WHEN WERE YOU SAVED? [Good Friday, 4-10-20]

Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Times of Winter

WHEN WERE YOU SAVED?  [Good Friday, 4-10-20]

It was almost the start of the school year when the U of IL history dept told younger daughter Katie that if she would go there for her PhD, they would give her a free ride. She had planned to return to IU for grad work, but you just don’t turn down a full scholarship, so she changed her plans. That meant that she got a late start looking for housing in Champaign-Urbana. But there was a room available in a nice big old house, very near the history department building, and it was all grad students, and run by a church, so what could go wrong?

Well, it was a fundamentalist church, and the other 21 grad students were very conservative. Which meant the other 21 were badly outnumbered.

Katie grew up in a personally conservative but socially and theologically liberal home. Went to liberal churches. At least, they were when her father pastored there. She was taught to be open-minded and respectful of others. She was taught more to look for the questions than to look for the answers, because an answer shuts the search down, while a question takes it further. Or maybe she just picked up those qualities on her own. Anyway, I think that approach has been why she is such a great teacher and author and researcher and mother and…

Her new housemates looked at her with skepticism. She went to church, claimed to be a Christian, but she didn’t talk like a Christian, someone who had the answers. One day a young man asked her, rather doubtfully, “Katie, are you saved?”

“Yes,” she said, quite confidently. He was surprised that she was even willing to respond to such a question.

With doubt in his voice, he asked, “When were you saved?”

“On Good Friday,” she answered.

John Robert McFarland

Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.  [Hebrews 12:1b-2.]