was it 2005?

i think it must have been.

when i was six years old, i decided i wanted to get baptized. in the church i grew up in, nobody said "get saved." it just wasn't the way we said it. whether or not i did the deciding is up for debate, as you will see as the story eventually unfolds (i'm still reformed, but it's really hard to tell and i lean toward "i decided" in this case - you'll see why).

this, of course, was not 2005. this was, i think, in very early 1991. so my parents and i talked to the preacher, and i still remember the talk. we discussed "no turning back," and that my life was now headed in a new direction. pretty deep for a six-year-old, but it seemed simple enough to me. of course, i didn't understand the depth of it (i still don't now, and nobody fully does). but it wasn't as simple as i thought.

i was a legalistic child. i mostly did what i was told except for fighting with my brother. i knew right from wrong and by the time i was a teenager i was convinced i was an authority on it. i knew what was expected of me from the words in the Bible, and so that's what i tried to do.

i remember tugs at my heart, crying, thinking there was something more when i was around 13, and again when i was around 15 or 16. i didn't really know what to do about it, but it was incredibly upsetting and i couldn't figure it out, so i just waited for it to "get quiet" and went on like i had been.

one high school graduation, several bad relationships, and a few years of college later, i found myself with low self-esteem, bad habits, and a lot of idols. i remember sobbing on a bench in the communications building to a friend over a stupid boy, going days without really talking to my family, and drowning myself in work and school, among other things.

finishing out the last year of my first degree, i wound up in a history class that i didn't even mean to take. i wanted the second part of western civ, and in my ignorance i took the first. it was a terrible class (the teacher told us that the united states had better never go up against iran or we would lose - i'm not even kidding), but in that class i sat by my cousin, who i didn't know before then except that we were distantly related, and we became very good friends. i remember talking to him about my life, and i'm pretty sure about yet another stupid boy.

he brought me a bible with smiley post-it notes inside marking the verses that he thought would help. it was an orange new testament, pocket-sized.

i'd read the verses before, but unlike before, i hadn't been following my Bible laws to keep me from needing to read those verses. (legalism is like that, you know.) too bad that at that point, i didn't really want to read them, and i didn't think i needed to anyway. i was just going through a normal phase of bad habits and i'd grow out of it and just be a christian again. later.

that was 2005.