 The year was 1975, and I remember it well. It was a year of highs and lows, a year of sadness, a year of victory. Wilfred Laurier had just been assassinated, and we spent the evenings huddled around the radio listening to reports of the turmoil in Ottawa. My father had just purchased a gramophone and talking picture box, and when we weren’t listening to Kurt Cobain singles, we were marveling at the audacity of those Australian astronauts as they performed their first walk on the sultry surface of Venus. Their words will always ring within the recesses of my brain – “One small step for man, one giant leap for our kangaroo here.
Okay, the fact is, I can’t even remember what happened last week, let alone what went on back in ’75. But there are some events you never forget, and for me one of the most significant of those happened in that year. I was a boisterous eight-year-old, and I had just taken yet another less-than-glamorous tumble off the swings at my school. As I landed in a cloud of grass and debris, narrowly missing my best friend Jamie, I uttered some words I’d often heard adults use. They were three simple words that started with “oh my” and ended with the name of a particular Saviour whose name sometimes starts with ‘G’. I don’t remember the exact look on Jamie’s face, but I know it wasn’t pleasant. See, Jamie was a Christian. Jamie was, at that moment, an unimpressed Christian. Jamie was an unimpressed Christian who began a tirade the likes of which amazed me. I’d never known the kid to hold on to a subject for longer than five seconds, and here he was dumping on me with such conviction that I couldn’t just kick him in the ankle and get on with my day. Plus, he had me by the collar and it was all I could do just to dodge the spittle.
Okay, it wasn’t as bad as all that, but Jamie had piqued my curiosity, and we spent many recesses and lunch hours just talking about God and Moses, Abraham and David, Peter and… uh, the other Peter. What an exciting story, I thought! And it was all true! I mean, Jamie said it was true, and I’d never known him to lie. Those days in ’75 stuck with me, and I always maintained what I would call a cordial friendship with God, a dialogue that was sometimes argumentative, sometimes curious, but always loving.
Unfortunately, the household in which I was raised wasn’t a worshipful one, unless you count my father’s bellowed prayers every time Tiger Williams got the puck. I never really opened up to God, praying only to apologize for the less than noble things I’d done each day. This meant I prayed often, but not so much for the right reasons. Back then, I had very little knowledge of Jesus; I knew who he was, and I knew what had been done to him, but I really didn’t know the reasons for his amazing sacrifice. I figured that if you sinned, you were on the hook, and there was some sort of cosmic balance sheet at the end of your life where your good had better outweigh the bad, or you’re eating brimstone on rye and playing racquetball with Beelzebub. So I prayed for forgiveness and sacrificed my best goat each year, hoping my Creator would be pleased.
Okay, I'm lying about the goat thing. The SPCA and I have an… understanding.
In any case, I prayed, and I worried, and I prayed some more. Every day I found problems in my habits and behaviour, actions I shouldn’t have taken, actions which couldn’t be reversed. It became a barrier between myself and God, a barrier of guilt which at times was insurmountable. God was there, I could feel Him, but I would never have the audacity to ask him about Himself, His work, His plans for me. After all, what was I to this deity, this supreme being, the creator of Earth and life itself? Who was I to make demands? Wasn’t it enough that he’d breathed life into me and given me this cool planet to live on?
I won’t bore you with the details of my life, like the time I spent as an Antarctican krill harvester or my years as puppet master to the King of Barbados. Suffice it to say that, though I drifted once in a while and spent some time away from God, he never left my side. I always felt him there, and though what I felt was love, I didn’t feel I was all that deserving of it.
I could have coasted like that forever, kind of like I’m doing in this testimony. But you know, I met a girl… no, a woman, who, like myself, was of a spiritual bent and had far more questions than answers. The difference between us was that I’d grown complacent with my version of God, whereas she was more proactive. She joined a church called HMCC, and came home with all sorts of stories, mostly about Shirley’s kindness and Jason’s odd behaviour. One Mother’s Day, I decided to suppress my usual reservations about “organized” religion and attend HMCC for her sake. Upon discovering that the last thing you guys are is organized, I decided to keep coming. I learned more from Mark in a few weeks than I’d discovered in all my years of self-education, and came closer to God with every trip to this school gymnasium. Over time, I learned about the importance of this guy called Jesus, and that the sacrifice he made so many years ago had little to do with circumstance and everything to do with atonement, forgiveness, and the absolution of sin for all generations. I’ve learned that he’s got a plan for all of us, and that each of us has a purpose. I’ve grown through Him and through this church, and am discovering things about myself that I had no idea existed. For instance, apparently I have a sense of humour, and if I try really hard I can get through almost an entire day without saying something offensive.
I could go on forever, but I won’t, because you’re all looking restless. Let me just finish by saying that without my wife, and without HMCC, my spiritual growth would have remained a non-entity. I owe much to this church and the family I’ve come to know here, and I can’t think of a better bunch of people before whom to proclaim my love for and acceptance of Jesus Christ.
- Nik's Baptismal Testimony, November 2003
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Not fiction 
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