Return to the City of My Second Birth

On Thursday, February 28, 2008 I drove up to Bellingham Washington for a quick, nostalgic visit. I was in the north part of Seattle with some extra time on my hands, when on a lark I decided to zip up to my college alma mater, Western Washington University, for a blast from the past.

A quarter century earlier I had been an art and music student there at the beautiful campus perched above Bellingham Bay. It was at WWU that I brushed wild colors across stretched canvases in the art studio to the smell of oil paints and mineral spirits. It was there that I spent endless hours shut up in windowless practice rooms as a music student fingering scales and jazz riffs on my guitar. It was in this town that I played and sang in smoky night clubs filled with the rank smell of cheap beer. It was there that I watched the movie Elephant Man and was embarrassed by the overwhelming sense of pity that made me sob in front of my friends as if I had just seen my own pathetic spiritual condition exposed in front of a shocked audience.

It was there, twenty-five years ago, that I first suspected a sovereign God existed behind the canopy of stars, who might call me to account for who I was and what I thought and what I did. I was a Kentucky boy, the casualty of a broken home, who had wound up in the Pacific Northwest to chase after his life's purpose at a university. It was in Bellingham that I was yanked out of my atheistic existentialism and summoned into the Kingdom of God like a hapless islander who gets swept out of his village by the surge of a tsunami, then deposited back into a pile of debris that was his former life. There wasn't much worth salvaging, so I began a new life, trusting in Christ.

I had lived in Bellingham for six years. I had rented various apartments, dated various girls, been indoctrinated by various professors, and partied with various acquaintances. The kingdom of God had sent most of my friends packing. At the name of Jesus, they had grown suspicious and distant, like I was the Elephant Man, the freak of faith. Eventually we parted company, which left me with time on my own to soak up the words of C.S. Lewis, R.C. Sproul and Josh MacDowell, to name a few, who wrote about a God who redeems sinners. Like me.

I read the Bible, too, starting the with John's gospel, which introduced me to Christ, the Light of the World, the Bread of Life, the Resurrection and the Life.

Back in the present, I walked across campus observing students bustling from class to class. They seemed driven by academic purpose, yet adrift in the relativistic culture of higher education with no sense of God’s superintending presence.

I began to pray. I asked God to call His elect out of the darkness as He had called me back in 1983. I prayed for dozens, perhaps a hundred individuals, asking the Lord to pour out His Spirit on the students. I circled back across the campus and aimed at every soul that came in sight, praying that God would redeem sinners and transform them into future husbands and wives and parents of faith, who would bring Him glory.

I entered the music building, where I had sung in the university choir as a cynical atheist, and I sang a hymn aloud in the elevator. I went into the Viking Union student center and asked the Lord to give me the opportunity to witness to at least four people on campus before I left. In my folder I had four spiritual survey sheets that I had developed for sharing the gospel.

For the next two hours I sipped Starbuck’s coffee and interviewed four students. I asked a dozen different questions. I explained the problem of sin and the good news of salvation in Christ alone. I left each of them with this thought to ponder: “Is it possible that God is calling you to believe in Jesus to save you from punishment? “ Two answered “yes,” one answered “no,” and one answered “not sure.” One young man said he thought that if God was calling him, He would probably do it by sending him a dream, or a vision, or something unusual. I asked him if it were possible that God might send a stranger from out of town (me) as a divine appointment to talk to him about faith. He might still be thinking about that.

After I had interviewed the students, I asked them about their majors, their interests, their goals in life. They, in turn, asked me why I was out interviewing people. I got to share my testimony of how I had been a student at WWU twenty-five years ago when God called me out of darkness and into light. He had chosen me for His own, even though I had mocked believers and claimed Christianity was a crutch for the weak-minded. God had allowed me to marry a wonderful Christian woman and start a Christian family. Now, as a father of five children and the pastor of a great church, it was a privilege to return to WWU to speak with others about God's amazing grace. I gave each of them a business card with my email address, along with a reference to Ephesians 1:4.

Now that I’m back at home in Grants Pass, Oregon, my trip to Bellingham seems like a dream. It was a wonderful little side trip from my commitments in Seattle. Since I may not be back for another twenty-five years, I will relish the dose of nostalgia. And I will pray: Lord, send your tsunami again into the city of my second birth.