Up until the age of 11, my exposure to church was very mixed. My mom was from a catholic background, my Dad grew up as the son of a bi-vocational Wesleyan preacher who worked on repairing vehicles more than he repaired the heart. Our family went to church on Easter, Christmas, and the odd Sunday or camp meeting visit to support my grandfather. Church for me during that time didn’t make a strong impression. I just remember a long time spent in a hard wooden pew, trying to sit still enough to avoid prompting my Mom or Dad to tell me to calm down.

During that time, we built a home in a new neighborhood, and the builder–was a bivocational pastor who helped my Mom to get serious about her faith, leading to her baptism and nightly devotions at bedtime for us for a season. I remember the short season of engagement in her life, and my older brother’s subsequent baptism. The devotional books: Daily Bread and Keys to Life were very good stories to me, and I kept them and read them on my own after our nightly tradition stopped.

It was at the age of 11 that these spiritual seeds finally sprouted for the first time. Leading up to Easter Sunday, I had gotten into more trouble than usual and I vividly remember tossing a shoe at the wall of my room after I was sent there to await my father’s return from work. Then on Easter, hearing about Jesus on the cross, the preacher explained our need to ask Jesus to save us. I left the service convicted, certain of what I must do. Our church didn’t do alter calls or walk people through a sinner’s prayer, so I simply found a private spot in the garage after we arrived home to “ask Jesus into my heart” as I often heard it called then.

What I know for certain is that God really intervened in my life that day. I felt a newfound passion for God, for the Bible, and for church. I would even ask every week if we were going to church, sometimes waking my parents to do so, in order to stay more connected. Armed with my comic book Children’s Bible, the devotional books, and a spiral notepad, I would have a nightly conversation with God at bedtime on paper, reading and writing my thoughts down.

I didn’t really have anyone to share my new connection with Christ with, aside from Him, but it spurred a desire for holiness in my life and created in me a strong private desire to honor Him in everything.

It also fueled my involvement in Bible quizzing for a few years, where I did build some Christian relationships with peers and memorize a lot of Bible verses and facts. However, none of the facts or verses really got connected to practical living and all the community I built at church was unconnected to my school and sports involvement, so I ended up with two entirely different worlds of friends to live in.