Bryce's Faith Story

I'm finally ready to share the story of my faith as it has wound through my life. I'm going to warn you all up front: it's not pretty. If you don't want to hear me talk about ugliness that most everyone experiences in life, and my struggles with it, then you may not want to click through to the story. I assure you that I'm not sharing anything here that I'm unwilling to discuss with anyone in person.

So without further ado, my story:

My faith has evolved in three stages. I was born into a family deeply involved in, and professed my own faith in a legalistic pseudo-Christian religion. Later, my immediate family and I found fresh faith in the true God and Christ his son when I was in high school. Eventually my full submission to Christ as my Lord and my belief in God’s transforming power grew rapidly as I came to know my wife, Rachel. And today my faith continues to grow, as I continue to seek God’s will in my life.

I was born into an immediate and large extended family that professed faith in an unnamed pseudo-Christian religion. They use the King James version of the Bible as their authority, but really their ultimate authority was their homeless ministers, sent in same-gendered pairs (yes, women too) to oversee each city-area. They have no name, but refer to themselves as “The Way” and “The Truth.” They are very family and community-oriented (perhaps their best characteristic), and their culture is usually fairly insular. They place a high value on being separate from the world and detached from worldly things (TV, jewelry, dancing, popular music, etc.).

 In their culture, it is implied that they are spiritual descendants of a home church that stayed the same as the stories depicting homeless travelling ministers and home churches in the New Testament. Few admit that the church’s lineage is broken, and almost none know or accept that it was born out of tent revivals in the UK in the late 1800’s.They are non-orthodox in their emphasis on legalistic salvation and their disbelief of Jesus’ divinity and the trinity. To them, Christ was a prophet of highest excellence, and the foremost example of how we ought to live our lives in submission to the Father. To them the cross was the ultimate sacrifice of submission, devoid of the sin-overpowering and sinner-ransoming hope of freedom to live for Christ.

As a young boy, I felt deeply convicted of my need to be better that I was. I was made aware of my sexuality at an early age and exposed to trashy romance novels (I was, and am still an avid reader). Even before puberty, I had a fascination with sex that I knew was wrong. As a child in “The Truth,” I never was told about what sex was about, but I knew that it was bad. That meant that I was bad, and I felt it.

As I grew older, I felt more and more deeply convicted of my sinfulness, especially during the altar calls periodically given during gospel meetings. I responded to an altar call at the age of 11, giving my life to God. Looking back, I’m unsure whether that was a moment of salvation or not. It certainly did not involve an acceptance of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross for my sins, but it was a response to my sinfulness, an acceptance of God’s lordship in my life, and an acknowledgement that I needed to try to follow God’s design for my life through devotion to his Word and “The Truth.”

My hidden exposure to sexuality inevitably deepened into an addiction, as I was exposed to pornography of both under-age and over-age sorts. The cycle of self-loathing and desperation for God made for a tumultuous inner life, which I hid very well behind my goody-two-shoes persona. This persona was well-cultivated among family and those of “The Truth,” but didn’t get me very far among friends and school-mates, so I began to live a double life. I didn’t rebel that much really, but I did use coarse language to try to make myself fit in enough to at least have a few friends. Fortunately, my innate individualism kept me from giving in to most forms of peer pressure, but it resulted in my remaining mostly a loner. I’ve seen only one of the friends that I did have in school since then.

At some point, my mother gradually been seeking Christ more deeply. She had questions that the ministers of “The Truth” couldn’t answer to her satisfaction. She began doing private Bible studies with an older ex-minister who had a more orthodox view of the Bible because of his own in-depth studies. In the summer of 1994, when I was fifteen, she and my father talked to me about “The Truth,” telling me that many of its central tenets were actually false. Its members cultivate a very high respect for the authority of its ministers, and this assertion that they were basically all wrong was earth-shaking. We continued to attend home church meetings, and my parents (still mostly my mom) had multiple discussions with ministers, extended family members, and friends who were members for the next nine months. After the fruitfulness of those conversations was exhausted, we began attending the local non-denominational New Song Community Church.

The experience of attending an evangelical Christian church was eye-opening and life-changing. Joining in true worship was one of the most formative experiences of that time of my life. I have always had a love and thirst for music, and experiencing the fusion of the fundamental truths of the universe with the most expressive media rocked my world. I’ve been even more a fanatic of good music, and good Christian music, ever since.

At my mother’s prompting, I was reading my Bible in a new way. One of the things I distinctly remember praying for is that the filters that had been built in my mind would be taken away and that I would see His Word in all its truth. They were, and I did. This was a real turning point in the development of my faith. Up to that point, my faith was of the blind, childish variety - founded much more on the authority of my parents and the recently-repudiated ministers of “The Truth.” That faith was deeply shaken, and in its place began to grow a new understanding of God’s history of redemption, beginning in Genesis, continuing throughout the old testament, and culminating in his sacrifice on the cross. That sacrifice now had so much more meaning than just the execution of another great prophet. It was the ultimate redemptive work, the sacrifice of the man without sin, God himself taking all the sins of all of history, paying the price once and for all. No more payment is now required. I no longer have to strive to be good in order for God to hear me, to love me, to accept me. I saw no reason to resist this scandalous act of grace, and in the summer of 1995, between my Sophomore and Junior years of High School, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior, God, and King.

I suppose that I should wish that at this point, it would be happily ever after, but does anyone’s story go that way? The act of choosing to accept God’s sacrifice as sufficient is momentous and life-changing, and the joy of new freedom yields quite a high, but the working out of God’s salvation in our lives is not instantaneous. It is only through the continual submission to his exposure of our brokenness, our confession of our inability to fix ourselves, and complete surrender to the work that God wants to do in us that we can be transformed, layer by layer, into the person that he created us to be.

I started living my faith in new ways among my peers, attending a youth group at Church, and an after-school Bible study. I really had a thirst for learning the truth thMy faith has evolved in three stages. I was born into a family deeply involved in, and professed my at I had missed for so long, and intended to live my life differently. But in my story, victory over pornography didn’t come that easily. Through the rest of high school I continued to struggle with my hidden sin, and my relationship with God, while it had developed to a new level, didn’t continue to deepen. I kept trying, seeking, and learning, but I did not yet have the depth of faith in God’s all-sufficiency, the heart-wrenching awareness of my sins’ consequences, or a firm resolve to live in the freedom that had been bought for me. I went on two mission trips to Mexico with our church, and had eye-opening, faith-building mountain-top experiences, but was still unable to shake the devil off my back.

I graduated from high school and went off to college at Seattle Pacific University to study in computer engineering. If anything, my hidden sin became even more deeply rooted. By the grace of God, my addiction to pornography didn’t evolve into more, but after years of failure, its hold seemed unbreakable. I always felt on the outside of social life (I was unacceptably bad after all), and never had the courage to date any girls. The hidden knowledge of my brokenness also kept me from getting involved, because I was scared of myself.
Then, on an extended field trip, I fell into a ridiculous junior-high-school-style crush on an upper-class-woman. She was pretty, and visibly a woman of God with integrity. She was the type of woman that I could imaging sharing my life with. As with most crushes, that one was short-lived, and the rest of my college days seemed much like the others, but a subtle change in me was starting to take root. For perhaps the first time, I started weighing the consequences of my sin not only to myself, but to my future wife. I think it was around that time that a speaker at one of SPU’s chapel events said something that stuck with me: “You’re not ready until the kind of woman that you want to marry would actually want to marry the kind of man that you are.” That was the beginning of a new kernel of truth that wouldn’t really take root until I fell in love with my future wife.

Then in November 2001, after graduation and starting work as a computer engineer, I went on a road trip with my roommate friends and some of their friends. I rode in one of the two cars with Matt, a roommate with whom I’d had many conversations about life and faith, and Rachel, a friend of another roommate. The road trip was up to Edmonton, so we ended up spending more than 24 hours together in the car, and we all got to know each other really well. We shared some of our life stories, we talked about our faith, and the part it played in our lives. We talked about the fundamentals of intimacy in relationships with friends, and what it requires to grow and be sustained.

I found Rachel extremely attractive in every aspect, especially the integrity of her character and faith in Christ. I was in love. We started dating a week after getting back, and my life changed. I knew that I could delay no longer in becoming the man that she would want me to be. In the euphoria of new relationship, and the growth in Christ that this one brought in particular, the grip of pornography on my life slipped. I was free from it, at least temporarily, and its death blow was soon to come.

Over the next several months, the newness of my romantic relationship with Rachel was coupled with the newness of intimacy among the three of us, including Matt. In this fellowship of close friends, Up to that point, my faith was relatively blind, accepting the authority of the Bible because I was supposed to, believing in God because I always had, and because of my experiences that I couldn’t just write off as delusion. Then in this fellowship of close friends, we became deeply interested in knowing God, the object of our faith, why we believe that he exists, what he is all about, and what difference it should make in the way we live our lives.
We started reading books written by Christian writers who examined the Bible’s basis of authority, and learned of its unique characteristics among historical documents. We read books that proposed nuances that tie the doctrines of the Christian world view together into a rational view of how the world works, and how God interacts with it. Until this time, my intellect, my politics, my finances, and my faith were (somewhat ignorantly) at odds. This period of learning jump-started their integration.

As my relationship with Rachel progressed, I became more sure that she was the woman with whom I wanted to share the rest of my life. I also felt a deep desire to have no secrets from my wife, with whom I would be committing to sharing my life. On a day that we both had free from other obligations, I confessed my addiction to pornography to Rachel. It was a long day. We discussed at length any details of my story that she wanted. I answered any question that she needed answered. The experience was very painful for both of us, but neither of us regret my taking that step.

Pornography is an insidious two-edges sword that strikes most deeply exactly where most men and women are the most vulnerable. Pornography is ubiquitous in today’s world, pervading every media and using its influence to sell anything and everything that a company can create for us to buy. Men are perhaps most vulnerable to sexual temptation, and the combination of the mental re-training to strip women of their divinely-designed human dignity to be objectified as sex slaves to our fantastic whims, with the entrapping deceit that pornography is a private sin that only affects the sinner, may make it the most addicting.

As far as I’ve experienced, other than the need for God himself, women feel most deeply the need to be beautiful and uniquely valued, especially to their life-mate. Instead of being the most attractive woman in the world to her husband, pornography first asserts the lie that physical beauty is what matters most in a woman, then asserts the lie that physical beauty requires certain shapes (or not) and sizes (or naught), then extinguishes her in inadequacy under a flood of endless unrealistic expectations.

By the amazing grace of God and by the courage of Rachel to forgive, accept, and share with me the attack on her deepest fears and desires, I have been set completely free from my addiction to pornography. I can never be thankful enough. In my mind, God’s work in healing me of my dysfunctional past and patterns and transforming me into the husband that God intended me to be are indisputable evidence of his goodness and power.

In March of 2002, Rachel and I were engaged to be married. The time in my life from when I started dating Rachel to when we were married in January of 2003 was a third new beginning for me. Rachel’s faith seemed to be the center of her life, and I was (and continue to be) attracted to and challenged by her example. We had long conversations about how our faith should work itself out in different aspects of our lives. If we are truly submitted to the lordship of Christ, then our lives should be fully His. Our money is His, our family & friends are His, our church & ministries are His, our politics are His, our goals & dreams are His, our entertainment and consumption are His.

Since then, as I have slowly grown in faith and obedience, God has been at work transforming every part of my life that I am willing to submit. In His strength, I have broken other bad habits, like 20 years of nail-biting. If we are truly submitted to the lordship of Christ, then our lives should be fully His. Our money is His, our family & friends are His, our church & ministries are His, our politics are His, our goals & dreams are His, our entertainment and consumption are His. That is the ideal that I strive towards: to be fully His, and for His glory.

Any questions? ;-)