About a Fresh Start

It occurred to me recently that I never had a chance to start fresh, on my own terms.

That thought came to me recently when I was listening to an evangelist talk to church leaders about "hastening the coming of Christ" by getting every church member actively involved spreading the gospel to the world.

"Hastening the coming of Christ?" I thought. "Do we really presume to have that kind of control over God's timeline?"

Then I realized that I've heard that phrase before in my life, quite frequently when I was a child. Only now, after not hearing it for some time, did it sound new enough in my ears to question it. And I couldn't remember if it was biblical, or if it came from somewhere else in my religious education.

As I listened to the evangelist continue pounding his point home, I thought of a young man I interviewed when I was doing my dissertation research on third culture kids. He had spent his childhood as the son of Wycliffe Bible translators in the Galapagos Islands. A seemingly well-balanced young man with a cheery personality over the phone, he told me that at one point he drew away from the endless religious services and spiritual vocabulary of his parents. "I just got saturated," he said. "I hadn't chosen this for myself. I was full to overflowing, and I needed a chance to dry out." As a committed Christian adult, he's not unhappy about his upbringing; he just recognizes that he needed to back away, then make his beliefs his own.

I'm not concerned about my beliefs being my own. To some degree I have the freedom to do that, within limits which which I'm comfortable. But I have found myself wishing I could erase all the past religious learning from parents, teachers and pastors and just start fresh.

I'd like to be able to read the Bible for the first time and have those first impressions uninfluenced by anyone else's set of beliefs. I'd like to know what it's like to go in as a "blank slate" and experience the discovery of spiritual things without a context already set up. I'd like to see the things of God for the first time with only Him and me in the equation.

I'll never get that chance, but I wonder: if I'd had a chance to discover God in that way, would I hear His voice better, without a thousand other lifelong voices of God-talk chattering in the background?