Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.-Psalm 127:5

 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.-Deuteronomy-6:6-7         

 “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.”- John 12:40

 I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there.–Psalm139:7-8

 

At the Tender Age of Six

It was when I was six years old
At a church in my hometown,
That the pastor gave an altar call
To help the lost be found.
He asked us to come forward,
So our lives might be redeemed.
I didn’t think that I was lost
But wasn’t sure what that could mean.
But he said I would talk to Jesus
Invite Him to come live in my heart;
He said Jesus would change everything
Give my life a brand new start.
Well, I knew I could talk to Jesus
I’d done it many times before.
This redeeming thing seemed easy
A talk with Jesus, nothing more.
I was actually quite excited.
Was expecting to have fun.
So I ran headlong down that aisle
As I smiled at everyone.
I heard the pastor say that Jesus
Was going to save us all from sin.
He would redeem our lives for God
Once we invited Him to come in.
So I prayed the words after the pastor
I asked Jesus to fill my heart.
And I waited with anticipation
For my brand new life to start.
When I felt absolutely nothing,
I opened up just one eye.
Peered around the altar,
Felt panic start to rise.
For I understood what had just happened,
And prayed it didn’t show.
That when I asked Jesus into my heart
He had answered by saying NO!
That’s the day when at six years old,
I began to feel the need to hide.
The day I became convinced
That God and religion were a lie.
For it was the only answer
That could save me from the conflict
Of my rejection by Jesus Christ
At the tender age of six
©Linda Troxell  07/31/2017

 

The Bible speaks lovingly about children and makes it clear that they are gifts to be cherished and nurtured. Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him.-Psalm 127:5. It tells us that they are the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and that the Lord Himself teaches them His ways. All your children will be taught by the Lord and great will be their peace.-Isaiah 54:13. We are told that it is our responsibility to teach our children about God and His love and His commands, in everything we do. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.Deuteronomy-6:6-7. But the Bible gives us no command to verify that our children understand what we teach them. Nor does it give us directions about how to find out what they’re thinking or what’s in their hearts and minds.

It’s easy to think of children simply as miniature adults, to assume that when we talk to them and when we teach them they understand our communication; what we mean as well as what we say. Therefore, we don’t often think to explain the things we say to them or even better, ask questions to find out how they received what we said. Likewise, we seldom think to sit down with our children to just chat with them about the events of their day to see if there is anything about their world of which they are unsure. We just naturally assume that they will ask questions about what they don’t understand.

But children are not miniature adults. Their brains do not work the same way as an adult brain. Children’s brains are not yet fully developed; their thinking is concrete because they are not yet capable of abstract reasoning. Consequently, children take all communication literally making metaphors, analogies, fables and the like pointless. Children rarely think to ask questions because they are used to not understanding much of their world, what they hear as well as what they experience. Instead, they use their limited experience to attempt to figure out what they don’t understand. And what they can’t figure out they ask an older friend or sibling to explain. So, you can see how important it is to help our children to make sense of their world and to determine that what we are saying to them is what they are hearing. Continuing to assume that a child’s mind works the same way as an adult’s mind will not only lead to confusion for the child, but it can lead to terror with life-long consequences. Let me give you an example.

Some of you might remember or may have read about the Cuban missile crisis which took place over a period of 13 days in October of 1962. The basic story is that the Soviets, tired of feeling vulnerable to the number of American nuclear weapons trained on them from the US military bases in Europe, staged armed missiles in Cuba just 90 miles from the US shore. In response, President Kennedy formed a naval blockade around Cuba. For 13 days the American public was on pins and needles. The terror of a nuclear disaster dominated the evening news, and the country was urged to prepare for war. I was 9 years old when this happened and I was terrified.

As I watched nightly news reports, I didn’t fully understand, with my father, I was filled with anxiety. As my mom stocked our cupboards with dozens and dozens of can goods I felt a fear I didn’t quite understand. At school, we practiced daily safety drills. In case of attack we were to crawl under our desks; this, evidently, would protect us from a nuclear bomb. Somehow, that seemed unlikely to me, but I didn’t say so. For many of those 13 nights, and for years beyond, I had nightmares in which I was separated from my family during an unidentified disaster and couldn’t get back to them. Still, I didn’t tell anyone and I didn’t ask questions. Nor did anyone explain the situation to me or even think to find out what I knew or what I felt about the frightening things happening around me. In Isaiah 66:15 we are told that God will comfort us as mothers comfort their children. But in 1962, as the country was on the brink of nuclear war, mothers weren’t comforting their children. They weren’t even aware they were in need of comfort.

I believe that event in 1962 had a profound effect on my development and informed the way I would interpret the world for many years to come. However, as frightening as that period of time was, it came 3 years after an event so traumatizing that it robbed me of my faith in God, a faith that surely would have mitigated the terror of those 13 days in October. Given the fact that no one talked to me about pending war in 1962, it probably won’t surprise you that 3 years earlier, when I was six years old, no one thought to talk to me about why Jesus had rejected me.   The thought of Jesus rejecting a child is probably unthinkable to you. But when I was only 6 years old He rejected me.

It happened on a normal Sunday morning in 1959. I went to church that morning with my grandma. For some reason, I didn’t go to Sunday school but was in the sanctuary with the adults. I remember very little of the sermon until the end. At the end of the sermon, the pastor gave an altar call. I heard him say that anyone who wanted to ask Jesus to come into their life to and live in their heart should come forward. Well, in a flash I was up and ready. I was a shy child, but, as shy as I was, I wasn’t afraid to walk down the aisle to talk with my friend Jesus. Because when I was done He would live in my heart with me forever; I would never be alone again. I wasn’t frightened because I spoke to Jesus every night. So, bravely, I ran down the aisle, reached the front and waited excitedly.

The pastor told us that he would say a prayer and we would repeat it after him and that was all it took. So, I bowed my head, closed my eyes and in my very loudest voice I repeated the prayer after the pastor and I waited for Jesus to come into my heart. But nothing happened. Nothing changed. I felt nothing. Until finally, I began to feel the most suffocating shame I had felt in all of my six short years. Because suddenly I was aware that Jesus wasn’t coming to live in my heart. I could only think that it was because I was too evil. I cannot explain to you what it felt like for me, as such a little girl, to believe that I was so bad and so unacceptable that Jesus refused to live in my heart. I walked back up the aisle as if everything was fine. I was devastated but I was not about to share that kind of shame with my grandma. I could not risk seeing her love disappear when she found o I was evil. I vowed right then that when asked I would tell no one what had happened. But no one ever asked.

No one had thought to prepare me, a 6-year-old, for this very serious and sacred sacrament. No one had thought to explain to me what would, or more importantly, what probably would not happen. And no one thought to discuss the experience with me once it was over. So, I was left alone at that young age to try to understand and bear the shame of what I perceived as the rejection of God. I think you can guess the outcome of this event. At that young age, I was not able to tolerate the pain and the shame of that kind of rejection. So, instead, I came to the only conclusion that would allow me to mitigate the shame. I decided that God and religion were lies. I began to believe that there really was no God who loved me unconditionally and no Jesus that loved me so much he died on the cross for me. I began to believe there was no baby Jesus in the manger, no wise men with gifts, no ark full of animals, nothing. It was all lies.

There was plenty of support for me over the next 40 years as I gathered evidence to support the belief that religion was a lie. Of course over those years the memory of that alter call dimmed. I didn’t so much forget the incident as stopped associating it with my disbelief. But it was always there in the back of my head niggling and fueling my need for Christianity to be a lie, a story made up for money, or for power. I needed to believe that organized religion was, as Karl Marx proclaimed, the opium of the masses. I needed for it to be anything but true. Because, if it was true, then I was so defective that the God of love who longs to win the hearts of all people, had rejected me. Fortunately, as hard as I tried, I was unable to completely give up on “God” and I continued seeking.

Eventually, I settled on my own mixture of different traditions and beliefs. I certainly believed in God, but not the Trinity. I even believed in Jesus as the son of God; but not as divine himself. I believed Jesus was really no different than you or I, save for the fact that He knew how to use His power and we didn’t yet know how to use ours. In my mind, I guess I kind of demoted Jesus from being God’s equal and elevated man to being Jesus’ equal. In that way, I could tolerate the rejection. After all, if Jesus wasn’t divine, it wasn’t as if God Himself had rejected me. I convinced myself that the Bible was not literal but a metaphor, which is crazy because I never read the Bible. I didn’t believe that Jesus had really been raised from the dead, I thought that was a metaphor as well. I created a faith that suited my need to believe I was not alone in the universe but at that the same time insulated me from the shame of being, “not good enough” for God. Because, at the core of all that I chose to believe was a big ball of resentment for Jesus and his rejection of that poor little girl who had believed in him.

For most of those years, I was unaware of the resentment. I didn’t associate my rejection of Christianity with the experience of Christ rejecting me. I barely thought of that experience through the years. But it was working on my subconscious as I thought of Jesus as God’s favorite child who came to earth to make the rest of us look bad. I used to make a joke that I had a sibling rivalry with Jesus. I thought it was a joke, however, the enemy was very serious about using it to keep me from God. “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.”- John 12:40. The enemy had certainly hardened my heart and blinded my eyes to the love, the compassion, and the grace of God. I saw Him instead as cold, harsh and judgmental, spying on me to catch me in sin so He could give me another black check mark in my evaluation. And I lived with a crippling fear of death because even though I said I didn’t believe in hell or the devil, decided they were only metaphors as well, deep in my heart I knew if I didn’t get back to Jesus before I died, I was going to Hell.

On the outside, one would never have known I had this resentment, this fear, or this unhappiness weighing me down. My life was still successful. I was a good mother and I had a successful career; but I also had crippling anxiety, suffered from periodic depression, and eventually, panic attacks. “For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I have need of nothing,’ not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.”-Revelation 3:17. Still, I didn’t think these things had anything to do with not having God in my life. For the most part, I was too busy to think about it at all. But, as hard as I tried, I could not get away from God. He continued to pursue me even though I was through with Him. As David put it: I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there.–Psalm139:7-8

 And then came the day God decided enough was enough; He wanted my attention and so He arranged for my whole world fall apart so He could have it. I had been stubborn and I had resisted but, of course, I was no match for God. And I am very grateful I wasn’t. Because God was so persistent I got another chance to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. And this time, because I knew that there need not be anything dramatic happen at the moment that I was saved to make it valid, I was not disappointed, confused or shamed when there actually was no dramatic moment. Now I get to live the last part of my life in a beautiful relationship with my maker. I get to walk hand and hand with Him through the challenges that this part of my life holds. I’m sad that I missed walking with Him in the first half of my life, but I’ve come to terms with it. However, I would hate to see it happen to anyone else.

Often, as Christians, in our enthusiasm for the dramatic difference Jesus makes in our lives, we describe our experiences in a way that can cause misunderstandings and can lead to disappointment, even devastation. Being reborn into the family of God is a joyful occasion for all Christians and we all like to tell of our experience. I have heard rebirth and the moment of receiving the Holy Spirit presented as earth-shaking events in which everything changes at that moment. I’ve heard it described as a feeling of being consumed with joy, or of having one’s whole body shake. For some, it felt like their heart actually swelled with gratitude, or they were filled with love and warmth, and so on. But I think for many of us, perhaps most of us, although being reborn and receiving the Holy Spirit changes our entire lives, sometimes in very dramatic ways, at that moment there is no discernable difference in the way we feel. And if there is, generally it is something more subtle than the earth-shaking; perhaps a simple feeling of peace or well-being. It can be dangerous to describe these moments as so dramatic without adding the caveat that this is not always the case. And without emphasizing that the experience is just as valid when there is no discernable difference at that moment.

For most people who make the decision to become Christians as adults, the decision to give their lives to Jesus comes after a significant amount of pain and or shame. Usually, their lives are not working for them. Maybe they have lost all of their significant relationships; perhaps they have ruined their lives with addictions. At the very least, they are probably very unhappy when they first turn to Jesus. They are reaching out in the hopes that God can make their lives whole. If they believe there should be an earth-shaking, sky-splitting, dove landing event when they accept Jesus as their Savior and instead there is nothing or only a subtle peace, there is a danger that they will feel disappointed. Or worse, feel shame and rejection. And we, who know better, are not likely to get the opportunity to tell them differently after the fact.

No, they won’t’ tell us. Because someone who feels as if they have just had one more failure because they heard no music or saw no fireworks when they were saved, might be feeling unworthy and rejected. This person is not likely to share their shame with others. So we will never be given the chance to explain that the experience is different for everyone. Instead, they are more likely to react as I did as a six-year-old. They are likely to keep the shame to themselves and wonder what is so wrong with them that even the one who is love cannot love them. Remember, when adults first turn their lives over to the Lord they are usually very vulnerable, often truly damaged, and sometimes desperate. They cannot tolerate one more failure. So let those of us who are more experienced Christians support these new Christians through the process making sure they have a positive experience by discussing the entire process with them, beginning to end, as we welcome them into the family of God.

 

Points for Prayer and Pondering

 Have you heard the stories from people who had a very dramatic experience when they were reborn? What are some of the things you heard? If you are saved were you expecting the same when you were saved?

If you are saved what was your experience when you were first saved? Was it earth-shaking, did you feel different in the moment? Or did you feel no difference in the moment?

Have you, or do you know someone who felt that they failed or that they were not really saved because there was no dramatic difference when they accepted the Lord? What did you tell yourself or the person?