Shane Claiborne is one of my most ‘favorite-ist’ authors.  In his book, The Irresistible Revolution, he tells the story of one of his experiences as a youth leader at church, “One of the high school students who had ‘given his life to Jesus’ got busted only a few weeks later for having acid in school.  I remember asking in disappointment, ‘What happened, bro? What went wrong?’ He just shrugged his shoulder and said, ‘I got bored.’  Bored?  God forgive us for all those we have lost because we made the gospel boring.  I am convinced that if we lose kids to the culture of drugs and materialism, of violence and war, it’s because we don’t dare them, not because we don’t entertain them.  It’s because we make the gospel too easy, not because we make it too difficult.” 

    

And I think to myself, “Isn’t that so true?”  Like some of you, I grew up in the Church and I remember the exciting time when I “gave my life to Christ” in the summer before 8th grade.  Now I love my church - it’s where I met Jesus and received tons of love and it’s where a lot of the foundations of my faith were laid down.  But there was so much emphasis on becoming a ”believer” or accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, that I missed out on what it meant to “follow” Jesus.  I mean I understood that becoming Christian means “giving your life” to Christ, but what I didn’t know is what happens after you give your life to Him.  The cross had become a place to drop my sins off, to lay down addictions, to putt off my “old self.”  The cross was safe and it vended out “cheap grace.”   

   

By the time I came to NYU, I think it’s safe to say that I had abandoned my faith.  It’s not that I didn’t truly believe in God or that I didn’t pray to Him. Christianity was stale.  To me, what ”walking” with God really meant practically was going to church on Sundays, not drinking and keeping your pants on.  And I was doing two out of the three, kind of.  But God was onto me. 

   

[to be continued...]