Autobiographies are hard, and harder still when they are limited to three hundred words. I firmly believe that most people are living contradictions. I believe that most people are hypocrites, and mostly unintentionally. Most of us have principles, goals, desires, things that we are concerned with to the highest point of our being. And most of us, in some way or another, conscious or unconscious, work against those values. I am no different. I am a conflict, just as I would bet many of you are.
A sinful saint, or a saintly sinner, perhaps, I am a religious man. Perhaps this is where the conflict of my being begins. Born to the son of a Southern Baptist deacon and a cradle Episcopalian mother, I found it strange and fascinating that my family did not attend a church, but that we prayed before meals and identified ourselves as Christians. My parents finally met in the middle, and took my brother and I to the Methodist church. It could have been just to quiet our questions, or appease the neighbors, but they faithfully took us to Sunday school weekly, sometimes not even staying for church themselves, and I loved it! I drank in the stories, I learned the right answers, and best of all, I got real good at praying.
It wasn’t until high school that I realized I had become the very thing my father hated, a Pharisee, a hypocrite. On the church council I sat through budget meetings, furious about the way money was used, but I still paid the man for my cup at the keg party the next Friday. I came to college and kept on my good mask most of the time, but then I learned a very valuable lesson and joined the Church universal. That lesson: it is better to have faith than knowledge, and better to be surrendered and humbly devoted than to know the answers, but not know who Jesus is.
