From New Age to Christ Jesus: Why I Became a Christian

In the parish of St. Edmund's Episcopal school in Chicago, I'd stare at the rendering of Jesus hanging on a crucifix, and bristled when Father Mitchell told us we had to talk to God through Jesus.

Why did I need a go-between in order to speak to God? That's what my young mind wondered.

I spoke aloud to God in my bed as a 10-year-old, and I felt better.

When my dad put down the bottle more and retired from his post-office job and joined a neighborhood church around that same time, I watched his metamorphosis with a curious and wary eye.

In ensuing years, when my sister and I would come home during college breaks, we'd get all dressed up in our business suits and stockings and attend services with him at the Greater Institutional AME Church on the corner of the south side neighborhood.

These were only the beginning sprouts of a deeper faith to follow.

Getting New Age-y

By the time I'd graduated from Florida A & M University in 1990 and came back home as a "boomerang" to live with my parents, I no longer visited the little corner church with my dad during those years.

After all, my mom had given up on church mess and the hypocrisy of it all years before -- and she didn't go with him, so why should I?

"Go read your f*(&ing Bible!" Mommy shouted at Daddy during one argument.

"That's blasphemy!" he countered.

It was a tables-turning shift to the same old arguments I'd witnessed between them for years.

I eloped with a wild-haired man from school, and was more interested in blowing marijuana smoke out my childhood bedroom window to hide from my parents than picking up any kind of Word of God to read.

The stuff Oprah pitched began to sound more enlightened and fascinating and elevating to me instead of "that boring old Christianity" that I thought I knew all about.

Give me The Celestine Prophecy or The Soul's Code or all that other crap that spoke of a New Age millennia to come...

My So-Called Perfect Life

By 1999, I'd long divorced the dreadlocked man and married my new husband.

I'd left the drama of Chicago and my parents behind, and relocated to Ohio to start a new blessed life.

I was still more into Oprah's books more than the Book of John or Luke or The Revelation...

But curious and painful things began to happen in my life.

"I'm pregnant," I told my surprised husband, as I handed him cigars wrapped in pink and blue ribbons.

"I see no baby," my OB told me weeks later during an exam that revealed a blighted ovum.

The second pregnancy that year would end the same way -- but I barely had time to take it in, because I was too busy burying my beloved Mommy, who died unexpectedly in her sleep at 68 years of age.

Who Can I Run To?

After the repast, after the beautiful family who sweated in our kitchen making spaghetti went home, I needed something more than those New Age-y Oprah books to keep me going.

I went back to a warehouse-looking church (harvesting souls!) called The House of the Lord in Akron, Ohio, right off the highway.

I'd visited the church before with a friend on occasion, but this time I went back for real, with a vengeance -- even alone, every Sunday.

I sat and listened and rationalized all the reasons I didn't need to walk up to the front during the altar call.

I already believe in Jesus -- do I still need to go up?

Finally, one day I laid my cerebral head knowledge aside and determined in my heart that I was going up and saying that prayer of faith:

Father, forgive me

Change me, make me who You want me to be

Come into my heart

I believe Your Son died on the cross for me...

...giving me eternal life

I prayed that prayer "and meant it," as Bishop Joey used to say.

And from that day forward, God has shown me some amazing things that belong in a Hollywood movie.

He's given me business success, amazing visions and dreams, and greater and deeper relationships and a purpose in life.

But best of all, He has given me an assurance that I don't need to fear death -- and that when I take my last breath, the knowledge that I'm going to something and Someone much greater.

I'm going to Christ.