Hide and Seek

This is an essay I wrote for my writing class!

As a child, I was fascinated by the game, “Hide and Seek”. Whether hiding or seeking, I was brilliant. Now that I’m older I wonder if parts of who I am are hidden, and if other parts of me must become the seeker.
Luke Skywalker, when he found his calling to be a Jedi, could look back and see that his calling was with him from the very beginning when he was shooting swamp rats with unusual accuracy. When Frodo Baggins found that he was the ring bearer of the One Ring, he could look back and see that he was destined for adventure from the very beginning when he day dreamed of having his own adventures like uncle Bilbo had. Harry Potter, when he found out that he was a wizard, could look back and see that he was something special when strange and magical things would happen when he got emotional. So, it isn’t uncommon for characters to go looking them selfs. Often when looking, one will search in unlikely places. Once found, one will see that one’s true self was there from the very beginning.
In 2006, I went on a journey to find myself. Growing up in the conservative Baptist Church, I wanted to know if I could continue living as a “Christian” or if all this time I was attending, practicing, and aligning my life with the Christian faith because my family, church and friends said that I must. In order to discover whether or not a relationship with the creator of the universe was possible in my life, two of my friends and I devised a plan to go to Australia on a missions trip with a group called Youth With A Mission (YWAM). For me, if I didn’t experience something real, something not of me, something divine on this trip, I believed that I would never be able to experience this supernatural relationship.
In Christian circles, this idea of discovering a relationship with Jesus that has nothing to do with friends or family, is called “owning your faith”. I think that anyone who confesses any kind of faith in anything should take time to own it. In my opinion the greatest fault in any organized religion, is a lack of personal ownership.
In an attempt at personal ownership and also in a young, rebellious action I got a series of religious tattoos. Hoping that if I owned a relationship with Jesus outwardly on my skin I would own the relationship inwardly as well. At the time I had five tattoos. They were all inspired by a series of dreams were I survived a horrible catastrophe, like a car crash or a mugging, with no harm but a few scratches and scars that formed words and images that are now the tattoos that I have. The first was on my back and in Greek was written the phrase “weapon of God”. The second was on my left wrist and in hebrew was written “man of valor”. The third was on my right wrist and in Hebrew was written “salvation” with a small Gothic cross underneath it. The fourth was on my left ear and was a cross, and the fifth was behind my right ear and in Hebrew was written “still small voice”. The last one comes from a story about a prophet of God that searched for God in all these different places, but only found Him when he quieted his own mind and waited on God to find the prophet. And God did. God spoke to him in a still small voice.
The money spent on the tattoos didn’t help to pay for the trip to Australia, but in four months, my two friends and I raised the sixty-five hundred dollars for the three of us to spend four months in Australia. “Miraculous,” some people called it. At the time I called it good fortune and generous church goers.
If people who do things because of a claim to religion did that thing because of a personal devotion to the religion rather than for personal gain, then we would have eliminated the majority of causes for global conflict. Thoughts like this and others flashed through my mind as I sat on the cramped airplane headed to Australia. Our flight left LA in the evening on the sixteenth of April. After a seventeen hour, direct, red eye flight to Sydney, we landed in the evening on the sixteenth of April! Sort of like going back in time.
From the moment we landed I was eager to commence with finding myself. The next few months seemed to me like an over-used movie transition. I was praying and seeking God every morning, still not convinced that I had found Him. I was helping to lead a youth team on Saturdays that kept juvenile delinquents out of trouble by playing different sports with them every week; from squash to cricket and rugby to ultimate frisbee. Still, no God. I was going to a mall every Thursday to tell anyone who would listen about how great having a relationship with Jesus was. Although I wasn’t talking from personal experience. I was also working in a skate shop that the youth organization owned to help provide funding for the ministries that they offered, such as the Saturday youth program. And I was singing and worshiping with the rest of the people that I was living with on the ministry’s base.
About three months in, everything happened. If I were to continue with the movie analogy, this is when the music would have faded and instead of flashing scenes of different things happening to me, the camera would have focused on a scene of me sitting in a room.
The room is big. It is frequently used to throw concerts, which makes it odd that there is blue carpet on the floor. There are a few white pillars with peeling paint supporting the roof, and two large windows overlooking a second story view of downtown Newcastle. I am sitting on the floor, cross legged, with twenty-two other people, who, like me, are listening to a speaker tell us what we already know. She, the speaker, is saying how Jesus’ death and resurrection is what makes it possible for us to speak to God. She is saying that God is incapable of being in the presence of sin. Holy means, set apart. Complete holiness means that if God and sin were to be in the same space the sin would burn up to nothing until only what is pure remains. That is why it is impossible to speak to God, because every word is sprung from a tongue that would wither to nothingness in His presence. That is also why I cannot hear God speak, because to hear His holy words would melt my ears to oblivion. But Jesus, being God’s son, being holy, became a man, took my sin upon Himself and put it to death with Himself. In that act, Jesus gives me His rightness. He gives me His own spirit, so that I may communicate with Him, and Jesus can be the mediator between me and God, between sin and holiness.
The speaker goes on to say that God is often called our Father. What kind of father wouldn’t want to speak or to hear from their children? A good question. She tells us all to find a spot in the room to be alone. She says pray to God, through Jesus. That’s why when I pray I say, “in Jesus name, amen” I think to my self. Then she says to wait for God to speak to you. So I do. I go to a spot by myself and kneel down and pray. I say something like, “God, when I was little, I asked Jesus into my life. That’s supposed to make me Your son. So if you really are my Father then you should want to talk to me because I want to hear you! I’m going to lay here,” at this point I laid prostrate on the blue carpet, “until you speak to me.” The carpet smelled like tennis shoes. Not new tennis shoes but well used ones, but not like feet. It wasn’t unpleasant. My eyes were closed, and though I knew that people around the room were talking to each other and praying, I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything but my own breathing which was surprisingly deep and full, though a bit uneven. I could feel the carpet under me, it was hard and uncomfortable, like an indoor putting green. I waited for some time, but also maybe no time. Time was irrelevant. Then the sharp, salty sting that I know so well came to the corner of my eyes. “God, why won’t you speak to me? I just want to know what you, my Father, thinks of me!” The carpet vanished, I smelt and felt nothing but the warm tears flowing down my face, “If you won’t speak to me, how am I supposed to know that I am even Your son?” I wasn’t laying on the floor; the floor was gone. I wasn’t floating either. I was again waiting in silence, being as still as possible so I wouldn’t miss a single whispered syllable that was something other than my sobs.
I wouldn’t describe them as words, or even as thoughts. They weren’t images, nor were they a general impression. They were all of those, and none of them. They were something like a way of communication that is beyond me, and yet, I was familiar with them. I was being asked a question, “What have I written on your body?” I was shocked. Was this a dream? Should I respond or do I wait for more. Is this rhetorical? Suddenly I remembered the speaker from before talking about how I shouldn’t put God in a box and expect Him to speak to me on my terms, or in my preferred way. So I responded, “Nothing...?”
“Why do you have the tattoos that you have?”
“Youthful rebelliousness?”
“I want so badly to tell you what I think of you. I inspired the desire to get the tattoos that you have so you can always look and see what I think about you. What do they say?”
I looked at my right wrist, then at my left. “They say, salvation and man of valor.”
“You have received Me, and so you are My son, and not just that, but also a mighty man of valor. What else?”
I remembered my back, “weapon of God.”
“I intend to work through you to spread hope, love and peace; all of which I have given you.” The carpet materialized underneath me. The smell of tennis shoes seemed a little more pleasant. I knew what God thought of me, and had truly experienced Him! I began to see, almost at once, God’s activity in my life since before I had a life. The way my parents raised me in the church, protecting me from life damaging sin and teaching me how to live a moral life. Sixty-five hundred dollars in four months! My small home church wasn’t that rich, but my father, He “owns the cattle on a million hills.” (Psalms fifty)
The flight home reminded me of an adventure that had just begun. Like Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, and Harry Potter, I knew what and who I was. I didn’t know exactly how that would play out, but I could put a name to all the things that happened around me. I could see now, that this is what I always was: A son of God, a man of valor, a servant and weapon in God’s kingdom.