Born Into a Faith I Didn't Choose.

Every one of us begins life inside a story we did not choose. 

Before we ask questions, before we form beliefs of our own, we inherit a version of faith. It is the faith that shaped the air in our homes, the faith that quietly formed how we see the world, and what we believe about God, life, and eternity. 

In this deeply personal story, I revisit the faith of my childhood, a faith shaped by a constant awareness of heaven and hell, obedience and judgment, and the terrifying possibility that the world could end at any moment. 

As a child, I believed that even small moments, going to the circus, dancing at school, or forgetting to confess a mistake, could determine whether I would be saved or left behind. 

Over time I began to realize something profound. 

Fear had slowly replaced good news. 

This episode explores the difference between inherited faith and living faith, and how curiosity often becomes the doorway through which faith begins to grow. 

Because sometimes the most important spiritual moment in a person’s life is not when they stop believing, but when they begin asking questions. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, welcome to Where My Stories Live. This is a threshold, the place where memory meets imagination. Some stories begin with something we choose. Others begin with something we were given, and this one is one of those stories. It's a story about what we all unknowingly receive. Inherited faith. The faith you were raised in, the faith that shaped the air in your home, the faith that you didn't really choose, but one that quietly formed the atmosphere of your childhood and influenced how you understand life, the world, and what may lie beyond it. Now, sometimes people say to me, you know, I didn't grow up with faith, but I'm not sure that is ever really true. Because even the belief that there is no God, cosmic power, whatever you believe, that the world is only nature and chance, and that there is nothing beyond what we see, that too becomes some kind of faith. Because every home carries a story about the world means, and children breed that story in long before they ever question it. Now, inherited faith is powerful like this. It shapes the way we see, it shapes what we fear, shapes what we expect from the world, and it shapes where we think the boundaries of life are drawn, and it shapes us long before we even realize it. Now, my story, it begins inside a very peculiar kind of faith, a very serious faith, a sincere faith, a faith that had deep, deep, deep reverence for God. But the thing that stood above everything else in my memory of faith was the constant awareness of heaven and hell. Hinwood was a great hope. Hell was the great terror, and somewhere between those two was the fragile space where we lived our lives. You see, the world we were told could end at any given moment. Jesus could return at any time to the earth. And at that moment arrive. And if you're doing anything wrong, if you had not told God about what you did wrong, you will be left behind, which means being cast into a bit of fire forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. The language for this in theology is eschatology, the study of the end of the world. End times. But as a child, you don't hear theological words, you hear stories. Stories from ancient scriptures, stories that sound something like this, and was quoted from the ancient verse in that black black book, the Bible. Two will be on, will be standing at the well, one will be taken, and one will be left behind. Two people will be lying on a bed. One will be taken, one left behind. Taken was a good thing. We understood. That means escaping hell and going to heaven. Left behind was not good. Not good at all. Even as a child, we were often reminded what hell was fire, torment, weeping, grinding of teeth, where worms did not die. I really never understood the worm thing, but they had me with fire, torment, weeping, and grinding of teeth. These were not distant metaphors to us, they were very real possibilities, you see, because the way to heaven, as it was explained to us, was absolute obedience to all the rules and the laws in that book that no one questioned. There were another two verses often quoted in our home from that ancient book. A friend of the world is an enemy of God, and do not love the things of this world, because if you do, the love of God cannot live in you. In our household, that phrase had a very practical meaning. It meant we did not make friends with people outside of our own little church. They were considered the world. We did not visit their homes, they did not visit ours, because life was not about friendship, life was about heaven and hell in my little heart. Looking back now, I realize how unusual that world was. But when you grow up inside something, it does not feel unusual. It feels normal, it feels like the only way the world has ever worked. I remember being in second grade. Our teacher asked us to write a short essay on the circus. All the children started to write. I did not. I raised my hand and I said to her, I've never been to the circus. So she came to me and with curiosity, she said, Why? I said, because I don't want to go to hell. I remember another occasion where the whole grade gathered to do like oak dancing, the square dancing. And I was sitting on the sideline, crossing my arms in holy defiance. So I thought the teacher came over, she says, Come on, come join us. It's so much fun. And I said something that now sounds almost unbelievable, even ridiculous. I said, I will not dance because if Jesus comes, while I'm dancing, I will be left behind and go to hell. It sounds strange, but for a child formed inside that world, it was simply survival logic. There is a strange faith develop there is a stage in faith development. Let me rather phrase it this way. Theologian James Fowler calls this first stage mythical literal. In that stage where faith is young in its development, people take every word exactly as it appears in ancient writing. Not considering the context, the historical distance, no interpretation, every sentence becomes law. And when a child lives inside that kind of literal faith, something begins to happen. In my case, it slowly shaped my relationship to the world around me. Because I had never really been around other children relationally. I didn't know how normal friendships work. I didn't know how ordinary conversations unfolded. I've never watched people in casual interactions. It created a strange kind of social distance in my life. Later in life, it left me isolated and lonely, and I chalked it up to, they rejected Jesus, that's why they rejected me. Not so. I had to learn the basics of human interaction and conversation skills in my early 30s. But there was something else too, something much deeper, much sadder. Every night I went to bed as a kid, I was afraid, not just a little afraid, very afraid, petrified. On my wall was a poster, and that poster was quoted out of the book of Matthew that says, The thief will come at a moment you least expect it. That refers to something called the rapture, the second coming of Jesus. In the twinkling of an eye, he will come, and those who obeyed the rules 100% will go, and those who didn't will stay behind. And every night I would lie there think, What if tonight is the night? What if Jesus returned while I'm asleep? What if I forgot to admit something I did wrong? I confess things I didn't even do, so I developed this ritual out of paralyzing fear. I would pray this prayer again and again and again and again and again and again. You know how this prayer went? It went like this. I am a child so, so small. Cleanse my heart so so deep so that nobody lives in there but Jesus alone. I would not pray it once, but over and over again, driven by fear until eventually exhaustion took over and I fell asleep. Looking back now, I realized something so, so important. Fear had slowly replaced the good news that Jesus brought, the message that had overshadowed that message of undeserving grace and the love of God. The gospel, the good news had become something I had to survive. Rather, that something that came to rescue me. And yet, I want to say something carefully here. This is not a story of accusation and criticizing the faith I inherited by my amazing parents. Because you see, the truth is this every generation receives something. Faith is always handed down through culture and time. What we receive is shaped by the questions people ask and live in. But the real journey of faith begins later. It begins when curiosity awakes, because inherited faith is not the same as living faith. Inherited faith is made of assumptions, conclusions that we have never personally tested out, interpretations that we never examined. And sometimes the deepest spiritual moment in a person's life is when curiosity finally grows a voice. When we begin to ask questions, not because we want to abandon faith, but because we want faith to breathe in us and become alive in us. Faith that cannot ask questions is a sign that we are not ready for faith to become alive. So over time I've discovered understanding God is not like solving math. It is more like trying to paint a bird in flight. Every time you think, you know what it looks like, it moves. God is mysterious. God is alive, God is loving. There are far more things about God I don't understand and things I do not know. But that's much thing I've come to know. God is personal, patient, loving, and God is not threatened by my curiosity and questions. He is mindful that I'm dust. And I can tell you this one thing, because when curiosity finally wakes up, we begin to pray a different kind of prayer, a humble kind of prayer, not a prayer of fear, but the prayer we find in scripture, a simple one that says, God, I believe, help my unbelief. And maybe that prayer is where inherited faith finally begins to grow into living faith.