Admission Essay

If anyone is interested, this is my admission essay I wrote for acceptance into seminary for my Masters of Arts and Religion degree. I ended up being accepted. Hope you enjoy it!

I began my walk as a Christian later then my childhood friends growing up. Most of them had dedicated their lives to the Lord when they were between 3-5 years old; something that to this day I am suspicious of. At the time, I remember thinking that such spiritual experiences would be impossible for a very young child – for it takes a serious amount of understanding to fathom the complexity of hearing God’s invitation. For me, the time when I encountered God was much later.

I was 12 years old, and it was early in the morning before the sun had risen in the sky. I was riding with my father in the car on a trip to New Jersey to visit my grandparents. I remember that very suddenly, I became overcome with a strong desire to commit my life to God. I asked my father what is was like when he first became a Christian, and he told me about his conversion experience. My memory of the things that happened next were vague, but I do remember being filled with a mounting awareness of my imperfections, coupled strongly with my desire to draw close to God. I simply called out to God for help, and asked Him to take over.

Looking back, I am amazed at what happened in those few moments. For the first time in my life, I suddenly cared very much about God and our relationship, and could feel the terrible weight of a life trying to be lived without Him. All these thoughts were new to my experience at the time, but in an instant, I completely understood them very clearly. I am amazed at how God can communicate things to people that take so long for us to explain to others, but are passed to us in just a fleeting moment, and we understand completely within some deep part of ourselves. God has a way to speak to us that takes a parable-like form: our mental and rational guards are up, but He takes another route to communicate truth – one that speaks a different language than cold reason and logic alone; one that talks quietly to our inmost being where the message becomes internalized before it can be brought into coherency with our existing beliefs which become in that moment of realization hopelessly outdated.

This first experience with God has been a model of how I have learned spiritual truth that has really stuck with me – truth that has been seeded deep within me and has not been forgotten. These truths most of all are what has kept me spiritually alive when life inevitably became very hard and painful. A person’s theology is full of beliefs, bolstered by a myriad of tangled emotional and rational arguments, but it is not often that these kinds of beliefs sustain me in the midst of hard times.

It wasn’t long before my new life began to invade daily living. I began to question whether or not my activities were in line with my values, or if they jeopardized my relationship with God. I remember it was around this time that my brother and I never fought again, and have been great friends ever since. I also remember another interesting quality I picked up: a very strong thirst for serious study about God and the Christian walk. I might attribute this desire to observing my father who had a similar passion, but it is hard to say if that alone was the fuel that drove me to read book after book late into the night on apologetics, worldviews, philosophy, and Bible interpretation. It was at this time in my life as an early Christian that C.S. Lewis and his particular way of looking at the Christian life really resonated with me, and to this day he has been a strong influence in the way I understand Christianity.

During my remaining tumultuous teenage years, I discovered I had other great passions beside biblical studies, such as art, design, and computers. When the time came to make a decision about what to do with my life scholastically, I decided to follow a path towards a career that suited those loves, and so I set off to get a degree in Industrial and Graphic design. Undergraduate school was such an intense part of my life that I have often compared it to a type of hibernation: I was so completely focused on learning my trade that years went by before I began to once again resurface into the social world and interact with other human beings. It was an awkward transition that took me years to recover from.

Even during this intense time, I never seemed to loose my desire to try desperately to understand my Christian walk and life in general in an intellectual way. I would often be up late into the night – lying in my bed and staring at the ceiling thinking about some aspect of theology that I couldn’t understand. To this day, I have found few people as consumed as I who wrangle with these questions day and night, and would like nothing more than to simply discuss them for hours on end with a kindred spirit. I am sure such people exist, and with greater passion, but I have not met many nor have I kept in steady contact with the few that are.

At this point, I would like to clarify what I mean when I say I was “desperate” to understand spiritual truth. I do not mean that my beliefs in God or the stability of my faith were fragile and I was trying to save them. I use this strong word because I can’t think of a better one to describe the intensity of my desire to understand these spiritual things. Although I struggled day and night over some issue, I still went to bed without a worry as to if the basic tenants of Christianity were true or not. To this day, this desire has not cooled, but stayed at a steady level of high intensity. I do not know what drives this. At one point, I thought it was my pride, but life came down hard and wrecked that part of me, yet my desire to know truth continued to haunt me more strongly, even when it was no longer superficially beneficial to me.

Many years after college, I became involved with collage & career age Bible studies and church groups. I was asked to be a group leader in two of them. I gave lectures and led small group Bible studies on a regular basis for years. I also was involved with the affairs of leadership of such groups that did not involve teaching, such as conflict resolution and event planning. It was a wonderful time in my life, the first time that I could be used by God to minister to people and to encourage them to draw closer to God and to help them in their times of need where God gave me insight to help. It was my desire in my ministry to be open about my own failures and struggles in my Christian walk, and to admit I didn’t have all the answers and that I messed up quite often.

However, it was during this time that I became aware of the many problems of Bible interpretation in the conservative circles I was teaching in, and the sects that arise in the church because this. I also noticed a division among people and their approach to interpretation. Some believed what people they respected believed without any personal scrutiny and others (like myself) cared little for what important people believed, but tried to take a more scholarly approach to determine the right interpretation of a Bible passage or theological perspective. What I noticed most of all was everyone’s ignorance (including my own) of important tools that facilitate good interpretation above and beyond good logic and reason – a solid knowledge of the language and culture of the Bible. I would often attend a bible study or teach one that really moved me or the people I taught, only to realize that many of my points and my understanding of biblical culture and my interpretation were entirely wrong. This has been a source of frustration to me. Although it has been a long time since I have been allowed to teach, I restrict my advice to the spiritual truths in my life that are the most deeply rooted and most real to me, and have kept my opinions and perspectives on the less-certain things to myself.

Over the past couple of years, the spiritual life of our family has taken a heavy toll. We were forced to leave a very bad church only to land in another that was in some ways even worse. Since that time, we have moved from church to church, but have never found one that we were comfortable in. This experience has opened my eyes to a very dark side of Christianity that I had never experienced before or even believed could exist. This was a time when all I had to comfort me where the deep spiritual truths that God had given me. Those truths and many more He gave me during this time sustained me. I began to see things very clearly from the shoes of the atheist and the recovering anti-Christian that had been beat up by religious abuse. Most of my time spent over the past couple of years has been listening to people like this and what they have to say about their experiences with Christianity and its many variations. With the help of these hurt men and women, I have gained a painful perspective on the terrible destruction that man-made religious attitudes and behaviors have on the spiritual lives of people and their relationship with God. Their criticisms have helped me rethink many of my beliefs and attitudes. One good piece of advice from C.S. Lewis was to try to see a thing from someone else’s perspective. Whenever you read a book or a topic that you agree with, read one that you don’t. It is in this tension that a greater understanding of things may arise where a narrow perspective would not allow. Because of my bad church experiences, I have been able to follow his advice – to see the other side of religion; to see the valid criticisms and anger of atheists and other non-Christians towards religious societies who easily fall into the trap of corruption and in the process hurt so many people and destroy their relationship with God.

So, where does this leave me now? I believe God has led me on a path back to school again. It is time for my second passion to receive the benefit of higher learning. It is my desire to attend seminary to study the Bible under some of the greatest scholars in the country. This is indeed a great privilege, and it could not come at a better time. I have spent the last 2 years removing the encrustation of a self-righteous religious attitude, one that could be fed by seminary under the right conditions rather than corrected. Instead, I am coming with humility; with the noise of many hurt and angry voices echoing in my ears that will stem the tide of arrogance in me that inevitably accompanies advanced learning of any kind, as Paul mentions in Corinthians. I have seen first and second hand the damage of what religious pride can do, and my intentions are not sided there, but rather to do what I remember doing a long time ago: to be a facilitator to help people draw closer to God. I know as a lived reality that it is within the magic of that relationship where people will receive their deepest spiritual truths, the ones that will be clung to when the hard times of life come.