this in more depth, and it comes from this encounter. I suggest checking it out if you want to read about this in a little more detail. 

After I adopted this newly-found perspective, the rest came pretty easily. I’ll admit, there have been trials. Redemption is as much a process as it is a moment, and there was some heavy weeding that had to be done in my life. Through a slow-fading process, I broke up with my old Dungeons and Dragons group. This gave me my Fridays and Saturdays back, and I have been on this wild ride ever since. It has been nothing short of a grand adventure, and I believe it’s only getting started! There have been ups, downs, tears and dances. There have been inspiring  healings and tremendous recoveries. I have been reshaped, remade, and reborn. Every moment, people have asked me “what the heck happened?” and all I can say is “dat ain’t me! Ask the King!” 

I could keep going with the stories from just this last year. All the places I have been, things I have done, and people I have met. It has been a wonderful ride so far! But this post is already over double what I usually do, and my AMC showing of The Chosen is soon, so I’m going to wrap this up. This has been the story of my opening chapter, my rebirth. Is this my testimony? Sort of, I would say this is the story of my blooming. God planted a whole field’s worth of seeds up until this point. The field was set, the fuse was lit. This is the story of the day when God lit the fireworks.