I used to be a Christian who didn't think about Jesus. I was bored
with him. I remember telling my husband one day that I was tired of
hearing him say, "Jesus loves you, Luma." It all seemed trite and
superficial. I wanted, I needed, something deeper. Something more
challenging to my mind, more impactful than "Jesus died on the cross for
your sins." That tired story, heard countless times since my father
first spoke the gospel to me in a train station in Thessaloniki, rang
hollow.
But despite my weakness, ambivalence, and even hostility, this same
gospel has never let me go and will not let me go—through hardships,
divorce, rebellion, passivity, legalism, and back again. Although I
believe I've been a Christian since I was 8 years old, for many years my
faith was accompanied by a cloudiness and distortion like that of the
blind man Jesus healed: "I see men, but they look like trees walking" (Mark 8:24).
It hurts to write these words, yet they must be written. They must be
written for the sake of many who silently live the way I lived and think
the way I thought.
Most of my life has been spent finding one way or another to atone
for myself. Operating from a hazy understanding of what Christ did in
his life and death to win my salvation, this self-atonement was like a
vortex—a downward spiral into the depth of my amnesia. Continue at Luma Simms
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