I got an email from a friend who reads the blog; we knew each other about twelve years ago and have barely been in touch the past nine years. She asked about my journey. What has transpired in the past decade? How did I get from there to here, spiritually speaking? And that made me think. Some of my Marion peeps and my Clemson comrades, and my Anderson amigos may be wonderin’, “Who in the world is she?” And some of you who are just getting to know me may be thinkin’, “Who is this spaz who doesn’t know how to use her air conditioner?” My blabbering probably won’t lend any insight into that question, but I would love to kinda share my journey from there to here…

Once upon a time, there was me and I was the only child of my parents’ marriage. They divorced when I was four; my dad remarried pretty quickly and mom did the same four years later (I’m not giving you a sob story here; there’s just some background I need to share). They both went on to have other children, and I found myself with two families, four siblings, and four sets of grandparents. Divorce is ugly and contentious, no doubt about that. My mom and I lived on a puny budget, but she was (and is) the bomb! Both of my parents tried to love me to pieces to make up for their choice, but I look back on my childhood as a painful one – for far greater reasons than the divorce. Couple with that dozens of harsh negative church experiences at the hands of extended family members, and you have a little person with no use for God. And you don’t undo that very easily…

And so it was as a thirteen year-old that I first heard that God loved me at Centrifuge youth camp at North Greenville College. I went for the boys. I went because of my friends. I went for a week away from home, but I left having made a new Acquaintance (and snagged a new boyfriend from Dothan, Alabama).

But the ten years after that were rocky for me and Him. In fact, I am the picture in the Illustrated Bible for Matthew 13:5-6. In my case, the Seed fell on the rocky places; “it sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.” My claim to Christ was not rooted in faith. There was a lot of heart stuff going on (emotions) and a lot of head stuff going on (I began to attend discipleship classes), but there was no root. So when life as a teen and a college student got wild, so did I. I had enough of Jesus to keep me out of hell, but that was absolutely it…

To be continued (hopefully tomorrow)…