Sovereign Grace Blog

A Biographical Sketch of My Conversion Experience (Part 1) by Joe Lamay

                                                                      Childhood

I was raised as the sixth child of seven in a Roman Catholic family. The smell of my dad’s cologne meant it was Sunday morning and time for church. Though my parents raised us as a religiously observant family, by the time of my senior year in high school, none of my older siblings was attending Mass anymore. Being raised in the culture of my Catholic family meant that, throughout my childhood, I assumed the existence of God and that Jesus Christ was God who became a human being in order to die for sinners. I believed that He was the one and only savior of the world. After all, that is what I was taught. That was my culture. I went to church. I took communion. I made acts of contrition…at least in word, because I did not have any idea what the term meant when I entered the confessional booth as a kid. I thought it was all one word: Aktovcontrision. Yet, I was not a Christian. Of course, I didn’t know I was unsaved. Most of us don’t know we are unsaved until our eyes are opened by the miracle of new birth and we awaken as believers who have a personal, intimate faith in Jesus Christ.

 

                                                                 I loved to sin

One thing is for sure: I loved to sin. My life was a pursuit of the natural desires of my flesh. I grew up with two great passions: playing baseball and living to party. The only thing that kept me from smoking dope on any particular day was a baseball practice or game later that evening. Only my desire to perform and excel on the field superseded my desire to get stoned or drunk during most of my high school years.

The latter part of my teenage years was described by the music of my generation and from one of my favorite bands, Pink Floyd:

“So, so you think you can tell heaven from Hell,

blue skies from pain.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?

A smile from a veil?

Do you think you can tell?...

And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.

We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year. Running over the same old ground. What have you found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.”

By the fall of 1980, emptiness and the same old fears were becoming the air I breathed. I fell into my first bout with a sense of profound meaninglessness and mild depression which only marijuana soothed…temporarily. I was a hollow, barren, lost soul trying to numb the pain of reality with that which could never truly satisfy. But the closet of artificial peace was more bearable than the pain and fear of purposelessness.

 

Hundreds of years ago, the great mathematician Blaise Pascal pinpointed the one main problem of my life when he wrote, “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end [goal]…This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.” I, like everybody else, was seeking happiness or, to say it in the negative, seeking the absence of pain.

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