My Journey of Faith: Part Two

Let me preface this section by saying that this leg of my spiritual journey was a desert, and despite their role in making it so, I love my family dearly and have long since forgiven them. Nevertheless, to adequately tell this story, all things here must be included.

My adolescent life could be described accurately as tumultuous.

My parents divorced when I was nine, and I had six addresses in a span of seven years. My mother behaved as if she saw her divorce as a casting off of the shackles that bound her to her former mundane roles as stay-at-home mother and housewife. In many ways it was, and she wasted no time bringing around a new boyfriend that would, a handful of years later, become my step-father.

The newfound freedom my mother enjoyed did not include a lot of child-friendly fun. She and my future step-father would go out together, sometimes all night, sometimes without leaving my brothers or me a clue of where they were or when they'd return, and often they would return drunk, yelling at each other, yelling at us. This was what we grew accustomed to over a span of seven years. If my parents' divorce had put in me a suspicion of authority, the next seven years continued to erode what trust was left in me.

There were at least two bright points that are crucial, however, to the rest of this story, and I'll mention them both at once.

The first crucial item is that my step-father is Catholic. He has not always been the best witness to the faith (have any of us?), but he is a mass-going Catholic, nevertheless, and because of this, I attended Mass sporadically during my teenage years.

The second crucial item is a conversation that I had with my mother, one day when I was fourteen. I don't remember the whole context, but I remember standing in the entrance to the kitchen, as my mother sat at the kitchen table, drinking either diet coke or sweet tea, and her saying to me, "Jake, I've raised you and taught you what I believe, now your salvation is your responsibility."

This mini, personal, pseudo-confirmation ritual had a great impact on me. I often wonder if, because my brothers did not get the same release, it somehow gave them greater reason to rebel against faith. From then on, however, my salvation was mine to "work out with fear and trembling."

It was also at this time that conversations about religion and faith began to take place among my friends at school, and I remember first articulating what amounted to doctrinal differences with my peers when it came to the question of the "Perseverance of the Saints," or, as they would have put it, "Once Saved, Always Saved." I rejected this, though, among my friends at this point, mine was a minority view.

The very general faith I possessed was slowly becoming more specific, but I did not attend services regularly, I did not read the Bible often, nor did I identify myself as any specific type of Christian. I merely prayed, as I always had, in the same, conversational manner, thanking God for what was given, asking for blessings and protection of loved ones, sending messages to deceased loved ones, telling him that I loved him.

Meanwhile, at home, my parents spiraled deeper into alcoholism, and while we had ignored for so long the mental damage that we were made to suffer, when the clear and obvious threat of physical harm not only presented itself but was actualized, we left. On 30 November 1999, after returning from a school function, my brothers and I grabbed our things, and left. My father's house was a safe haven - one we'd initially rejected because of the relationship one forms with a stay-at-home mother, then later one we rejected because of our established friends and school, but one we weren't going dismiss any longer.

Each night for months forward, on the hide-a-bed in my father's basement, I fell asleep crying and praying into my pillow desperate and anguished pleas for help and mercy for my brothers and myself. When I remember those nights, I can feel the tightness in my jaw, the sting in my eyes, and the cool sheets in between my tightly clenched fingers as I sobbed my petitions and wondered in between them why we had to hurt so much.

This crisis stripped from me every familiar support. Despite being safe and loved in my father's house, I felt forsaken. If God was going to answer me, it was going to be in a manner that would be new, and therefore visible.

More to come.