ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

I get nervous whenever I’m asked to share my testimony of why I am a Christian. I get especially nervous when I’m asked to do this in meetings where other Christians will be giving their testimonies as the worry sets in that my testimony will be nowhere near as moving as theirs. The story of how I came to believe in Jesus Christ is rather bland and difficult to craft into a compelling narrative, and on top of that, sometimes I’m not even sure that I like the way I initially came to be a Christian. Do I really have to share that with people over and over again?

If you’re bored enough to click on this post, you leave me with no choice but to subject you to it.

Growing Up in Alaska, Growing up Irreligious

I did not grow up in a religious home. If you had asked my parents about it, they’d have told you they were Christians who had accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior, my father hailing from Baptist stock and my mother from Nazarene. They even had me baptized at the Nazarene church as an infant at the request of my maternal grandfather. However, throughout my childhood, my own immediate family never went to church, read the Bible, prayed together, or talked about God or Jesus Christ. I guess you could say we were cultural Protestants.

I spent the first ten years of my life in Alaska, the second of five children in a military family, inhabiting a three-bedroom duplex in a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Anchorage. Dad was an engineer on C-130s (and later C-141s) while Mom babysat and ran a paper route for extra money. I participated in Girl Scouts, which meant selling cookies in the freezing snow. I dodged the moose that made their way out of the forest across from our home and I argued with my friends about which Ninja Turtle would win in a fight (it’s Donatello, btw). I went sledding at neighborhood snow hills and sustained a couple of minor head injuries from flipping my sled after going too fast on icy slopes. My teachers put me in the district’s gifted program when I was in fourth grade, but honestly? The lessons were hard and I felt like the dumbest “gifted” kid in the class. Besides, I couldn’t have been that gifted if I couldn’t figure out that fast sleds + icy hills = pain.

What I didn’t get growing up in Alaska was time with extended family. Our income was too modest for a family of seven to be making regular trips to “the lower 48,” as we called it, so my family life in Alaska was rather insular. That all changed in the summer of 1992 when we relocated to McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington, with an aunt and uncle living a mere half hour away from us and more family in nearby Oregon. Eventually I would live two houses away from my aunt’s family with her three children practically functioning as my siblings on top of the ones I already had.

The thing that was really going to change my life though? My aunt and uncle were both devout evangelical Christians who regularly attended their local Church of the Nazarene. And if there’s anything that makes us evangelical, it’s our zeal to share the faith.