Life was different in so many ways in 1990. The Berlin Wall had just come down, serious weight training and bodybuilding were central to life for me, it was the year I was married first time round, phones had cords, car stereos had tape decks (very few had CD players), and my favourite football team hadn’t yet won any of its four premierships.
I was a mechanical tradesperson working on the heaviest of mining trucks. I enjoyed that rough and tumble working environment, often working overtime, afternoon and night shift. Life back then was free and easy, but without much money, and a night’s entertainment was a VHS movie at home, curled up on the lounge, with a bottle of Diet Coke to share.
Wanting to be married at a particular church meant approaching the pastor and asking.
We were not Christian but wanted a church wedding. The pastor was a very warm and friendly man. He agreed to marry us, and he got to work arranging for us to complete a detailed survey (on paper) that would help him provide us pre-marital education. It was February.
We meet with the pastor regularly and had marriage counselling; oh, and we lived together across the road, about a cricket ball’s throw from the church.
Yes, we were all very well aware that we were living together out of wedlock. The fact that the pastor said nothing about this back in 1990 is astounding. I guess he was more interested in serving us than potentially being seen as judging us or interrupting the process of us coming to faith — which we did!
We came to faith in preparing to marry.
I’m sure we’re not the only ones, but it’s bizarre to me that at Rivervale Church of Christ we discerned no pressure to comply with church ‘rules’, only loving community.
Yet, to be truthful, I was not looking for community. I didn’t quite understand why Christians would live without excitement in their lives. Back then I didn’t want to give up the many things I still enjoyed that were not Christian.
For 13 years I remained in the twilight zone between true faith and the ways of the world. I kept drinking alcohol, and indeed I drank more consistently as time went on, smoked cigarettes and cannabis occasionally, used anabolic steroids, swore a lot, and generally neither had the desire to follow God nor did I have the power to do it. (I have found there’s a direct correlation between these two; desire to follow God bequeaths the power to do so with the experience of joy.)
I understand there are many people who claim faith in Christ but have not as yet been able to fully give over their lives to his service.
I understand it because that was my life for the first nearly 13 years.
I understand that feeling of not quite getting it even though you don’t know you don’t get it.
All you know is the joy and delight in others who genuinely follow Christ isn’t yet yours. It’s mystifying and tantalising.
And I understand why Christians can suffer from addiction and other maladies they hate. I’d be a hypocrite to judge anyone with my track record.
But when you do finally get it — and for me, I had to be absolutely broken to get there — it’s like night versus day. When I first reached out in complete surrender before God, it had to be because I literally had nothing left. I’d lost my wife, home, and easy access to my children. I even had to change jobs. And I thank God that I suffered that lonely aloneness for month after month for about 35 months before my life was retracked into my second marriage.
30 years since baptism, but only 17 years of fully following Jesus’ teaching and being fully surrendered before him. I’m thankful now for both periods because they show me how polar opposite Christian faith can truly be, and how much a subtle distance it is between initial belief and committed discipleship.
Most of all at this time, I’m thankful for Pastor Barry Thygesen, who was the pastor who discipled me to even a semblance of true faith back then. The seed was sown, I agreed to be baptised, and there we were going through the waters of baptism way back on Sunday December 16, 1990. God knew I would eventually get it.
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