How I Learned to Let God Find Me In the Good Times and the Bad

THREE

My Second Conversion

‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Re-Defined

Between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-six I experienced a radical conversion.

The last fifteen months of the process was undoubtedly the most dramatic and fast-paced period of my transformation. In this period I would learn that, in real life, good and bad life experiences are inextricably interwoven.

I learned that this is especially true in the life of a follower of Jesus. The good and bad events and experiences of our lives are never purely good or purely bad. Good events always contain the potential for bad developments and bad events the potential for good ones.

In the ‘bad’ events, the person who desires to follow Jesus is given an opportunity to do something that makes all the difference to the outcome of her/his negative experiences; namely, to invite God into them.

When he or she does, the potential for life-transforming good that lies hidden in the bad experiences slowly becomes reality. By allowing God to find you in your bad times you turn bad into good—in fact, into better-than-good!

This is very good news. It means that the painful times in our lives, and the times when evil assaults us, do not have to have the last word.

I also learned that without our ‘bad’ experiences we would be deprived of priceless insights, lessons and spiritual tools that we could never acquire in any other way!

My conversion therefore taught me that—spiritually speaking—I needed to re-define the meaning of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the life of one who keeps seeking God.

Pattern that my Conversion Took

My journey to find again the Christ or—more accurately—to be found again by Him was a process that started gently and with little fanfare. It was only after my radical transformation had taken place that I was able to look back and see that God had in fact quietly planted the first seeds of my transformation a full four and a half years earlier.

At the end of those four and a half years I was a radically different person; not different in the personality sense, perhaps—although the repercussions were definitely felt there as well—but in the sense that I became very clearly aware that my consciousness had been transformed from the roots up.

What I experienced at the deepest level of my being was far, far more than merely a series of ‘aha’, light-bulb moments. Rather, there was a change in the very lens through which I viewed God, myself, the entire world and all the people in it. I now was able to see God, myself and others with radically new eyes!

My conversion began a few days before the Christmas of 1979, as I joined my church congregation in the singing of a familiar Christmas carol, We Three Kings, a carol I had known from infancy. Suddenly, a particular line in the refrain claimed my continuing attention: ‘Guide us to Thy perfect light’. In the carol, this was the request of the Magi as they had begun their journey to find the new-born Christ. The Magi were relying on the light of a specific star in the East to guide them to the Perfect Light.

As I repeated, verse by verse, the carol’s refrain, I suddenly sensed that the request of these eastern kings was somehow quickly becoming my own. I didn’t know why, but I sensed that Christ might be inviting me, too, to allow Him to guide me to His Perfect Light.

Much later on, the Lord would reveal the ‘why’ behind this. For now, all I knew was that Christ seemed to be calling me to Himself; and, as it would turn out, He was calling me to Himself ina brand new way.

Over the next three years, other unexpected events in my life would follow. Although I couldn’t know it at the time, these events would serve as the stepping stones that would culminate in my ‘second’ conversion.