One day, many years ago, I woke up one morning and had this strange pull to a Unitarian-Universalist church near where I lived. It was the strangest experience, I just felt like God was calling me to this place. Now I knew nothing about the UUs, but I couldn't just shake this feeling like I absolutely had to go there. And so I did go, and joined in a religious studies group there. They were studying a book that would mark my life, MYSTERY WITHOUT MAGIC.
I had been studying both Christianity and Taoism, and taking online Bible College classes to learn more about the former. I didn't fully know what I believed or why. It was there that I met a man named Jason Pullen, and started a friendship with him that would also mark my life.
Jason seemed to me to be everything I wanted to be: self-controlled, faithful, moral, and highly intelligent. He had a sense of purpose in life and a good idea of how to realize that purpose. He was a self-realized human being. I cannot overstate how important this relationship was to me. It was from Jason that I appropriated the worldview that dominates me today, though I have drifted my own direction in certain ways (I am Christocentric and Trinitarian in a way Jason is not). But when it comes to the basic outline of what I believe, much of it is directly from, or inspired by, him and what he believes.
So much of what I am today is due to Jason, the books he gave me, our conversations, and the love of him and his family. I would spend Sunday mornings at the UU church, and then eat lunch at his house as we discussed all manner of things. It was Jason who first suggested I become a youth minister. It was Jason who suggested I offer my services to a church for free, and hope that it would lead to a paid position. This plan indeed is the one that worked, I became a youth minister in part because Jason suggested it, and I was able to become one because of the plan he laid out for me. His father taught me about finances, and his mother and I are very close friends as well.
I met other people at that Church, among them Carol Phillips and Peter Taylor. These people facilitated the only relationship in my life more important than the one I had with Jason, and that is with my wife. They introduced me to Angelic, who further pushed me down the path of rebirth. This relationship changed everything. My wife taught me to drive (yes, at 25 years old). She helped me get my paid youth ministry position at St. Timothy's, and later at St. Thomas. I would have very little of what I do today without her, and I would not be the man I am today without her love. I cannot imagine loving someone more than I do her, and her love inspires me to new heights every day.
This is, in many ways, the story of my being born again. Yet it is not a story like one is apt to hear at church. Oh, the story of a man who had a serious drug problem, and lived the life of a criminal, is a familiar one. But I had pretty much made a decision to get passed all that before I started down the religious path. Religion, and I mean that in the broadest sense of that word, was my therapy. But to really learn how to live a life, that took the involvement of certain people. It all began with the craziest of thoughts: "God wants me to do this."
A coincidence you say? Just dumb luck, you say? Think about this people, this isn't just a matter of one single event that went right for me. This is a whole life determined by a single moment, by a single experience. This is a series of "coincidences" so wide and so numerous it boggles the mind. The whole of the story has the look of a conversation, of Someone telling me something. Yes, a billion monkeys typing a billion hours may be able to come up with the greatest novel of all time, but if I find that novel am I insane for supposing it was written by someone, and not the result of chance? Why is the latter more likely than the former?
And it isn't just a matter of the look of the thing. This is how it was experienced, it came to me AS a Grace. Think about what it would mean if I had not received that message, or ignored it? I would not be the man I am today, of that I have no doubt. The whole of my existence, everything I am and my very soul coming down to a single moment of decision. It isn't just the matter of a changed person. In a very real sense, I am a completely DIFFERENT person than I was back then, because of this one wacky strange feeling and the choice to follow it. I would not exist but for that Joshua trusting that moment of insanity or insight. It is a religious experience just to think about it.
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