Part 3 of the Without Sin series. See Part 1 here. | Home

Hitting God’s Jackpot.

Over the course of the next two days, I wrote.

I ate little.

I slept little.

I wrote so much.

I spent the better part of those two days in my booth. I left occasionally to do something or other but returned as soon as I could. That booth was my sanctuary and my office. I could study there because there was enough caffeine and distraction to keep my chronically understimulated mind stimulated enough to think clearly. Also, we could smoke inside, a bonus at the time.

I wrestled with the questions, “If God is love, and love is what motivates God’s relationship to creation, why does our understanding of salvation not look like love?”

“If salvation is the beginning of our relationship with God, why do we name God’s ultimate plan for salvation the ‘end times’?”

Less literally than Paul in Acts 9, I felt like scales fell from my eyes when I realized my biggest problem with the whole idea of salvation is the fact that Americanized Christianity spins a false narrative that it’s really still up to me, captive or not.

“It’s like God gave us all a winning lottery ticket,” folks would say. “All you have to do is cash it to hit God’s jackpot.”

Growing up in the South, I heard people tell me all the time that I need to decide for Jesus or I’m not saved. I have to accept God’s grace and Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior, and I go to hell if I don’t. The question is so obvious now, but it opened my eyes then — if it’s really my decision that brings my salvation, is it really God saving me?

How is this not still just reformulation of salvation through works righteousness since it seems like I’m really still saving myself?”

As I look back, I realize what I was writing at the Waffle House was the result of deep reflection that really began when I was sixteen years old.

Help Me Jesus.

I stood with my friend Spence in his back yard, and he said from what felt like kind of out of nowhere, “Do you know if you’re saved?”

Spence was uncharacteristically guileless, which unnerved me. He always had an angle, but this time his angle was sincerity because he was recently baptized as a Southern Baptist.

Good Lutheran that I was even then, I responded, “saved from what?”

“Hell.”

“Oh.”

“You have to be baptized.”

“I got baptized when I was a baby, so I’m good.”

“No, that doesn’t count. You have to choose it. You have to want it. You have to accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior or else it doesn’t count.”

I was starting to get a little frustrated, “I go to church like every Sunday. I got confirmed. I go to youth group and church camp. I pray every night” — a small exaggeration. “How am I not accepting Jesus?”

I told you I’m a good Lutheran.

“You have to know where you’re going to go.”

“When?”

“When you die.”

I didn’t even know where I was going the rest of that day, so I deflected. “Well do you know the seven last words of Jesus on the cross?”

“Noooo … ?”

“Into your hands, I commend my spirit.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It means I know the Bible better than you.”

So there.

“Well knowing what Jesus said on the cross doesn’t stop hell. Nothing stops hell but Jesus.”

Whoever said “hell is other people” must’ve had this conversation too because it didn’t stop there.

In fact, I swear it’s still going on in some alternate reality where we’re both rail thin with three foot beards and mothers who went hoarse long ago calling us for dinner.

I got what he was saying, that there has to be something intentional about our faith, or else all those prayers are just empty words. Faith is more than words, more than actions, more than consenting to believe something.

Faith is living out this mystery that is life, remaining open every day to the possibilities of God. Openness isn’t passive. It’s active — and despite that I don’t believe that my will is salvific in the slightest, there is a sense of choosing to remain open to the possibilities of God that whatever it is exists beyond us has any interest in us whatsoever.

What I lacked back then was the next thirty-odd years of my life, but even now, I feel the same keen edge of conviction that there’s something to this need for response, even if it was coming from the most Southern of Baptist denominations.

When that conversation finally ended, I was left wondering how we could both worship the same Jesus and God, yet my belief would land me in hell.

As I wrote, I started remembering that this isn’t even where and when that internal upheaval began.

I remembered Mom-Mom.