“If you died today, do you know you’d go to Heaven?” the bold young woman asked me as she held out a tract. I was one of hundreds of college students jostling our way through the narrow passageway on our way to class. Two young missionaries had placed themselves directly in our path and asked the question repeatedly while handing out as many tracts as students were willing to take.
How annoying. I accepted the tract, but made no effort to hide my displeasure. “That’s a personal decision,” I shot back. Undaunted, she warned, “Don’t put off the decision too long.”
End of conversation; on to the next class. I don’t recall what the tract said, or if I even bothered to read it. But the words, “Don’t put off the decision too long,” lingered like a mosquito. Long after I should have forgotten the brief encounter, the stranger’s words returned to whine in my ear.
I wasn’t ignorant of Jesus Christ and his gift of salvation to the world. I just didn’t see that the gift was also a personal one for me. I didn’t know that I was a sinner needing his forgiveness. As the daughter of an Episcopal rector, I had been exposed to long passages of the Bible, and had attended Church with some regularity. My father prayed for me and with me. But my parents’ divorce, my father’s death, and a fire that destroyed our home, pushed my mother away from church and the help we could have received there. She isolated herself from God, and I joined her in that isolation. She was emotionally unstable, trying to process her traumatic past without any guidance. I remember a disturbing dream from age five or six, in which my mother was unable to drive our car, so I was forced to drive. Years later as a college student, making decisions for myself was no longer scary, but felt like freedom. Allowing God back into the picture wasn’t particularly appealing. Besides, there were many roads to God, weren’t there? Surely I was driving down one of them.
The next three years of “freedom” left me lonely and empty. I had friends, a teaching job, and a boyfriend who cared about me. Why did I feel lonely? What was missing?
One humid, summer afternoon in 1990, I found out what was missing. After slamming down the phone on my mother in a typically angry conversation, suddenly my perspective changed. For the first time, I could see that I lacked the ability to change that relationship, or any relationship. I was powerless to change my life in any meaningful way. I lay sobbing on my bedroom floor, keenly aware of my own pathetic state. And Someone was helping me to see it. Someone was with me in the room, full of pity, full of compassion. I felt the gentle words, “You seem to be at a dead end. Are you ready to let me drive?”
I was ready. It was time to make the decision. I had not put it off too long. God knew just the right time. Just as the unsettling dream suggested, my mother was unable to drive the car of her life. I had tried, but I also was unable to drive the car of my life. But God was able -and willing- to drive for me. Not only was He able to forgive my sin, but He wanted to be at the center of my life. And that was when true freedom began.
Gervais Baptist
