Thank you all for sharing. Part of the idea for this thread, though, was not just “I’m going to witness to my conversion experience” but to have the skeptics examine the stories, and in their asking questions and our responding, get some handle on just what is going on in all of this. Supposing there to be a God for purposes of this sentence (as I believe firmly but as other good people who post here do not), why might He have done the things He did with us, brought Phil to Him and let him choose to slip away, never have given Gaudere the proof He gave us? Those are fair questions to ask. Analysis and probing questions are requested.
Okay, now my turn:
Age about 15: sitting in a very traditionalist Methodist church, during service. We live next door to the church. Aunt is one of the pillars of the church, parents and grandparents are non-attending members. I have strong doubts about whether any of what is going on here has anything to do with the life I live outside, and whether there is in fact such a God as they’re presupposing down front. So I ask him, “if You’re there, let me know it.” And he does. No voice in my head, no particular epiphanies of any sort. Just a certainty that He is in fact real, which had not been there before, but was now a part of my stock of knowledge. And the service then moved to a hymn: “Nearer, My God, to Thee” which had previously been just “that song they played while the Titanic sunk” – an urban legend, by the way – but was invested with real meaning to me at that point. I’ve never been uncertain of His existence since.
However, I finished high school, went to college, our family terminated any interest in that church (a long and disgusting story having to do with the United Methodist Church failing to keep any tabs on their ministers’ behavior – Jodi, if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll e-mail you the gory details), and I went on with my life with no strong attachment to anything, including God.
I re-encountered the girl I’d been close to throughout high school and junior college at age 26, and we married and moved to Syracuse NY, and at her behest, went church-shopping, eventually settling on an Episcopal church there that met both our tastes in worship. Later we moved back to Watertown, joined the largest of the 3 Episcopal churches in town, and became reasonably active. All this time, however, it was simply an intellectual adherence to a set of propositions, plus the memory of that one event years before.
We enrolled in an extension course in theology, taught by the assistant priest using materials from and with the program accredited by the University of the South theology school. A major portion of this was a scholarly examination of the Bible. And in the process, we came to the letters to the Corinthians. Discussion on the whole “gifts of the spirit” stuff ensued.
One course member, who was part of the “charismatic renewal movement” (anathema to that staid country-club Episcopalian parish!), invited the class to hold the next session at his home, so he could give some background on what the whole “renewal movement” entailed. Accordingly, we went there, and he played a Pat Boone singing hymns record as part of the background material. I was singing along under my breath, and when Pat left English, so did I. This shocked the sh*t out of me, needless to say. Over the course of the next few days, I found that there was a “door” there (this is metaphorical of a mental/spiritual sensation) that I had never noticed before, and that there was a clear connection between me and Something beyond it, who gave clear evidence of being (1) awe-inspiring, (2) warm and caring, (3) the Christian deity I’d had preached to me, studied about, but never really met (except for the casual acquaintance noted above).
Now, let me make very clear that (1) I did not at that point feel a “lack in my life” or a “need to believe” and (2) had I had a choice, a Pentecostal experience was the *last thing I would have sought out (I associated them with obnoxious people like what we used to see Adam as being).
What followed from this experience was a hunger for more information on what was going on, including reading the Bible with a sense of “oh, so that’s what that meant!” (I think I’m qualified to carry on both sides of the argument on 'Gator’s comment about the Holy Spirit giving understanding of the Scriptures and those who took that as insulting – It’s more like reading a commentary on Zen before and after having had a satori, if you’ll allow a spiritual but non-Christian metaphor – it makes sense that it didn’t before.)
Further, my somewhat repressed and passivist personality got changed around. From being excessively intellectual, I started developing emotional and empathic traits, from being afraid of what people would think (still a small problem) I started standing for what (I believed) was right, felt a sense of a call to find out the Truth, a purposiveness to my life that hadn’t been present before. And a willingness to “step out in faith” that has brought me from a depressive and depressed state to the environment I’m in and the way I feel today, for which my theme song has been Johnny Nash’s old “I can see clearly now.”
I remember being very in tune with the Spirit then.
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