Shane’s Journey

Thanks for coming over to this page to find out about how I came to believe.  Believe in what?   That Jesus of Nazareth, the illegitimate son of a carpenter in 1st Century Palestine, is in fact the son of God and the promised messiah predicted hundreds of years before his birth.  Why is that belief so important?  Because if it is true, then we can have a relationship with our creator.  More, our creator will consider us his adopted children, and lavish his love on us forever.  But if we don’t want that relationship, then we will suffer his absence for eternity in hell – not by his choice but by our own.

I’ll say this first: I didn’t grow up in a Christian home.  A lot of people assume that the only people who believe “this stuff” must have not had any other choice: not me.  While Bible stories were around, and we celebrated Christmas, and we might have gone to church once or twice a year, I can’t describe my childhood home as a Christian one.  It was moral – my Mom and Dad taught me right from wrong, but they always believed in letting us (my brother and sister and I) make our own decisions with regards to a number of issues – religion, alcohol, drugs, sex.

I went to public school.  I read about dinosaurs.  Most boys did.  I had heard about “Adam and Eve”, but dinosaurs seemed so much more scientific, and weren’t they just the first Cro-Magnon couple?

The most spiritual idea that I dealt with in my daily life from very early on was the concept of “the Force”.  I brought my Luke Skywalker action figure with me to Kindergarten I recollect, back in 1979.  I sure wanted to be able to summon my lightsaber from a snowbank!

Later, in high school, I recall an assignment in English that had us discuss our own ideas of deity.  I’d been heavily into Dungeons & Dragons.  My essay talked about a dualistic image of a good and evil spirit warring over the universe and the souls of humanity.  It was nonspecific enough to fit into any religion, and best of all, it had nothing to do with me.

Somewhere along the way, between the ages of seven and nine, my family uprooted and moved twice.  When we finally settled, I had been transplanted against my will into the flatlands of Alberta, away from the mountains and ocean that I had loved. I don’t know if it was the combination of my bitterness at leaving behind my best friend in Kitimat, what I felt was my home in BC, or my intellectual bent that was beginning to grow, but integration did not happen smoothly.  The first school I attended was painful physically and emotionally as even those people who appeared to be my friends would turn on me and pick on or attack me after school.  My parents moved us to the other end of town so I could go to a nicer school.  It turned out not to be that much nicer.  I wasn’t picked on as much, and made a few real friends.  One in particular actually stalked and attacked me for several months on the way home from school, until finally the principal walked me home one day.  Strangely enough, since he lived across the street, we became friends after that.  Many years later I learned that he did much, after we became friends, to keep me from more bullying, though I was unaware of it at the time.

However, upon entering Junior High school (grades seven to nine), things got worse again.  Many tears were shed those years, while facing all kinds of bizarre hazing.  At different times I was mocked continually, I was spat upon in crowds while waiting for the school bus, and once I was grabbed getting off the bus and slapped around.  I didn’t fight back because my attackers never made themselves clearly known.  Even when I was grabbed getting off the bus that day, all I could do was ask the kid, “Why me?” because it made no sense.  He had never been opposed to me before.  He answered, “I don’t know.”

In High School, in grade ten, a new guy started to come to school.  His name was Cal.  He was great fun – he loved the outdoors, fishing, exploring, building elaborate traps, doing stupid boy things.  He and I and another friend, Trevor, quickly became his good friends.  My social circle became for the most part his, and I remained an outsider at school.  On Sunday morning I called him up to go fishing down at the river, and he said, “I can’t, I’m going to church.”  I didn’t have anything against church, so I tagged along.  He went to this little Baptist church in a storefront across from the old Jail grounds.  I’d never been in one of those, but there were other kids there, and I didn’t mind going because often his parents would invite me over for lunch after.  I joined their youth group, and became interested enough in one girl to actually compose a bad love letter trying to ask her out.  She turned me down, saying that she only dated Christians.  What did that mean?  I had no idea really, but going to the church I was beginning to pick it up.

I got a job at McDonald’s and began to earn my own money, though McDonald’s was the lowest status job for high schoolers around.  After six months, I was on a shift without a manager, and a number of employees were snitching food (read: I am a thief) that was going to be thrown out (at that time they premade food and let it sit under heat lamps for no longer than 15 minutes – after that it was thrown away).  This was not allowed.  Finally we were caught and lined up.  They asked us who took the food.  I was the only one who admitted it.  Hence, I was the only one punished.  I was fired.  The idea that I had just been fired from the worst job in town was the worst hit to my self-confidence, already low from years of bullying, I could imagine.

That day for the first and last time in my life, I contemplated suicide.  I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse.  Then, a moment later, a thought entered my mind.  I am now convinced this was the voice of God.  He said, “What are you thinking?  You know it isn’t that bad.”  And it wasn’t.  From that moment on, I had confidence that things would get better.  Confidence in that nameless voice that contradicted despair.

It was a few weeks later that I got to talking one night about Jesus with Cal as he dropped me off at home after who knows what we were up to.  I asked him how a person becomes a Christian.  He explained to me briefly, that all God wants from me is to believe in Jesus, that man from 2000 years ago.  To believe that when he died, crucified by the Romans at the request of the Jews for claiming to be God (and proving he was God by rising again on the third day after he died), he took the punishment on himself for everything I have ever done or will do, so that my rebellion against God’s commands (lying, stealing, and many more) do not stand between me and friendship with God.  Then, God considers me his friend – more, he will adopt me as his child and be with me forever.

I took that with me to my room that night.  I thought about my whole life, and how I had always tried to pick my own way through it.  I kept on screwing it up no matter what I did.  I couldn’t stop people picking on me.  I couldn’t make people like me.  But letting Jesus be Lord, and following his teachings as my guide to my life, I discovered within myself a faith that his way would lead to my good, no matter what.  How could it not?  What I had learned in Sunday School with Cal, and at church was that Jesus loved me more than anyone ever has.  That from the very beginning, God has laid out in the Bible a guide to life that is unerringly good.

When I read the ten commandments, I knew that if everyone kept them, life would be heaven.  But yet in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus makes it even easier – two rules.  Love God, and love your neighbour.  That’s all.  Even all those songs I heard on the radio that talked about love knew that love is the only thing that can heal the world.  That love comes only from God.  I made my decision and told God so that night.  What came out was forgiveness, for everything I had done in rebellion against what I knew was right – stealing, hating, lusting, dishonoring, ignoring, lying – the list goes right down the ten commandments.  I was right with God, because I had accepted his forgiveness.

For days, maybe weeks, I didn’t notice that anything had changed.  You hear stories about people who come to faith and experience some kind of surge or force, or light, or sound.  None of that happened to me, but my heart had changed, and God had begun his work in my life whether I realized it or not.  The shy, scared, quiet boy I had been was on his way out and a new person was emerging.  A person who loved truth and would stand up for it no matter the cost.  I had a new direction and purpose in my life.  No, I can’t even say that.  I had no direction, no purpose for my life until Jesus.  I found myself at school, listening to someone mocking God, and speaking up for him!  I couldn’t imagine speaking up for myself, but for God, I would.  I was astonished at myself in that moment.

A few months later, I stood up at the front of the Fort Saskatchewan Alliance church, in front of my Baptist church family and my parents, and listened to Mr. Haglund, our youth leader, tell them how much I had changed.  I was as surprised and thankful I think as the people who were watching to hear of God’s work because I hadn’t even noticed.  Sometimes we’re too close to things.  But since then, God has been making my life better and better.  He’s given me wonderful gifts in response to obedience, starting with Forestry school, (when I promised him I’d go to Bible School to learn more about my God and my faith), then my wife (when I promised him I’d quit pining over a lost girl and be content with God as my companion), and now a place where I can teach and lead others – something that I’d always felt in my heart God wanted me to do but I didn’t believe I could (that all started when my wife and I gave God our vacation, and travelled to Africa on a short term mission).

There is so much more detail there I could go into, but that will have to be for another time.  The reason I am writing this is so that you can know that God is real.  He makes himself known to us.  He just has, by you reading this.  I don’t know how you came here, but it is my hope that you can know for certain that you can trust God’s love and God’s purpose for your life more than you can trust in yourself.  The Bible says in the book of Proverbs 3:5-6,

“Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.”

I would love the privelege of explaining more to you about who Jesus is and how I know he is who he says he is.  If you’d like more information, leave a comment here or email me, or even contact me through facebook.  If you found your way here by one of my cards, then you have my phone number so give me a call and we can have a cup of coffee or something and talk.  May God bless you!

—-Sorry, this page is displaying the post in duplicate.  The rest is redundant.—-

Thanks for coming over to this page to find out about how I came to believe.  Believe in what?   That Jesus of Nazareth, the illegitimate son of a carpenter in 1st Century Palestine, is in fact the son of God and the promised messiah predicted hundreds of years before his birth.  Why is that belief so important?  Because if it is true, then we can have a relationship with our creator.  More, our creator will consider us his adopted children, and lavish his love on us forever.  But if we don’t want that relationship, then we will suffer his absence for eternity in hell – not by his choice but by our own.

I’ll say this first: I didn’t grow up in a Christian home.  A lot of people assume that the only people who believe “this stuff” must have not had any other choice: not me.  While Bible stories were around, and we celebrated Christmas, and we might have gone to church once or twice a year, I can’t describe my childhood home as a Christian one.  It was moral – my Mom and Dad taught me right from wrong, but they always believed in letting us (my brother and sister and I) make our own decisions with regards to a number of issues – religion, alcohol, drugs, sex.

I went to public school.  I read about dinosaurs.  Most boys did.  I had heard about “Adam and Eve”, but dinosaurs seemed so much more scientific, and weren’t they just the first Cro-Magnon couple?

The most spiritual idea that I dealt with in my daily life from very early on was the concept of “the Force”.  I brought my Luke Skywalker action figure with me to Kindergarten I recollect, back in 1979.  I sure wanted to be able to summon my lightsaber from a snowbank!

Later, in high school, I recall an assignment in English that had us discuss our own ideas of deity.  I’d been heavily into Dungeons & Dragons.  My essay talked about a dualistic image of a good and evil spirit warring over the universe and the souls of humanity.  It was nonspecific enough to fit into any religion, and best of all, it had nothing to do with me.

Somewhere along the way, between the ages of seven and nine, my family uprooted and moved twice.  When we finally settled, I had been transplanted against my will into the flatlands of Alberta, away from the mountains and ocean that I had loved. I don’t know if it was the combination of my bitterness at leaving behind my best friend in Kitimat, what I felt was my home in BC, or my intellectual bent that was beginning to grow, but integration did not happen smoothly.  The first school I attended was painful physically and emotionally as even those people who appeared to be my friends would turn on me and pick on or attack me after school.  My parents moved us to the other end of town so I could go to a nicer school.  It turned out not to be that much nicer.  I wasn’t picked on as much, and made a few real friends.  One in particular actually stalked and attacked me for several months on the way home from school, until finally the principal walked me home one day.  Strangely enough, since he lived across the street, we became friends after that.  Many years later I learned that he did much, after we became friends, to keep me from more bullying, though I was unaware of it at the time.

However, upon entering Junior High school (grades seven to nine), things got worse again.  Many tears were shed those years, while facing all kinds of bizarre hazing.  At different times I was mocked continually, I was spat upon in crowds while waiting for the school bus, and once I was grabbed getting off the bus and slapped around.  I didn’t fight back because my attackers never made themselves clearly known.  Even when I was grabbed getting off the bus that day, all I could do was ask the kid, “Why me?” because it made no sense.  He had never been opposed to me before.  He answered, “I don’t know.”

In High School, in grade ten, a new guy started to come to school.  His name was Cal.  He was great fun – he loved the outdoors, fishing, exploring, building elaborate traps, doing stupid boy things.  He and I and another friend, Trevor, quickly became his good friends.  My social circle became for the most part his, and I remained an outsider at school.  On Sunday morning I called him up to go fishing down at the river, and he said, “I can’t, I’m going to church.”  I didn’t have anything against church, so I tagged along.  He went to this little Baptist church in a storefront across from the old Jail grounds.  I’d never been in one of those, but there were other kids there, and I didn’t mind going because often his parents would invite me over for lunch after.  I joined their youth group, and became interested enough in one girl to actually compose a bad love letter trying to ask her out.  She turned me down, saying that she only dated Christians.  What did that mean?  I had no idea really, but going to the church I was beginning to pick it up.

I got a job at McDonald’s and began to earn my own money, though McDonald’s was the lowest status job for high schoolers around.  After six months, I was on a shift without a manager, and a number of employees were snitching food (read: I am a thief) that was going to be thrown out (at that time they premade food and let it sit under heat lamps for no longer than 15 minutes – after that it was thrown away).  This was not allowed.  Finally we were caught and lined up.  They asked us who took the food.  I was the only one who admitted it.  Hence, I was the only one punished.  I was fired.  The idea that I had just been fired from the worst job in town was the worst hit to my self-confidence, already low from years of bullying, I could imagine.

That day for the first and last time in my life, I contemplated suicide.  I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse.  Then, a moment later, a thought entered my mind.  I am now convinced this was the voice of God.  He said, “What are you thinking?  You know it isn’t that bad.”  And it wasn’t.  From that moment on, I had confidence that things would get better.  Confidence in that nameless voice that contradicted despair.

It was a few weeks later that I got to talking one night about Jesus with Cal as he dropped me off at home after who knows what we were up to.  I asked him how a person becomes a Christian.  He explained to me briefly, that all God wants from me is to believe in Jesus, that man from 2000 years ago.  To believe that when he died, crucified by the Romans at the request of the Jews for claiming to be God (and proving he was God by rising again on the third day after he died), he took the punishment on himself for everything I have ever done or will do, so that my rebellion against God’s commands (lying, stealing, and many more) do not stand between me and friendship with God.  Then, God considers me his friend – more, he will adopt me as his child and be with me forever.

I took that with me to my room that night.  I thought about my whole life, and how I had always tried to pick my own way through it.  I kept on screwing it up no matter what I did.  I couldn’t stop people picking on me.  I couldn’t make people like me.  But letting Jesus be Lord, and following his teachings as my guide to my life, I discovered within myself a faith that his way would lead to my good, no matter what.  How could it not?  What I had learned in Sunday School with Cal, and at church was that Jesus loved me more than anyone ever has.  That from the very beginning, God has laid out in the Bible a guide to life that is unerringly good.

When I read the ten commandments, I knew that if everyone kept them, life would be heaven.  But yet in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus makes it even easier – two rules.  Love God, and love your neighbour.  That’s all.  Even all those songs I heard on the radio that talked about love knew that love is the only thing that can heal the world.  That love comes only from God.  I made my decision and told God so that night.  What came out was forgiveness, for everything I had done in rebellion against what I knew was right – stealing, hating, lusting, dishonoring, ignoring, lying – the list goes right down the ten commandments.  I was right with God, because I had accepted his forgiveness.

For days, maybe weeks, I didn’t notice that anything had changed.  You hear stories about people who come to faith and experience some kind of surge or force, or light, or sound.  None of that happened to me, but my heart had changed, and God had begun his work in my life whether I realized it or not.  The shy, scared, quiet boy I had been was on his way out and a new person was emerging.  A person who loved truth and would stand up for it no matter the cost.  I had a new direction and purpose in my life.  No, I can’t even say that.  I had no direction, no purpose for my life until Jesus.  I found myself at school, listening to someone mocking God, and speaking up for him!  I couldn’t imagine speaking up for myself, but for God, I would.  I was astonished at myself in that moment.

A few months later, I stood up at the front of the Fort Saskatchewan Alliance church, in front of my Baptist church family and my parents, and listened to Mr. Haglund, our youth leader, tell them how much I had changed.  I was as surprised and thankful I think as the people who were watching to hear of God’s work because I hadn’t even noticed.  Sometimes we’re too close to things.  But since then, God has been making my life better and better.  He’s given me wonderful gifts in response to obedience, starting with Forestry school, (when I promised him I’d go to Bible School to learn more about my God and my faith), then my wife (when I promised him I’d quit pining over a lost girl and be content with God as my companion), and now a place where I can teach and lead others – something that I’d always felt in my heart God wanted me to do but I didn’t believe I could (that all started when my wife and I gave God our vacation, and travelled to Africa on a short term mission).

There is so much more detail there I could go into, but that will have to be for another time.  The reason I am writing this is so that you can know that God is real.  He makes himself known to us.  He just has, by you reading this.  I don’t know how you came here, but it is my hope that you can know for certain that you can trust God’s love and God’s purpose for your life more than you can trust in yourself.  The Bible says in the book of Proverbs 3:5-6,

“Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.”

I would love the privelege of explaining more to you about who Jesus is and how I know he is who he says he is.  If you’d like more information, leave a comment here or email me, or even contact me through facebook.  If you found your way here by one of my cards, then you have my phone number so give me a call and we can have a cup of coffee or something and talk.  May God bless you!

—-Sorry, this page is displaying the post in duplicate.  The rest is redundant.—-