So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

- Romans 7:21 – 25

When I was a heathen, I had a lot of opinions regarding God and the universe, most of them steeped in a combination of dogmatic religious tradition and bold, new-age quackery. And by “steeped in a combination of dogmatic religious tradition and bold, new-age quackery,” I mean “crap.”

And by “crap,” I mean “absolute and utter crap.”

Worthy of Berets 

What wasn’t crap, though, and what eventually won me over to Christ, was a conflict I felt within myself, an epic battle that I referred to (often and to whomever would listen) as my “Primal Self versus Spiritual Self.” It’s a pretty sweet title, worthy of berets, little round spectacles, and coffee-shop discussion over large cappuccinos. Whenever I mentioned it people would gasp, speaking of how deep and intellectual I was, of how one day I would start a Movement. To this day those people will not accept a glass of Kool-Aid from me.

The thing is, to me it wasn’t just a snappy title; I could feel the warring factions within me, could feel that I had a spirit which rebelled against the glands, fluids, and other icky processes that made the primal so dominant in what Paul refers to as the “members of my body.”

I could think of a hundred one-liners at this point, but for all our sakes I shall refrain.

My spirit would rebel, but the primal would kick it to the curb every time as it took over and caused me to once again do something stupid.

One Melon Short of a Jeep

In my Christ-less ignorance I struggled; with my homemade theology and a logic fashioned of duct tape and chewing gum (add a guava melon and I can MacGuyver you a Jeep), I fought to just maintain a passing cosmic grade. I figured that if I could manage to let the spirit win, say, fifty-one percent of the time I was more good than evil, and if I was more good than evil I  would win.

Win what? Seventy virgins? Large tracts of land? A new car? I had no idea, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because fifty-one percent spirituality is not attainable, at least not for me.

It’s a sad thing to look back on those times when my spirit, crushed beneath the weight of my primal self, would scream in frustration, cry out in anguish, only to be answered by the silence of a homemade god. At the time I didn’t recognize the silence for what it was, so I poured more and more effort into attaining that mystical fifty-one percent and thereby earning entry into heaven. Or paradise. Or the reincarnated body of something that was by its nature not a cockroach.

And my spirit kept screaming.

How Pleasant, They Say

I’m grateful now that my spirit never fell silent because its grief fuelled my determination. Its pain nurtured me as I sought the magic bullet, the method by which I could assure myself a fifty-one percent result. It led me ultimately to a pastor, a gilt-edged book, and a very real God with a very real dedication to making my life into something useful.

People ask me what it’s like being a Christian, how my life changed as I came up from under the blessed water in the blessed dunk tank and declared myself off the heathen market. They ask me how it feels to have found my magic bullet. They’ve read the articles on the web and seen stories on TV about how lives are changed with that one, simple declaration of faith. Some have even tried that declaration themselves; maybe they’ve read the little ad in the classifieds that tells you to just say this simple prayer, or bowed their heads in the unfamiliar (or all too familiar) confines of a church building, only to open their eyes and discover that the world is still the same old cesspool it was a minute ago and worse, they’re still the same sinful, lusting schmuck they’ve been all their lives. They tell me how nice it is that the Christian thing actually worked for me. How pleasant, they say.

Pleasant?

Gland-Ectomy

I tell them how much I wish my life had become “pleasant,” how I wish I’d been hit with a magic bullet and that haloes and wings had fallen from heaven and attached themselves to my skinny self. I tell them of the illusions I’d harboured about the process and how I’d hoped, once I opened my eyes after praying so earnestly, that Christ would instantly come and excise the primal from my body in some cosmic gland-ectomy.

My spirit still screams, and I still wish the primal would go away and die. In fact, the frustration is worse now because my mind has a crystal clear picture not only of what’s right, but why right is right. I’ve learned that being good doesn’t make you a Christian, but that being a real Christian makes you good. I’ve learned that as long as I treat everyone around me with respect and that as long as I love God with sincerity, the rest all falls into place and I can become the person I’ve always wanted so badly to be.

This is all crystal clear to me, and yet the primal still wins. Daily.

Magic Bullet

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered there really is a magic bullet, and it’s this: God saw it all coming. Every time the primal wins, I fall back on this fact and realize that my actions were not a surprise. When the f-bomb escapes my lips, God does not lean over to Gabriel and whisper “did Nik just say what I think he said?” When I imbibe overmuch of my father-in-law’s homemade wine (Keith, you have to either remove some of the taste or some of the alcohol), God does not cry out “why, Nik, why? Gabriel, this guy is hopeless!” The magic bullet is that God knows I’m a screw-up and that every time I make a mistake it’s a surprise only to me. And to the poor people who happened to be there.

My earthly Dad would give his life for me, would forgive me anything, and I take comfort from his love as well as confidence from the fact that regardless of what I’ve done in my life, I’ll always be his son. Why then would I not feel confident in belonging to God, who did give his life for me in order that I’ll be forgiven anything?

I’ve had to accept the primal’s domination of the scorecard and the fact that, in spite of my faith, in spite of my love for Christ, it’s unlikely that I’ll reach fifty-one percent in my time on this rock. But I’ve also come to know that my time here is nothing, absolutely nothing when measured against the expanse that is the eternity to which only my spirit has an invitation.

When I realized that grace is what matters and that my fifty-one percent was as irrelevant as my former home-brew theology, I threw away the scorecard. My spirit still cried out, but this time it wasn’t to a homemade God. This time the cry was heard. This time the cry was answered.

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