How to Enter In

From those evangelistic meetings of my childhood, I thought that “believing on the Lord Jesus Christ” simply meant being fully persuaded that what the church believed about Christ’s divinity was true.

 

This did not seem difficult. In fact, it was not long after the revival tent had been packed up and moved to another town that I decided to join the church. One Sunday at the close of the regular morning service in our church, my preacher-father issued “the invitation.” On an impulse, I rose, marched down the aisle, and so became a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Canton. Because I had marched spontaneously, I remember my father was so moved that he stood in front of the altar and looked at me through eyes swimming with tears behind his spectacles.

Years passed. Not until my college days did I recognize that something was missing in this inherited Christianity based on an untested assent. By that time I had acquired a parallel King James—Moffatt New Testament. Moffatt’s translation brought the ancient words alive for me.

I found that the evangelist of my childhood had been right in insisting that the only way we can really know God is by looking at Jesus Christ. Christ is the center of Christianity. To pretend anything else—that we need think of Him only as a good man who was also a great teacher, for instance—is not Christianity, whatever else it may be.

But I was also astonished to discover that no mere intellectual acceptance of Christ’s divinity would have satisfied Jesus as a way of entrance into His kingdom. He will settle for nothing less than making Him the ruler of one’s life, with the inevitable result of a practical day-by-day obedience: “Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46) No wonder marching down the church aisle had not changed me one whit.

I feel that I have come to a crisis in my life [I wrote in the journal I was keeping during these college years]. It’s very easy for me to see how people can lose their so-called religion when they have gotten enough education to make them think at all. That is very likely to happen to anyone whose religion is simply an inheritance or a habit. Unless something intervenes, it could happen to me.

My religion is not on a very firm basis, I’m afraid. I have had no vital experience. God doesn’t seem real to me. I believe now—because of people I know who do have something vital and real, like Peter Marshall. But I can’t go on like this. What are we here in this world for anyway?

This questioning may have seemed like a prelude to change, but the fact is that I did “go on that way” for many years, even after my graduation and marriage to the young preacher, Peter Marshall.

During those years I was an active, interested minister’s wife. In addition to my homemaking, I attended women’s meetings, led Bible studies, made talks, called on parishioners, and took part in program-committee meetings. Obviously most of this work was on the organizational level. Even when I led Bible studies for small groups of women or gave a talk or book review, I was still relying mostly on other people’s ideas about the Christian life. Those who listened carefully mussed have missed the authentic note of personal experience.

During all this time, I never stopped struggling to find the way to God for myself.

Then, in March 1943, came the event that was to change my life. A routine physical check-up brought bad news. Chest X rays showed a soft spotting over both lungs. Specialists were unable to make a conclusive diagnosis, but the trouble appeared to be tuberculosis. Tuberculosis! Hated word, hated disease. I was ordered to bed twenty-four hours a day for an indefinite period. Fifteen months later I had gained some fifteen pounds; otherwise nothing was changed. The area of infection was as widespread as at the beginning. When other specialists were consulted, they rejected the usual pneumothorax treatment, as well as surgery, or even the use of the drugs that were then beginning to be used in TB cases. Their only advice was “More bed rest.” When we asked how long, they said frankly they had no idea.

Often during those discouraging days there was a vivid picture in my mind: I was groping my way along a pitch-black tunnel. There were passages, twistings and turnings off the main tunnel. I tried this way and that. Repeatedly I found only dead ends and was forced to grope my way back to the black center shaft. I clung to the hope that somehow, sometime, I would emerge from darkness into the sunlight again. But in order to get there, I had to proceed resolutely straight ahead.

I knew by now that there were no short cuts. Did this mean that I had to deal directly with God, who was insisting through circumstances that He alone knew the shortest way to the sunlight of His presence?

There was in me a desire for an all-out effort to reach Him, born of desperation. Sloughed off now were all the trappings of religion, most of them concerned with the ceremonial or organizational aspects of churches that so often confused the central issue. I began to see wholeness as more than the search for physical health. As I understood the viewpoint of Jesus, it was that physical soundness is merely part of a more profound wholeness. In this sense, wholeness can only come about as inner cleavages are healed, as man is joined to the source of his being. Thus, for me, the search for health became the search for a relationship with God. The questions was, what was blocking that relationship?

I stood before my Maker starkly, stripped of pretenses. My unworthiness shrieked at me. My tendency to over-criticalness, to harsh, hasty judgments. My little jealousies, the self-centeredness that had made me a poor one for teamwork of any kind. Lying in bed I summoned up the dishonesties of my past. Once in high school I had cheated on an algebra test. Another time, when I had been a treasurer of a school organization, I had “borrowed” some money from the fund and then paid it back ten days later.

Having confessed every wrong that I had surfaced to my conscious mind, I then specifically claimed God’s promise of 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Then I proceeded to burn the list and the notes I had made as a symbol that everything was, from that moment, forgiven—forgotten—gone forever.

In subsequent months more of the debris did come into my consciousness. For instance, I became aware of a compartment in my being in which I had locked certain persons whom I disliked. They could go their way; I would go mine. But now Christ seemed to be standing by the locked door saying, “That isn’t forgiveness. It won’t do. No closed doors are allowed. The Kingdom of God is the kingdom of right relationships. Remember what I said—‘If ye forgive no men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses?’ If you cannot forgive, you cannot enter the kingdom. This unforgiveness grieves me more than any cheating on an algebra test.”

By the time I had faced up to this, it was the summer of 1944, time for our annual trek back to the Cape Cod cottage. Later that June, early one morning I was reading Jesus’ parable about the cleansed house, where an unclean spirit leaves and then returns to find it put in order.

There was danger, then, in my attempts to clean house unless the Spirit of God took over the house. The keys and the management of my house had to be turned over to Christ. For how could I ask Him to heal me until He was completely charge? Any human physician requires the surrender of a given case into his care; he can do nothing unless the patient agrees to follow his orders. Common sense told me that exactly the same was true of the Great Physician.

So  that sunshiny June morning, I got out of bed and stood at the bedroom window looking out at the garden that Peter had so lovingly planted: roses, white hollyhocks, yellow day lilies, and zinnias all a riot of color. A blue, blue sky rose above and the sea stood just over the brow of the hill. There I stood and took the plunge. It amounted to a quiet pledge to God, the promise of a blank check with my life:

“It is ten-twelve a.m. on the twenty-second of June, 1944,” I said. “Form this moment I promise that I’ll try to do whatever You tell me for the rest of my life, insofar as You’ll make it clear to me what Your wishes are. I’m weak and many times I’ll probably want to renege on this. But Lord, You’ll have to help me with that too.”

I took a deep breath; I was trembling. I had entered in. Yet nothing seemed different. The hollyhock faces still nodded at the window. Fluffy clouds still floated in that blue, blue sky. I turned and noted in my journal the date and the hour of the promise I had just made. There would be moments in the future when this pledge would not seem real to me. But it was real, and writing it down would help to remind me.

 

I felt no emotion other than the relief of knowing that I had completed my part, so far as I knew it. This brought me a peace of mind I had not known during the tortuous days of self-probing and writing the letters of confession.

From “Beyond Our Selves”