The Second Birth

From the day I was born, my parents wanted me to ask Jesus into my heart. It was their number one dream for me. The only thing they ever really wanted for my life. Dreams are funny things.

So I slept in a crib under a framed cross stitch, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," and I was given a pink Baby's First Bible and then later The Bible for Little Ones which had colorful pictures, and my mom read to me every night little fantastic stories, brief and simplified, stripped of all real theology. And at church every Sunday and Wednesday, I sat in classrooms with little plastic chairs just my size and watched the Bible unfold in felt cartoons and sang songs with King James words that sounded like a foreign language.

But when I was five I did it: I asked Jesus into my heart. At least that's what I was taught to call it. But that doesn't really describe what happened at all. It sounds too domestic. Like I was a suburban two-story home with a tire swing in the backyard, and He moved in some Ikea furniture and settled in for a comfortable middle class life. But really Jesus was more of a forest fire, the kind that spreads through a cracked skeleton of a forest after years of relentless summer drought, where the trees are mostly dead, and the fire flashes through them in seconds, leaving the whole place flat, with nothing but ash. But then there's room for real life again, not just old dying trees, and little blades of grass pierce the ashes one by one, and they're all tiny and frail, but they're alive and new.

So the next Sunday at church, when they were passing around the body and blood of Jesus, I tried to take my share, assuring my mom that I had asked Jesus into my heart. But she wouldn't let me, and she didn't believe me.

I kept asking for weeks, and finally she relented. So I began to eat and drink Jesus every week with a ravenous appetite that unnerved my parents in spite of all they had hoped for. The very thing they craved for me was the one thing that could take me from them, the one thing that usurped their role in my life as primary authority and caretaker.

Pretty soon I was asking to be baptized, and that was where they drew the line. "Not until you're old enough," they said. But there was already a new wilderness growing inside me that could not be trimmed and mowed and weeded into something clean and manageable.

And then the conflicts really began. When I tried to purge the house of secular music because it was only holding us back. When I tried to stay home from school some days saying I just wanted a day with God. When I planned a trip to Arizona to spend forty days fasting in the desert because Jesus had done it and it must be invigorating. When I insisted that we should sell our house and give the money to the poor because that was what Jesus had said to do. When I kept talking about Jesus on the playground at school until the teacher told me to stop and I wouldn't and she called my parents and my parents demanded that I keep my mouth shut and respect everyone's religious privacy. I wanted to scream at them "You're not my real dad!" but I didn't because I knew it would only hurt them even though it was true and it was what they had always wanted. Dreams are funny things.

So when I was eleven and the church announced a baptismal Sunday coming up, I asked again if I could be baptized. They agonized over the question as they did every time I asked saying that it was a "sweet thought" and that they were "touched" that I was thinking about these things but talked about it being...