neurological dryer lint

in our thursday night study last week we spent an excellent night enjoying a meal together and telling stories. eventually we went around the room and synopsized (it's a word) the story of how each of us began to follow Jesus. i've told this story in several contexts; synopsizing it (i'm loving this word) got me to realize how intricately God fashioned the circumstances of my life to lead me to the perfect point of decision... because i had to reduce the story quite a bit, distill it down so that all ten of us had time to talk and ask questions.

anyway. most stories i've heard of this fashion - how a person began to follow Jesus - have sounded a lot alike, likely because the crowd i heard them from all kind of took a similar path. for me, it was loneliness - feeling like very few people really valued me and certainly didn't appreciate me for who i was, leading me to try to act like a different person to get accepted; it was meaninglessness - feeling like the 70-80 years on this planet would end too quickly and that was it; a terrible fear of death - driven by that meaninglessness and by the horror of trying to grasp what eternity would be like, and that most likely it would look like the sopranos finale - the lights go out and that's it forever.

and that i was led through such randomly meaningful circumstances to a group of people who accepted me, a tangible glimpse of their hope and reason for living... and it was captivating, and i struggled past the cultural stigma of religion that was so frustrating... and i saw how God was indeed in pursuit of me and that he'd set things up, set my life up so that just when i was ready and desperate for my unfulfilling existence to change, i got dragged before him.

and now it's been eleven years that have flown by since i started calling him King, and i've watched as my life has been surreptitiously repaired... surrounded by honest, meaningful friendship, married (frick, a girl likes me), aware of who i am in the story of humanity... unafraid of death - this one still stuns me the most, because of how powerfully i felt that fear and how, through no effort of my own it has abated.

but thinking of all that - and hearing the other folks in my study tell their stories, and seeing how different they all are. how for some, the decision to be rescued by God was a simple one, and they can remember the day and time they made that choice; and for some it was a period of years, a long engagement, a slow churn of the ice cream of the soul; with no marked date, but a gradual release.

we're all so different, and we're all the same, the stories of our lives.

synopsized. just felt like saying it again.