I can’t remember any time of my life that I wasn’t exposed to daily, Scriptural Christian instruction. Constantly my parents, new believers in the early Nineties, taught their children of the glories of God, the cross of Christ, and the marvelous truths of the Holy Scriptures. Beyond just words, they lived it out both at home and away.

I owe much to this early teaching, which our Lord continues to use in my life, but the earliest beginnings of His work of grace in my soul date to age seven. At that time the Lord first began to awaken my soul to my need of Him. One of my clearest memories of childhood is of climbing into my bedroom windowsill and truly praying (not just ‘saying my prayers’) for the first time. I don’t recall what I said or what prompted it, but I remember something of the feeling that was in my heart as I sought the Lord in my childish way.

I believe that many children raised in Christian homes experience such early spiritual awakening. Sadly, too often premature encouragement in the church to ‘make a decision’, get baptised, and move on kills it before it has a chance to take root. This was certainly the case with me. At Vacation Bible School the next summer (1996 at age eight for you precise date-obsessed people . . . or is that just me?), the pastor of the little First Baptist Church we were attending issued an invitation to those children who were ready to ‘get saved’. Already my sound home teaching made me unsure about that (I distinctly remember sitting in the pew, praying something like, ‘Lord, if I’m already saved, don’t let me go up!’). But in the end, I followed the other children to the pastor’s office, where he led us through the sinner’s prayer and told us we were now saved. Though my parents were less enthusiastic than I expected them to be at the news I brought home (though they avoided being overly discouraging, their attitude was one of carefulness and caution), I was relieved to ‘have that out of the way’ and be assured that I wouldn’t go to hell, I was duly baptised a few months later.

For the next few years I continued the most complacent of little sinners. I concentrated on being a good little homeschooler and a good little Sunday schooler, though I was annoyed that the more inconveniencing of my pet sins didn’t vanish with no effort on my part—wasn’t that part of the deal? I read my Bible (focusing on the parts I liked), prayed when I thought I needed something, and was a proud regular church attender (of course, the last part wasn’t up to me). If I had doubts of my salvation, I simply pretended they weren’t there. An odd memory that comes to mind is my resolution at age ten to ‘start listening to the sermon’. I was looking for a new way to clean up my life and become a better Christian, and that seemed both virtuous and fairly painless.

In 1998 when I was ten the first shaking of my secure little house on the sand occurred. My family made our largest physical move ever, and my parents took advantage of it to leave behind the theologically poor church environments we had been in since their conversion. We joined a little Reformed Baptist church that was much more in line with their beliefs in doctrine and orthopraxy. For me, this new alliance between what I heard at church and what my dear parents taught at home had the effect of making me suddenly nervous about the state of my soul. It began to be a bit harder to quell these new doubts with false assurance—especially when Daddy asked me to give my testimony before joining the church.

Part II

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