Baptismal Testimony of Jody Cabble (12/03/05)

I have been in Kentucky since August 1991.  I followed my cousin Sam down here.  She is older than I am (I will pay for making her say this later) and I have been following her most of my life.    Sam’s family is the only part of our family that has a relationship with God. Neither my parents nor grandparents attended church.  Sam has been a Christian as long as I can remember and she began her crusade to save me about 3 seconds after I arrived in Lexington.  I tolerated it because she loves me and she tolerated my refusal to conform for the same reason.  I would occasionally attend church and even found a minister that I liked at her church.  But I never felt “right” about being there.  And the older I got and the more I watched people I just didn’t think this whole “Christian-thing” was for me.

I felt like the Bible had lots of rules and requirements and standards and the fundamental Christian movement that this country has taken left a really bad taste in my mouth.  You see, I am secular and pluralistic and liberal and Christianity seemed to me too narrow and confining and conservative and hypocritical.  And I just couldn’t reconcile this idea so many people, Christian people, had about marriage amendments, homosexuality and different religions.  I believed in the historical Jesus.  I read Borg and Wright and Knox and Crossan and while at DePauw University I studied the world religions and great thinkers and I believed that the Bible was an historical document inspired by God; but I just couldn’t buy the whole package.  I wasn’t perfect and I thought if I became a Christian I had to act like I was and embrace some ideas that quite simply I think are wrong.  And then almost 14 years after moving to Lexington I got a phone call one Sunday from Sam and she said, “Well, I have finally done it- I have found you a church.”  And she was talking about Central.  She attended the sermon Mark preached about homosexuality and the responsibility of Christians not to judge but to love.  A couple weeks later I attended and realized the very barriers that had kept me from having a personal relationship with God and from becoming a Christian, Mark preached about removing.  And as I attended I realized that these are not narrow confining people and that God doesn’t expect us to be perfect- that’s exactly why he sent Jesus.  These are people trying to remain close to God in a modern age.  Paul reminds us that “all have come short of the glory of God.”   I attended Mark’s pastor’s class and I began to form my own opinion of what God wants from us based on my reading of the Bible and Mark’s teaching.  And this is it- Love God, love each other.