Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
In the world of Christian ministry, people are always badgering us for our story. Thus, I feel obliged to give a quick narrative of the Lord’s radical intervention in my life—a kind of compressed Pilgrim’s Progress replete with ogres and dragons. I worry that there’s an unspoken assumption that the credibility of our story grows in direct proportion to the severity of our former life. I know that’s often the case with me: I don’t actively wish harm on anyone, of course, but I sure do cherish those ogres and dragons. How could I not? They’re so interesting. If we’ve survived the ravages of addiction, crossed the Rubicon from another religion, emerged from the underbelly of crime, or pushed past the barriers of skepticism, our listener is probably going to take us much more seriously. After all, you can’t argue with scars. There’s a reason these kinds of testimonies are a mainstay at Christian conferences and special church services featuring guest speakers.
But what if your story isn’t so exotic? What if you grew up in a Christian home, for instance, surrounded by faithful men and women who embodied the gospel with confounding consistency—men and women who didn’t do you the courtesy of provoking a serious (and narratively compelling) rebellion? What if your family effectively robbed you of the luxury of a more impressive testimony?
There’s a rough corollary between the perceived authenticity of the Christian with the past and the myth of the tortured artist. Do a bit of research on your favorite writer, poet, painter, or director, and you’ll frequently find evidence of a deeply damaged individual. Case in point: one of my favorite writers is David Foster Wallace. Tortured? Check. Complex relationship with his mother? Check. Eccentric? You bet. Brilliant writer? That’s an emphatic yes. Artistic credibility? Through the roof. Now apply this same litmus test to a cherished Christian testimony. Be honest, does the prodigality on display in the story tend to enhance the credibility of the witness? It’s no surprise that most of us are drawn to tumultuous stories, of course. What is surprising, however, is the amount of faith we often put in ogres and dragons.
I’m an apologist, so the What’s your story? question is unavoidable. Invariably, the person asking has an impressive sin résumé and is curious about the ogres and dragons I’ve battled myself. I’ve been asked for my story by former gangbangers, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, drug addicts, LGBTQ+ activists, and Wiccans, to name a few. They should all write books, I think to myself—and many of them have. “But enough about me,” they say, crossing their legs and leaning in, “I want to hear your story!” I’m tempted to answer, “I’ve always lived blandly ever after,” but my earnest, nondefensive thought is: I don’t have a story. I have no ogres and dragons. Do you know where I can find some?
The other temptation is to tell these dragon-scarred interlocutors about my dad. After all, his story meets all the requirements of authentic Christian testimony. If ever there was a malnourished, mud-strewn prodigal walking on faltering feet to the Father’s embrace, it’s my dad. Why can’t the gravity of his former rebellion atone for my conformity? Dad’s the prodigal; I’m the missionary kid. Do the math.
Fittingly, one of the more dramatic chapters in my own story does involve my dad. The event in question took place in the kitchen of our family home. One of the recurring themes of this book is the fact that, for better or for worse, the seemingly innocuous domestic terrain of the family household is one of the most primal sites of our spiritual transformation.
Our family had relocated from Vienna, Austria, to the United States in 1998, and as the nation lurched its way toward the potentially apocalyptic revelations of Y2K, I was learning firsthand the social hazards of wearing the same T-shirt twice in a week. This frugality was a partial byproduct of my missionary background, but I soon learned that in the land of plenty such thrift was more than a wardrobe malfunction; it constituted a serious breach of etiquette. My chronic self-consciousness was compounded by the yawning cultural divide. Everybody kept hearing me say Australia when I told them I’d come from Austria. Where was my sexy accent? they wanted to know. Why was I so pale? I kept issuing mordant reminders that I came from the place where “the hills are alive with the sound of music.” Amazingly, many of these kids didn’t seem to know Austria was a country. One well-meaning girl asked my sister, without a hint of irony, whether we had access to modern forms of transportation in Austria.
Outsiders can have a kind of forbidden glamor, of course, especially if they happen to come from the wrong side of the tracks. While it’s true that plenty of missionary kids do come from dangerous regions, the affluent nation of Austria, with its pristine ski slopes, lederhosen, and delectable milk chocolates, hardly qualified as dangerous. I had all the appeal of a nerdy foreign exchange student. Most of my peers, on the other hand, had grown up together. They remembered playground fights in kindergarten and still gossiped about former middle school power couples. Even if they did express occasional disdain for my sparse closet, most of these kids regarded me with idle curiosity at best, mild indifference at worst.
But as everybody knows, you’ve got to find your place in the teenage social hierarchy. And I learned very quickly that if you don’t find that place soon, it gets assigned to you. I also learned that most adolescents are lazy and only too happy to go along with whatever role you’ve chosen for yourself. There’s just one major requirement: You’ve got to look the part. The United States is the land of the free market and expressive individualism, and a large part of that dynamic involves shopping at the right places to secure your social standing.1 Since I’d decided to make it easy on myself and go with the outcast role, I knew I’d be wearing lots of black clothes and possibly eyeliner. If you want to be a misfit, start with a Misfits T-shirt.
I had a big problem, though. I had no demons. The costume was one thing, but how was I going to play the part without the proper motivation? I was in desperate need of ogres and dragons, but my new suburban setting in the Bible Belt wasn’t doing me any favors. It didn’t augur well that my dad worked for one of the biggest names in the apologetics world, effectively turning me into a pastor’s kid on steroids. No matter how much I wracked my brain, I just couldn’t find a secret wellspring of deep psychic pain to lend an air of authenticity to the black nail polish and eyeliner. My parents had failed to inflict the kinds of flattering emotional scars that were a prerequisite for my gloomy persona. I was no Heathcliff—I wasn’t even a Robert Smith. I did the only thing I thought I could; I went looking for demons.
Demon hunting wouldn’t have been my chosen phrase if I was asked about my game plan here, of course. If anything was approaching a rationale, it probably involved nothing more than trying to be a bit more interesting. However, my growing obsession with various expressions of darkness in the arts (music in particular) was more than a superficial avenue to better self-expression: All was not right with the world, and these shrieking voices were expressing this primal fact with greater honesty than many of the people around me. “Birth, copulation, and death / Is this the meaning of life?”—so went the chorus of a song by the aptly named Carcass.2 Though not all of us would have chosen such unsparing terms, my high school classmates and I certainly seemed to endorse the birth-copulation-death thesis with our behavior. As I saw it, these hopeless pursuits were usually disguised in flowery language and a pulsating beat that kept parties moving fast enough to avoid all serious thought. Carcass was simply stripping the varnish off of pop music and showing how hollow a godless life truly is. And, yes, this bleak vision was rendered through baritone guitars that chugged like industrial machinery and vocals that sounded like a snarling animal caught in a trap. It’s uncompromising, but all these years later it still seems to me a more fitting expression of the despair behind mindless hedonism than the joyful pop tunes that celebrate the same thing in more buoyant terms.
My dad taught me the discernment necessary to understand what I was listening to. It’s also worth noting that there were ample hints of my subversive tastes well before we moved to the United States. I remember one occasion in particular when I had left an album on the living room coffee table. Dad picked up the liner notes and, without a hint of alarm or defensiveness, gently deciphered all of the pagan and occult references of the album.
Given my European heritage, I ended up tapping into Norse mythology to bolster my gothic street cred. Lest you think this adolescent foray into Nordic territory involved some poetic trek toward sehnsucht (i.e., a transcendent sense of longing) à la C. S. Lewis, let me assure you that I took a typically American approach to this rich pagan terrain—one that required zero reading. I started buying loads of Scandinavian black metal. Burzum, Mayhem, Marduk, Emperor—these bands drew their inspiration from Norse mythology and divided their ideological allegiances equally between paganism, nihilism, and satanism. Plus, they were from Europe and I was from Europe, so I figured that made my devotion much more authentic.
Sporting corpse paint and outfits that made them look a bit like Vikings in bondage gear, many of these pioneers of extreme metal made good on their lyrical promises and burned churches, assaulted strangers, mutilated themselves, staged black masses, and in some cases went to prison as convicted murderers.3 Being a mild-mannered and largely compliant kid, I did none of those things. I was no arsonist—I didn’t even smoke. In fact, I never darkened the doorway of a single black metal show. But I sure did wear the heck out of those T-shirts, all of which I purchased through discreet mail-order transactions to spare my family the juvenile barrage of goat heads, inverted crosses, and pentagrams. Flannel shirts and jackets constituted my last piece of subterfuge before I arrived at school. Maybe not as brave as crowd surfing at a concert filled with people who think church buildings make for good bonfires, but these shirts sure would have incensed my folks, and that’s a pretty major risk for a teenage guy trying to ply his trade as a card-carrying outsider. As I saw it, my black metal getup was my Samson’s hair. Take it away and I was just a scared kid who needed to do some push-ups and get more sunshine.
Here’s another typically American assumption: what I do in private—as long as it’s legal—won’t have any major public consequences. This is nonsense, of course, and if you want to test it, try playing some aggressive music in your car as you’re driving in rush hour traffic. Not surprisingly, my newly acquired taste for music that celebrated unadulterated hatred and mayhem—much of it in a shrieking Gollum voice—began to seep into my attitude and behavior. Given my overwhelmingly shy nature and moral cowardice, most of this burgeoning hostility was directed at the people I loved the most because mistreating them entailed minimal risk to me. I knew that Mom and Dad would love me no matter how toxic my actions or speech. I’m ashamed to say that I exploited my parent’s unconditional love for a season. I wasn’t selling drugs and sleeping around—my warped fashion sense protected me from even the most intrepid members of the opposite sex—but my growing love of darkness was undeniable, and what I lacked in subtlety I made up for in sincerity.
Even though I’d never mustered the courage to go to a show, I somehow got it into my head that I could and would succeed as a black metal musician. Since I’d shown some aptitude as a singer, I decided to market myself as a lead vocalist. When it comes to black metal, though, we’re using the word singer in the loosest sense of the term. The traditional black metal singer channels their inner hyena to produce a sound that alternately evokes a wailing infant, a violent bout of illness, and the kind of shriek you might associate with an animate gargoyle. Practicing this sound made for some awkward moments when I wasn’t the only person in the house, and it generally necessitated copious amounts of something hot and herbal. I know alcohol is usually associated with rock ’n’ roll, but my choice of genre ensured that I usually had a cup of tea in my pale hands. I looked like I belonged in a library, not a Scandinavian fjord.
Dad persevered through these years, but his patience for my newfound aspiration to make a career of howling into the arctic winds of Norway was wearing thin. For a time he was reduced to writing me letters in an effort to avoid the explosive dynamics of some of our conversations. I’d wake up to find a neatly folded piece of paper slipped under my door like a hotel invoice. Invariably, these letters enjoined me to attack my homework with the same gusto as I attacked imaginary stages. Looking back, I can see that he was just trying to have an adult conversation with a petulant child. My mother, on the other hand, found herself playing the reluctant mediator or referee between the two of us. The family dinner table, formerly a haven of laughter and vibrant conversations, often became a tense battleground of pointed questions, pained side-glances, and adamant throat-slicing gestures. Since our family had never been big on small talk, most neutral conversational escapes were off-limits. An uncomfortable silence prevailed during our meals, and our normally loquacious family of four was reduced to sullen mastication sessions around the table.
One morning before school, I dragged myself into our kitchen for breakfast, only to find Dad seated at the table behind a fortress of books. This was a bad sign; it meant that he’d been up all night thinking. What was the subject of this particular wee-hour intensive study? None of the usual suspects: history, theology, sociology, and philosophy. Oh, no—something far worse. He’d been thinking about my future.
In my teenage years the question of my future was one of the most dangerous topics in our household, and I avoided it like the plague. On this particular morning, my goal was simple: grab a quick breakfast, avoid eye contact, and get the heck out of Dodge. But my efforts proved futile. Dad unfastened his gaze from the book in his hands, looked right at me, and asked, “Son, why do you call yourself a Christian?”
I stiffened as I reached for the toaster strudel in the freezer. “It’s six in the morning, Dad. Do you think we could talk about this later?”
“Oh, that’s just perfect, isn’t it?” he blustered and beat a hasty retreat to the basement library. Ironically, he was the one who’d managed to escape this awkward exchange. I stood by the fridge, filled with rage, frantically trying to eject his question from my mind. The effort probably looked physical.
I could easily flip through my adolescent identity roster and tell you why I called myself a metalhead, a goth, a stoner, a scene kid, or emo—all options that came with easy scripts for a prospective outcast such as myself—but I couldn’t tell you why I called myself a Christian. It’s worth pausing to explain why the answer to this seemingly basic question about a way of life that had comprehensively defined my upbringing and day-to-day existence proved so elusive.
In his monumental work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that one of the defining features of our culture is not necessarily its direct opposition to religion and traditional values but rather its increasing ability to accommodate a plethora of conflicting views by carving out an ever-widening space where they can sit side by side. Total visions of reality are reduced to a set of options. American awards shows are always fascinating examples of this phenomenon. Why is it that so many of our most risqué songwriters continue to “thank God” when they’re handed a trophy for their efforts?
According to Taylor, this roominess in our beliefs is the actual calling card of contemporary secularism.4 Again, if you want a rough picture of what this widening space looks like, think of streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify. All those widely disparate titles. All those possibilities. All those options.
In this vagrant zone, it’s perfectly sensible to mix and match. Electronic musician Tim Hecker offers a striking example of this tendency with his album Love Streams. Though Hecker’s particular brand of mixing and matching involves Christianity, it could just as easily target Hinduism or Satanism. Drawing on everything from classical choral arrangements to cutting-edge studio technology, his stated purpose is to make “pagan music that dances on the ashes of a burnt church.” The album reflects our cultural landscape in microcosm. Disparate elements of the past are scavenged from the wreckage of the Western church, “sculpted” beyond recognition and welded to modern software. The ensuing arrangement is a vast pastiche punctuated by an occasional murmur from a long-forgotten spiritual tradition. It’s the soundtrack of uncertainty, a sonic tour of the restless late-modern mind. Hecker’s audiences may find themselves alternately moved and alarmed, faintly overhearing a brief note of transcendence that is quickly swallowed by the riot of competing noises.5
More than a provocateur, Hecker’s bona fides include eight studio albums—each uniquely experimental—as well as a PhD from McGill University investigating the “cultural history of loud sound from 1880–1930.” He’s no hack.
For Hecker, Christendom is a grab bag of musical accessories. Whether it’s a Gregorian chant or an aria by Josquin des Prez, Hecker is only interested in the atmosphere of the piece. The spiritual heritage is discarded as irrelevant. This mindset allows him to wrench these sacred arrangements from their native context, dissect them in the laboratory of his studio, and market the hybrid as a new product.
Love Streams is indicative of what I call the condition of cultural oblivion—the odd paralysis that grips contemporary people as they try to navigate a culture that has been reduced to a state of pure immanence and that has blurred the boundaries between sacred and profane. By turns sublime and ridiculous, blasphemous and banal, this environment turns people into cultural nomads in a wilderness of disparate imagery. Now the images of Che Guevara and Charles Manson adorn T-shirts. Now the choral arrangements of a devout composer become fodder for Tim Hecker’s musical collages. Now an insecure adolescent reared in a Christian household can earnestly believe that nihilism clad in corpse paint is compatible with the teachings of Christ.6
Living in the Bible Belt only compounded the issue for me. My former homeland of Austria is a largely secular nation that has forgotten its Christian heritage—a place where the stately cathedrals of bygone eras function more like museums than houses of worship, and where the ritual of dragging yourself out of bed and going to church on a Sunday morning is greeted with genuine curiosity.
Terms like secular, atheist, and post-Christian are academic and clinical, and they tend to distance us from the atmosphere of haunting vacancy that punctuates religious sites in postsecular Europe. No one describes this atmosphere better than Philip Larkin in his poem “Church Going.” Larkin finds himself wandering into an old church and surveying its deserted interior. A principled unbeliever, Larkin is confounded by his seemingly unshakeable habit of visiting defunct churches:
What shall we turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.7
There’s a refreshing lack of spiritual ambiguity in post-Christian countries. In this environment a person either is or isn’t a Christian. Nominal Christianity is a husk—not a viable option. The current vogue among many US believers for “liminal spaces”—broad interstitial zones between belief and unbelief—belies the fact that the church, however diminished, still holds a high level of influence in our culture.8 Truly post-Christian cultures don’t offer that same luxury. We haven’t yet reached the time when displaced poets explore our churches like anthropologists doing fieldwork. That day may be on the horizon, but the fact that so many of our churches already resemble warehouses and shopping malls might make it more likely that they’d simply be repurposed as centers of commerce.
Ever since I’d moved to the South, though, I’d discovered that everyone was a Christian, no matter what they said or did. Asking someone about their Christian convictions was simply redundant. At the risk of overstatement, a person could have a voodoo altar in their living room and still lead worship at the local church. This social dynamic was one of the more insidious forms of culture shock I experienced when I crossed the pond from Europe. I’d often sit back and note the wide disparity between a person’s testimony in a Wednesday youth group meeting and the revelations of their weekend escapades on Monday mornings in homeroom. If Stacy could “convert” Brandon and sleep with him (in the same week no less), why couldn’t I offer lip service to Christ on Sunday and extol the virtues of nihilism on Monday?
At this point it should be clear that a simple charge of inconsistency in my worldview, though technically true, largely misses the point. Inconsistency is so deeply woven into the social fabric of contemporary culture that it’s often seen as a virtue—a sign that you’re open-minded, eclectic, tolerant. If Christianity is reduced to nothing more than one among numerous competing options, then drawing from its cultural capital while simultaneously indulging a life of unbridled hedonism is about as inconsistent as mixing ketchup and mustard or Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. Tim Hecker’s inconsistency didn’t stop him from making Love Streams.
All this helps explain why I saw no conflict in importing corpse paint and misanthropy into my Christianity. If I thought of my worldview at all, I probably would have put most of the emphasis on the my part. It’s my life, my view of the world, my Christianity. A person’s possessions may be morbid and unpleasant, but calling them inconsistent is just a category mistake.
Most people don’t see their experience of life as a worldview, and they usually don’t employ its conceptual language when they open up about their deeply held beliefs. What drew me to crude expressions of occultism and scrawny dudes in bad KISS makeup? It wasn’t a worldview; it was a vision, albeit one that matched my lousy fashion sense. As juvenile as black metal can be, in its more inspired moments, it paints a Dionysian picture of wildness and untamed passion that’s both primal and dangerous, and—if you happen to be a skinny third-culture kid nursing the usual cocktail of adolescent hormones—the atonal shrieking and poor man’s Nietzsche of, say, Norwegian black metal band, Gorgoroth,9 can cast a pretty powerful spell.
But this cerebral understanding of human action can be a difficult habit to break. I’ve got a friend who’s fond of worldview maps—questionnaires meant to clarify a person’s major assumptions by assigning them to a corresponding worldview—and in the context of campus ministry he likes to foist these surveys on any student who will give him the time of day. He always comes back saying the same thing: “These people are all over my map! There’s just no consistency.”
It gradually dawned on me that the map was the problem—not the students. Charles Taylor argues that our experience of life is less like a map and more like the deeply ingrained familiarity of our neighborhood. When it comes to the places where we live—the sights, the smells, the sounds—we know them in our very bones; they’re an indelible fixture in our consciousness. But it often happens that we can’t translate this intimate knowledge into the conceptual language of a map.10
Before the advent of Google Maps, many of us faced a common dilemma when people stopped to ask us for directions in the places we knew the best. We could take them to the desired location, but we were powerless to rattle off the necessary street names and distances for them to reach their destination. Another example would be the odd confusion that sets in when I ask my wife to say one of our numerous passwords out loud. We learn very quickly that saying it out loud is not the same as typing it out on a phone or computer, and it often takes a keyboard or a simulated motion to bring the information out into the open air. Paradoxically, there are some things we know too well to articulate. This same dilemma is what was transpiring between my friend and the unsuspecting students. It’s not that they don’t know what they believe but that they know it too well to put it into words.
Taylor employs the term social imaginary to describe this pretheoretical experience of the circumstances of our lives. It’s a very useful way to understand the odd disconnect that takes place when we ask people to translate these experiences into technical terminology. Channeling Augustine, James K. A. Smith argues that “the driving center of human action and behavior is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood, so to speak, without needing to be thought about.”11 While it’s true, for instance, that many college students are default hedonists, precious few of them would describe their spring break exploits with this kind of textbook terminology. As Taylor says, “Humans operated with a social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves.”12 We all know that people don’t go to Miami Beach to theorize. The notion that unrestricted freedom (much of it physical) is the key to ultimate fulfillment is just something that hums along under millions of people’s hoods. Most of them don’t even need to use words; they simply confirm the conviction with their bodies.
Of course, these convictions are frequently at odds with reality. We’ve all had the galling experience of having our cherished misconceptions exposed by reality. We can laugh off the trivial examples involving Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but we move into decidedly more sensitive territory when we read the results of unrestricted freedom on the bathroom scale or when we wake from the stupor of spring break to find ourselves hissing at the conflagration of the morning sun like a scorched vampire. Call to mind those “What You Think You Look Like Versus What You Actually Look Like” memes that dramatize the comic disparity between perception and reality, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of our superficial grasp of our place in the world (or the mirror).13 In theological terms, inhabiting the kingdom of man is second nature to all of us; inhabiting the kingdom of heaven requires fierce devotion and a keen sense of awareness.
Looking back to that kitchen in the Christian household of my adolescence, we might ask, What intimate knowledge precluded a straight answer to my dad? What did I know too well to say out loud? What kingdom did I inhabit? Why did I call myself a Christian?
I called myself a Christian because I knew that Christ was real, and I didn’t have the luxury of an earnest seeker’s doubt. My childhood was circumscribed by what sociologists call “thick religion,” a rich constellation of habits and patterns of behavior that exercised an indelible impact on my whole personality and confirmed for me that Christianity was nothing less than a comprehensive way of life. It was in such a setting and such a household that Christ called me to himself when I was five.
From that day forward the whole quality of my existence was permanently altered. The change itself was quite ineffable, and the best I can do to capture some measure of it in words is to say that, though it’s possible for me to miss the company of others, I never feel truly alone. A feeling of complete loneliness and isolation has been absent from my life since age five. My world is not haunted or vacant like the deserted cathedrals of my childhood; it’s perpetually inhabited. Nothing truly qualifies as wilderness for me. The words of Psalm 139 in this chapter’s epigraph are not some kind of inspirational gloss. They accurately convey my lived experience of God’s unshakeable presence.
At times the Lord’s presence is welcome. A secret joy permeates the rhythms of my day, and I walk around a bit like a person in love. Every song and cloud and sunset is somehow a love letter to me, and Calvin’s statement about the world being a theater of God’s glory seems like something I need to scream from the rooftops—or at the very least post on social media.
At other times, though, the Lord’s presence is downright oppressive, and a deep sense of foreboding characterizes my actions, most of which come down to a form of hiding. Adam and Eve got creative and utilized their surroundings for concealment. Nowadays, we don’t even have to leave the couch: We just fall through the trapdoor of our phones to hide from the Lord. In spiritual terms the word distraction is nearly always shorthand for hiding. It’s why Pascal famously said that most of our problems come down to the fact that we can’t sit quietly for an hour in our rooms (try it).14 It’s why the prophet Jonah tried to drown out his Lord’s voice by getting on the wrong ship and then sleeping through a catastrophic storm until his panicked shipmates insisted that he get back in touch with reality.
My dad’s question opened my eyes to the fact that I was a traitor—that I’d turned my back on the one I knew to be my Lord and Savior. I didn’t inhabit some liminal space between belief and unbelief where I could comfortably recline and serve two masters. In truth the day we recognize that we’ve truly compartmentalized our Christianity is the day we recognize we need to give our lives to Christ. As Austria had already shown me, there’s no such thing as nominal Christianity—Christianity reduced to a social club, an empty tradition, or a fashion statement.
That is, a question never arises in a vacuum. It’s borne out of a multitude of highly personal circumstances. Behind Dad’s question was, of course, a father’s concern for the spiritual well-being of his son. However, there was another question hovering in the background, this one from our Lord. As we’ll see in chapter seven, the apostle Peter’s shortcomings have become a tremendous source of encouragement to me because they poignantly demonstrate God’s grace in the midst of our failures. The question behind Dad’s question was the same one put to Peter by the resurrected Jesus: “Do you love me?” (John 21:15-17). The question of why I called myself a Christian really amounted to, Do I love Jesus? The next three chapters trace the (often painful) story of how I answered our Lord in the affirmative.