Mining Grace

This is the third edition in this series on how I came to be a man who sings in church.  You can still catch up on part 1 and part 2.

Last post left me an unconverted Episcopalian high school student.  The most terrifying moment of the first day of school was always the first five minutes of the lunch hour.  It is at that moment a crucial, life altering decision must be made–which lunch table to sit at.  Only the social pariah changes to a different table after day one.

With this monumental choice before me I entered the lunch room on the first day of my sophmore year.  By the grace of God I sat down with a group that I knew from various classes.  Like me, most of my new lunch time friends were on the cooler end of the nerd scale.  Unlike me, they were Christians who were involved in a ministry to High School students called Young Life.  Not far into the new school year I had accepted an invitation to one of these Young Life meetings.

I became a regular attender to Young Life–meetings that bordered between Christian worship and silly-string wars.  It was over these first few months of my sophmore year that I became a true believer in Jesus Christ.  I cannot pinpoint a certain day or moment at which it happened.  Nevertheless I began to understand rightly the guilt of my sin, the offer of Jesus Christ to pay for that sin, and the faith to receive this salvation through the Holy Spirit.

I was now a Christian.  I had something to sing about.  How could I not sing?  Jesus rescued my soul out of the trash heap that had become my life.  He was altogether amazing to me.  Words spoken would not do.  I had to sing.  And sing I did.

In addition to other things, Young Life meetings were places for singing the praises of God.  Not only that, the guys there sang just as loudly as the girls.  There were even songs that had guy and girl parts–shocking to my Episcopalian upbringing but altogether exciting to my new life in Christ.

There was only one confusing part.  We also sang other songs–like Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl minus the troublesome third verse. You see, Young Life was an outreach.  The thought was that if you could get a kid to sing Van Morrison they might be more comfortable with singing about Jesus.  Without commenting on the validity of that method, I can say that my earliest memories of Christian worship were interwoven with Van and his mocha-eyed girlfriend.

The worship of Jesus Christ got implicitly connected to vapid fluff during those formative days of my Christian adolescence.  This was not all Young Life’s fault.  I knew enough about the gospel to know that I was saved but nowhere near enough to fuel my desire to worship Jesus.  I was converted, ignorant, and untrained in the Bible.  I knew that my sins were paid for at the cross but I had no idea how deeply profound that Roman cross had changed my life.

I now had salvation to sing about I just didn’t know all that much about what that salvation actually was.  This produced true but shallow singing in me as I ministry-hoped on into college.

I still remember when I used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da…