Will I Fall Away?
The first forty years of my relationship with Christ remind me of the felt-boards my childhood Sunday School teachers used to illustrate Bible stories. They would put up a cloth Jesus and a disciple or two, and as the story changed, they would peel off the felt disciples to make room for new characters. Like a felt disciple, I, too, would sometimes join the Jesus story. When I felt powerless, when I needed something from God, up on the board I would go. But once my need was met I would pull away. I wanted the freedom to live my own story on my own terms. I did this time and again, as did a lot of the other "disciples" I knew. Now and then I wondered about the disciples who never left the story, who never came down from the board. How could they live like that, always a part of the same story? I liked my freedom. But my life turned upside down when I was forty, and I realized that what I thought was freedom was not freedom at all. I was a slave to the constant tug and p