The Mystery of Salvation: My Story of Doubt and Faith

I remember the indignation I felt over the miniature potted plant. 

I was eight years old, and it was Sunday School at the big Baptist church on the hill. The fluorescent lights flickered as we squirmed in our metal folding chairs while the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to invite Jesus into our hearts. She reminded us that every head was bowed and every eye was closed because, apparently, this was a secret decision. We peeked behind fingers laced in front of our eyes. 

A brown-haired girl was summoned behind the room divider and reappeared a few minutes later, surrounded by the approving gaze of the teachers. She seemed rather flippant for one who had just done something that required the rest of us to sit so solemnly with every-head-bowed-and-every-eye-closed.

I knew what had happened behind the room divider; the drill was familiar, even with only eight years under my belt. The teacher would have recited a prayer; the girl would have repeated it, and presto: Jesus was now in her heart. 

When the brown-haired girl emerged, she was holding a fake miniature potted plant: a prize, presumably, for raising her hand. Jealously flamed. I loved anything miniature, and I briefly contemplated raising my hand too. Yet I was caught in a conundrum: I had learned that you could only ask Jesus into your heart once, and I had already done so with my mother when I was five years old, right next to the record player that sat under the dining room window. There was nothing I could do to get myself that prize. I wondered, should this decision even warrant a prize? The unfairness planted itself as a memory.

By 12, my faith had grown with my shoe size. In Liberia, I was incubated in an extraordinary community of multicultural Christians. Why wouldn’t I want to align myself with their God? Every night, I sat on my bed and read five chapters of the Bible, framed by the old-fashioned brown-flowered wallpaper in my bedroom. I went straight through until I got bogged down in Isaiah and skipped to the New Testament. I wrote little notes with goals for myself on how to improve in one fruit of the Spirit each month. I cried when I prayed for my unsaved family members. 

I told my Dad I was ready to be baptized. In Liberia, the school gymnasium was also the church, representing the worst of times (P.E.) and the best of times (Psalty musicals). One Sunday, I stood outside that gymnasium while the cover was pulled off of the small concrete baptismal, and I stood in line in the red dust with several others. “Why do you want to be baptized?” the pastor asked me. “So that I can show the world I’m a Christian,” was my confident reply.

But yet, I had doubts. When did I actually become a Christian? I had no dramatic conversion story; I couldn’t remember not believing.  So was my faith legitimate? What else did I need to do? Fear of being Left Behind permeated my generation. How could I be sure I was in?  

As a teenager and back in California, I accompanied my mom on Saturdays to the Bible Club she started in the low-income neighborhood down the street from our church. She taught through a curriculum called Firm Foundations–a chronological series of lessons that told the story of redemption throughout the Bible (which, ironically, was written originally for Stone Age tribes). 

I sat in the ministry apartment with a kid on my lap and two more holding my hands and listened to the lessons that were meant for the children. But each week, something shifted inside me, too: The Bible isn’t just a set of moralistic lessons; it’s one big Story with one big theme – how the world is broken, how God fixed it, and how I need Him. 

My third year in college, I headed to Southern California to join a school that was a perfect fit for me: it had lots of rules (most of them unwritten), and I was excellent at following rules. I had some catching up to do, of course, as I had not been homeschooled and thus was unfamiliar with all the old hymns. I bought CDs and listened to them on repeat until I had them all memorized and could sing them acapella whenever someone decided to break out in song, which seemed to be often. 

I dutifully signed in to chapel on time, three times every week, with my long skirt on, taking notes better than the most spiritual students around me (and singing hymns with my eyes closed). One day, Jerry Bridges was the speaker, and as he spoke, I found myself writing frantically, not to impress the godly boy behind me, but because something within me lit up. Grace, he said, is not just for salvation; it’s for life—every part of life, every day, every good deed, every sin. I would have told you I already knew this, but I didn’t. A weight lifted, and the world suddenly became more beautiful.

I bought all of Jerry Bridges’ books. I started signing my letters with Covered by Grace, Compelled by Love, Amy.

Age 24: ten days after I moved to Tanzania, I had a massive panic attack that turned into a nervous breakdown that turned into an existential crisis that could be boiled down into one Overarching Question: I’ve come to this country to share the gospel, but do I really believe it myself?

Ravenous, I devoured apologetics books. But it wasn’t until our friend Dan handed Gil and me his copy of Total Truth that all the puzzle pieces I’d collected fit together. Firm Foundations made the story of the Bible come together; Total Truth made the Story of Reality come together: a biblical worldview is the one story that makes all the other stories make sense. Some pieces took many more years to click into place, and some still fit uncomfortably, but the picture they created was glorious.

Herein lies the question: At what point in my life did I cross over from death to life (John 5:24)? For many years, I agonized over this question. Somewhere along the way, I became content with the mystery. I am His, and He is mine, and it doesn’t matter when it began. 

Yet that same conclusion is challenged when I consider others I grew up with. Many whose stories overlapped with mine, who asked-Jesus-into-their-hearts (what does that even mean anyway?), who were in line with me in Liberia to be baptized, who listened to Firm Foundations, who sat next to me in college chapel – many of those later chose to reject it all. 

When I think of those I’ve discipled, including (especially) my own children, I find myself feeling a complicated mix of faith and doubt. How can I rejoice in a profession of faith when I’ve seen so many fall away? When do I encourage someone to be baptized, knowing that we live in an age of deconstruction? 

The farmer who sowed the seeds had some stolen away by birds. Others sprouted, robust and healthy, only to be choked by weeds or shriveled by heat. Only time would reveal those that would grow to maturity, producing fruit. Perhaps this is especially true for those of us raised in Christian air, who are raising our children in it too. Only time will tell.

A wise man wrote: He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. We learn the Roman Road and the Wordless Book and the Four Spiritual Laws and we try to simplify something that looks clear on paper but in reality, how do we quantify faith? How do we know if all the necessary elements are present when we are describing something that takes place in the most indefinable part of ourselves? Perhaps faith was never meant to be something that is summarized in one verse or tract or prayer. 

Salvation occurred in one moment two thousand years ago, on a hill outside Jerusalem, on a wooden cross. But it transpired in the context of a much wider, much grander story. Just like my life. 

My baptism in Liberia, 1989

*cross picture in header by Gil Medina in Santa Clarita, CA