In 1976 we lived in Sacramento, poor as church-mice. I worked in a hotel cleaning rooms and Chuck took jobs in food service and Top 40 bands. We barely made the rent each month, but we could always scrounge enough loose change for books. We rode our bikes through the downtown streets of the city, parked at the used bookstore, and came home with a load of books for ten cents apiece. I bought books on feminism, childbirth, nutrition, and vegetarianism, as well as the occasional Rita Mae Brown novel. Chuck studied Buddhism, the Beat Poets, jazz, and Buckminster Fuller on geodesic domes.


In the spring of 1982 books provided the stepping-stones in my movement toward Christianity. In late April of that year my husband made a declaration and posed a question, one that threw me into a stomach churning upheaval. He told me he’d become a Christian, a follower of Jesus, and asked me what I thought. Before that day I’d never heard the phrase "becoming a Christian" and didn’t know what to make of it. We’d both been in church off and on during our childhoods and no one that I knew of spoke like that. I guess I’d always assumed there was a little bit of Christian in all of us since we lived in the United States. As a little girl I sometimes attended Marysville Presbyterian with my grandparents, sang in the choir, and went to Sunday school. In later years I went on occasion with my maternal grandmother or my mother to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian. I knew something about the social practice of going to church, but what it meant to be the Church was another matter entirely. I’d never seriously considered the claims of Christianity and when I heard the words, "I’ve become a Christian," my only reference point for such definitive language were the kids we’d called Jesus Freaks in high school. I’d never known any of them and certainly didn’t know what they believed. But I remembered being baffled by them and tagging them as alien and cultish. Those same feelings were roused by Chuck’s statement. I felt scared and sick to my stomach. I was afraid that after everything we’d been through he would go off the deep end into some odd religious frenzy and we would lose each other after all. I considered packing up the children and leaving. But instead I stayed put. We’d come so far in the last year and I really didn’t have the gumption to break up our household one more time.


A few weeks later my sister took our kids so we could spend the weekend celebrating our 7th anniversary. We spent the days and nights moving about in freedom, going to matinees, riding horses at a stable, and talking over meals in restaurants. Christianity was the topic that threaded through all our conversations. My husband had found a pearl of great price and he wanted me to discover it too. He was passing on the biblical stories he’d collected so far and as we enjoyed a beautiful dinner in a seafood restaurant, he spoke to me about the creation of the physical universe, human beings included, as it is written about in Genesis. It was so foreign to me, but I had to admit it made more sense to the way things were. The notion of an accidental universe began to pale when it was compared to a creation that carried design and intent.


My curiosity was piqued and there was a pinprick in my armor, but I would only allow Chuck to speak about Christianity in small doses. On my own, however, I started looking for answers to questions that were rising up inside me. I wanted to know why the Bible should be believed and what gave it more authority than any other book on earth. I found a book lying around our house that Chuck had borrowed titled "Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity." I identified with the word skeptic so I picked it up and read the table of contents. Curiosity roused, I opened it up and found that it held answers to some of my questions. It seemed there were many solid intellectual reasons, historical and archaeological, for why the Bible was a book that was unique and reliable. Biblical scholarship was a foreign idea to me and the more I read in the field of apologetics, the more credible the Bible became.


From there I had questions about Christianity and sexism. My background had predisposed me to think that Christianity treated women as inferior beings, although this was based on just two or three texts taken in isolation from the whole of scripture. One day while driving through downtown Sacramento, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a Bible bookstore and pulled over. I’d never been to such a place before, but it drew me like a magnet. As I perused the shelves, I found a book titled "Is the Bible Sexist?" I bought it, took it home, and began to understand that my biases were wrong. The Bible seemed to have a much bigger story to tell, and with the coming of Jesus, it was one that brought freedom and dignity to women rather than took it away.


My next step was to actually open the scriptures and begin reading. The only other time I remembered doing that was with my best friend Jenae. In grammar school we’d gone through a short period of reading Jesus’ words in the King James, reciting aloud in our best dramatic voices "Verily, verily, I say unto you…"


This time I read one of the gospel accounts of the life of Christ. As I read I was amazed, along with the crowds that came to hear him, because he spoke with such authority. He also spoke with compassion and moral perfection about things that had a vital relevance to my life, but were also obviously, timeless truths. There was something about him that was very "other" and yet earthy, real, and direct. He gave "direction for being human." (Dallas Willard) The love embodied in his life and words was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard before. I found that I had been profoundly ignorant about Jesus and was becoming convinced that he was indeed, "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" as he said he was.


In the same few weeks we began visiting a church that met in an unused retail space. I agreed to go because it seemed like a nice thing for our family to do and I was hungry for family health. So I went as a skeptic and sat on the sidelines during Communion, but I listened to the sermon and was greatly impacted by the people gathered. Their welcome and care for us and for each other was evident, and when they sang the worship songs, they lifted their hands and sang to the God who was really there.


The evidence was adding up and I knew I couldn’t disregard it. I didn’t understand much, but what I did understand was enough. I couldn’t turn back and pretend ignorance. It was my turn to join the ancient chain of people of faith and step over the ledge to the arms of grace. One night in the dark shelter of our bedroom, with my husband by my side, I prayed out loud to God, telling him I was more full of confusion than I was of faith, but would he please take me and make me his?


The next morning I woke up with a strange combination of feeling different yet the same. And I started on a new path of learning. I began to spend regular periods of time sitting in a frayed, gray hand-me-down rocker looking intently into my new Bible. I was curious and hungry for the understanding that came as I read.


We were invited to something called a "Bible study," a term common to me now, but new at the time. The Bible study took place in the living room of a woman from our new church. Chuck and I sat on the floor with Bibles open to the first page of Genesis as the pastor began teaching. The group was small and informal, and questions and dialogue were welcome. After the teaching everyone bowed their heads, and whoever wanted to prayed out loud. Then we ate dessert and talked. It was such an alien world to me. But it was friendly and loving, and little by little we grew accustomed to these gatherings that centered on an unseen God and his revealed Word. Our minds were opened and renewed with healthy doses of new knowledge about God and his world, creation and redemption, and everything in between. It was good.


What wasn’t good was the sub-culture we began to dress ourselves in along with our new faith. With subtle shifts of clothing and haircuts, language and literary taste, I changed in ways that had nothing to do with the revealed will of God. I started buying books mainly in religious bookstores and taste testing the music sold there. I got my long hair cut and permed, and exchanged my thrift store clothes for a conservative look. Why I thought these things had anything to do with becoming a disciple of Jesus, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because changing the outer man is the easiest thing to do—a new haircut, a certain type of clothing that reflects the taste of others around you—it’s the quickest way to fit in. Change in the inner person is a much slower, incremental work of the Spirit of God. It’s long and lifetime. It’s a deep, lasting, and holy work that belongs to God and God alone.


But in the beginning, like so many Jesus people in the late seventies and early eighties, we felt the need to clean house, to remove things that seemed to have no place in our life anymore. The first target was our books and music. One weekend we threw a yard sale and sold our stellar collection of jazz albums, along with some Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez. The Beat Poets and my books and magazines from feminist bookstores were carted away by neighbors with quarters in their pockets. In later life we’ve chuckled at the irony of our willingness to make a few bucks off the stuff. We didn’t think the content was good for us anymore, but we were okay to send it off to someone else’s household! It wasn’t long before our wrongly placed zeal evened out and over the years we purchased the music again and some of the books. Still, some of that housecleaning was probably a good thing. We did need a major overhaul and a reorientation. We needed to become students of marriage, of parenting, and of life in general from a biblical perspective.


Something else that swayed us to a small view of life and learning in the early eighties was the emphasis for California Christians on the end times and the imminent return of Jesus. In the first few months of living with my new faith, I was still a part time student at Sacramento State University. I’d been going to college off and on since I was eighteen and had picked up again about a year before. As I considered whether or not to sign up for fall classes I specifically remember thinking: if Jesus is coming back any minute and heaven is what matters most, then I should spend my time immersed in Bible studies and learning from other Christians. So that’s what I did. I went to Bible studies for new believers and for women. I attended the mid-week Bible study for the whole church. Chuck and I both went to a study on marriage. We hosted a Bible study in our house. We read books by Christian authors, one after another. We listened on the radio to Chuck Smith from Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa and Walter Martin: The Bible Answer Man. It was a time set apart that was good in so many ways. The focused time of learning was important to growing a strong root, a foundation of biblical understanding. But we were very misguided to think that life in the here and now, and learning about the world, God’s world, didn’t matter. On this point, Francis and Edith Schaeffer came to our rescue.


One morning after a Sunday service at Warehouse Ministries, a church we became a part of in 1984, I was perusing the shelves of the small church library. I came across a book by Edith, "Common Sense Christian Living," and thumbed through the pages. It intrigued me so I took it home. I soon went on to read "Hidden Art." Both books were life giving and inspired me to think with a biblically informed mind about the big picture of human existence as well as the smallest of details. Chuck found Francis Schaeffer’s "Art and the Bible" around the same time.


One afternoon while visiting our family in Yuba City, we hopped in our old blue Datsun for an outing. True to form, the car sputtered and stalled at the intersections. With a young faith that asked God for parking spaces and healing for wounded cars, we prayed that it would start again. We finally made the short trip from the outskirts of town to Nordahl’s Christian Supplies on Plumas Street. There on a shelf Chuck, found the small pamphlet that he often refers to as the book that saved his life as an artist.


The Schaeffer’s books gave us both our first glimpse into a holistic view of life under the Lordship of Jesus. They did not chop life into sections, naming some parts spiritual or sacred, and the other parts secular and ultimately not as important. It was all important—from the life of the Church, to government, art, and education to ecology, business, and homemaking. With the addition of years we read other authors and listened to teachers who helped us understand that God has no dualisms. Our dualisms are humanly constructed and often times so ancient that we have no idea where our thinking comes from. It’s there as if by accident. But the God of the Bible hasn’t revealed himself as a God who cares only about our religious practices or what goes on inside the church walls. Instead, our study of the Bible should inform the whole of our existence. Prayer is a continual conversation as we go throughout our days and nights. And the worship of God is for every moment and every activity as it is offered to him—from our love making to our eating to our work as CEO of a corporation. He created all that exists, both visible and invisible and is reconciling all things to himself. In the words of the influential Dutchman, Abraham Kuyper, "In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, "That is mine!"


Now that’s a view of reality worth getting up for in the morning! It leads to a life fueled with the truth that all of life matters to God and consequently to us. In practical terms I know for sure that when I’m in the kitchen preparing a meal or doing the dishes, my work is important. People need to eat and God knows that. It’s his idea not mine. Cooking and eating is a messy business, so cleaning up is part of restoring the order so household life may continue. When I’m reading a novel and enjoying the beauty of words and story, I’m not enjoying something that’s out of the realm of what God cares about. He designed me to love those things and gifted certain people with the ability to imagine and write well. And if I want to study art history or the Hippie culture of the 60’s or the ways of honey bees, do I have any business thinking those topics are somehow separate from my life in Christ?


I have to admit that I do still live with a dualistic mindset, even though I know better. I don’t always think and act as if the whole of life—people and universe—matters to God and therefore to me. All to often I stereotype, categorize, and remain distant and critical of people and practices I don’t understand. But love calls me to something deeper and larger. It calls me to live with an inquiring mind and a genuine interest in who people are, what makes them tick, and what stories are shaping them. There are a million questions to ask if I can just remember to set my mind in that direction rather than going to the easier, but ultimately small and constricted place of not caring.


I’m challenged on a regular basis to uncover the places in my mind and heart where curiosity is absent and apathy has taken its place. In this process I have friends and mentors who come and stir my soul to a better way. Steve Garber, author of "The Fabric of Faithfulness," teaches me that as human beings made in the image of God, we’re wired to know and to love at the same time. The epistemology that grows out of the pages of scripture shows that knowing leads to responsibility, which leads to care. We’re made to know and to respond, which is a far cry from detachment and disinterest. Nita Andrews, counselor, artist, and mother, tells me I have things to learn from the artists of the world. She says not to dismiss art because I don’t resonate with it right away or it disturbs me. Instead, I should stay with it and learn from its nuances and subtleties. Denis and Margie Haack, writers of Critique and Notes from Toad Hall teach me to think with discernment, to appreciate and engage in the culture I live in. They inspire me to care about all kinds of subjects and all kinds of people. There’s no end to the topics they write about in their publications. They draw from the landscape of our culture--its films, music, books, politics, and habits. They read widely, think deeply, and love well because they’re interested in human life and all its complexities.


I’m still coming alive to curiosity on a grand scale. It makes for a far more interesting life, one that has no room for boredom or apathy. As I age, I find more meaning, not less. Sorrows stack up to be sure, and sometimes become overwhelming. But the excitement to learn, love, and live more deeply in my Father’s world keeps me centered and eager for life.