I am as it were, a born again Christian.  In my case the realization came following years and years of feeling that the Church was nothing more than a system of control.  I find it odd now on reflection that those thoughts paired so neatly with the years of my life that were “self” focused.

A rebellion of the spirit if you will, a driving force to go out and make a name — prove what I could do in the form of jobs, possessions and self approval.  In short, the years when I thought I knew everything.

At first when I made my way away from the Church, and I say Church because at the time I really did not have a personal relationship with Jesus.  Religion was the Church, and the Church was God.  The Bible was no more than a fictional teaching tool of the church.  Something not to be believed as real.

All this may seem surprising giving my upbringing in Catholic grade and high school, the tragic flaw of the experience was that what could have been a spirit filling experience, turned out to be spirit draining.  And by the end of school, I had had enough of religion.

And at that moment, religion was locked away in my heart as nothing more than a bad experience.  Life would throw me a number of curve balls such as the death of my mother, and countless failed attempts to get pregnant with my wife.  All of which made the occasional thought of God even more bleak.

It would take a book of fiction, to bring me back to God.  Fiction.  My wife had picked up a copy of “Left Behind” at a community swap event.  She thought I might like it, so I started to read it.  The problem was, I could not put it down.

I read it, devoured it would be a better word.  It got me thinking about God again, little wisps of questions in my head, little flickers of thought that maybe I was wrong about God.  My subconscious quickly pushed these away.  So I started to read the second book.

And more thoughts surfaced.  I resisted.  I read the third book.  Still more thoughts, it was becoming harder to deny them.  I read the fourth book and… could not deny it, the calling resounded inside me, I tried to fight it but it was like a baby trying to fend off a prize fighter.  Finally I broke down and with tears in my eyes I asked for his (Christ’s) forgiveness and acknowledged his sacrifice.

At that moment, I was born again into Christ.  They say that being born again has different effects of different people.  Those who have never experienced religion or God are sometimes overwhelmed having never been filled in such a way before.  Others like myself, felt a comfort of having come home like a prodigal son.

I was filled with a sense of fear.  Fear of God, and fear of my friends and family.  I feared God because I for the first time had a realization of what Revelations foretells.  The Bible had taken on a whole new level of importance to me, and the dismissing thoughts of it being something other than divinely inspired were gone.  I had to get my life in order, I had to repent, and change the way I lived my life and looked at things.

And fear of what my friends and family would think of this conversion back to God.  I’ll make no bones about it, I made my lack of faith public over the years.  If you were to ask my friends if I was religious they would laugh at the thought.  My fear was that I would be seen as insincere, and would be mocked.

I gradually got over this feeling, and grew in my resolve to my faith.  But quickly found that this new-found understand brought with it new-found challenges and difficulties I had never before understood.  Sin had been a physical thing, you do something bad, you sin.

When taken into the context that sin begins in the heart, thoughts become sin outside of the physical realm.  Much harder to contain, much harder to avoid.  You would think that following this conversion that I would sin no more.  I tried, I really did.  But it failed as it was bound to from the beginning.

We cannot help sinning.  Its in our nature, we are flawed in this most important way.  I have committed sins, big and small, and have felt that forgiveness could not be had again.  To say I am ashamed of these failings is an understatement.  I would like to think that they served a purpose, that they helped me refine my faith through failure, if that makes any sense at all.

Where I find myself now is at a point where I have to consider the Church.  More importantly, which Church I belong to.  I was baptized a Catholic, raised and confirmed a Catholic.  Yet I belong to the Methodist Church.  But where does my heart reside?

For a long time I thought my days as a Catholic were over, that I was done being Catholic.  And yet in my heart I feel like I am still Catholic.  I became a Methodist largely because my wife wanted to be Methodist, her Mother is Methodist, and the Methodist orthodoxy is a bit more relaxed than that of the Roman Catholic Church.

I have never really felt like I understood what a Methodist is, I have not studied the doctrine.  I don’t have it ingrained in me yet.  I think what I need to do is study.  Study what it means to be a Methodist, study what it means to be a Catholic, even study what it means to be Episcopal (we have good friends who are Episcopal and have done a number of study courses).

Church is important, being part of a community is something that we need as Christians.  It provides a medium for learning and sharing of faith with the community.  Where will I end up?  Catholic? Methodist? Other?  I really can’t answer yet.  It will be something I will pray about that is for sure.