ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

What does it mean for us as Christians when the method originally used to bring us into the fold would never work on us if someone tried the same technique today?

Having an aunt and an uncle and cousins living so near to me was an entirely new experience for me. I loved my aunt from the start. She was intelligent and assertive and we had a connection from the beginning quite unlike anything that I had in my immediate family. I was fascinated by the way my aunt and uncle ran their household. They actually did things like assigning chores and disciplining kids for not finishing them, in contrast to my family, where I couldn’t get my parents to issue and maintain assigned chores if I’d paid them. Does it sound bizarre that I actually wanted parents who would give me chores and make me stick to them? I guess you could say that I’ve always been a little envious of houses of order even though I’ve never belonged to one. I was initially terrified of my uncle and the way he would yell at his children when he was angry with them, but I eventually learned that he was quietly affectionate beneath the harsh exterior and his bark was worse than his bite.

I don’t remember how it came about that my aunt asked me if I’d accepted Jesus as my Savior, but my answer (“Um . . . I think so”) apparently did not satisfy her. The truth was, I had no idea what she meant. So she asked me to come back into her bedroom with her, and I followed her, and it was there that she shared the Gospel with me. She told me that, when Jesus Christ was dying on the cross, he could see two thousand years into the future and see me. That he was thinking about me and doing it for me. I prayed to make him my Savior that day.

I have little doubt that my aunt meant well in doing what she did, and the thing about my aunt is, she did not just convert me. She continued to disciple me and guide me in faith, and she has always been there for me in the eighteen years that I’ve known her. She has seen me through my troubled teenage years, my time at BYU, my marriage, my near-divorce, the birth of my daughter and the death of my mother. She supported me again last year as I made the decision to return to graduate school and move my family from Washington state to Illinois. I could never ask for a better spiritual mentor and friend.

Looking back on that day though, I question it. I know that I was sincere and I meant every word that I prayed, but I was only ten years old, I knew next to nothing about God and religion, and I trusted my aunt. I think I would have believed anything that she told me that day in that room. What if she had been LDS? Would I have come out of that room with a testimony of Joseph Smith as a prophet? Or what if she had been Jewish, and her sermon that day had been a brief discussion of the one true God of Israel and how the Trinitarian deity of my Protestant parents was at odd with the Torah’s teachings on monotheism? One could even very well question what right she had to teach her niece about her religion without the consent of my parents.

However questionable the experience may seem to me years later, the prayer I said in that room was the start of my Christian faith. Interestingly enough, although she was related to me by marriage to my father’s brother and had no connection to my maternal grandfather, my aunt was a devout member of the local Church of the Nazarene—the same denomination that my grandfather had had me baptized into as a baby. He had passed away when I was two so that I never knew him. Is it possible that my aunt’s intervention and guidance in my life was the parting gift of a dead man, the realization of a wish he had made when he committed me to the Christian community as a baby but could not stick around to fulfill himself?

I’d like to think so.