Faith, Forever & Discovery

Well, when I was a kid, my neighbors and friends would invite us to church quite frequently. My parents weren’t very open about their faith, they had their beliefs, but they weren’t “Jesus freaks”, and they weren’t Atheist either. But, they let us children find our own way, and encouraged us to seek whatever we desired. My mother was a Buddhist, mind you, but it’s important to realize that she related to Buddha in the same fashion as we do God. Anyway, we would often go to church with a variety of families, so we were exposed to everything. This one church, The Church of Christ(which I know now to be fundamentalist) had a “Joy Bus”, that would pick us up every Sunday. It became a routine for us children to go, and we liked it, as far as a kid can like sitting in worship on a Sunday morning with bright blue skies and sunshine beckoning just outside. Part of the service was junior worship, where children were separated by age, so that they could indoctrinate us with varying levels of cynicism and promise of redemption. One day, in junior worship, they spoke of hell and described the process of damnation in minute detail. From the fire and brimstone, to the lake of fire, and how one’s damned soul would be hung from chains and dipped eternally in the fires of hell, forever repeating the cycle of agony. They spoke of bringing people of other faiths into the fold, to “save” them from this ummm… hell. And this young boy, when asked, was told of my mother’s sin for being from another country, and how she needed to repent her Buddhism and be saved by Christ or she would be, quite simply, damned. I can’t tell you how many nights I prayed to God to save my mother, silently bargaining with him in the early morning hours, to “please, take my soul”, if it would just save my mother’s. And that is how this boy was forever changed about the way he viewed God. It wasn’t the end, but it was a beginning and I have sought the true God ever since.

-Duncan Frenz