Searching the World for God

In my teen years, I attended youth group at the local synagogue a couple of times, but that didn’t engage me. I was really adrift. I was searching for God … to the point that I confronted my father with this question: “Daddy, is there a God?”

I think this was a crucial question for him. He had grown up in a strictly Orthodox family and abandoned that practice in his early 20s – probably when he went to college, although I’m not sure. I do know that he and my mother were great social justice warriors in their time … and were married to each other twice. The first time was a secret marriage at a liberal Unitarian church in New York City; the second time was in a traditional Orthodox ceremony in Jersey City, when my paternal grandparents discovered they were already married and – according to my grandfather – they were living in sin. Daddy was clearly struggling between the faith of his fathers and the culture of the time.

But my father was a gracious, loving man, so when I asked him, “Is there a God?” He gave me the answer that was perfect for me.

I want to share that I am a coward; I don’t think I would have been able to make that pivotal decision if my parents were still alive. Even though they were only cultural Jews, I was convinced that my decision to become a Christian would have broken their hearts.

But as he always has, and as he always will, God protected me … in his own mysterious way. In 1979, my mother died, and I moved back to New York to be closer to my family. My father had died 10 years earlier when I was just 20. While the early loss of both my parents still grieves me, God made my decision an easy one. I didn’t have to worry about how other people felt about my baptism. I didn’t have to think about whether my family would shun me. My only decision was whether I wanted to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, which I did, in June of 1980, at Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City, where my father and I had spent some leisurely hours in my childhood, sitting in the peaceful graveyard, on various excursions to New York. Surely, God has this wonderful sense of resolution.

And that’s just the beginning of the story. God has taken me on a 40-year journey – yes, the reference is intentional – through ups and downs, hills and valleys, to the fruition of his deep call on my life … ordination in the Anglican Church of North America. And I am grateful that my father knew the right answer to my teen-aged question: “Is there a God?”

What do you think?