Grace...

This past year I took part in a program that exists for the sole purpose to get youth passionate about God and with that passion at hand, go out into the world. For two months of this program I lived in the Republic of Vanuatu doing "missions" work... for the good of the kingdom.

While in Vanuatu, with the intent of leading people to the Lord, an enormous amount of questions were raised in my head about receiving salvation. Phrases such as "become a Christian", "Ask Jesus into your heart", etc. etc. really make me think.

While my team was street preaching, doing dramas in the middle of the road, one-on-one evangelizing and so on, I was thinking about this conversion experience that we were aiming for in these people's lives. All these efforts were so that they would take action and verbally accept the Lord into their lives. As they did, they came alongside what we were saying/preaching/acting and accept our belief system, theology, practices, and even our own personal conviction, as their own. At that point they became a stat, a mark on our paper under "salvation received" and then we moved onto the next. Don't even get me started on the stats, aside from them, a major point of struggle for me was this: just because they told me they wanted to "make Jesus their best friend" and repeated after me... were they actually saved? They knew only what I told them in the last 15 minutes of their life that they had spent with me. So at the end of that 15 minutes, when all was said and done and they had a bible in their hands, had their lives changed? Or... did their lives NEED to change? There's no possible way that in that instant, Jesus became their best friend, and as for Jesus coming into their hearts.. I don't even know what the hell to think about that.

Oh Lord, I'm confusing myself.

Okay so, is that how you "become a Christian"? Is the physical act of verbalizing your desire for Christ to atone your life, the point when grace is received? Is it really in that moment when God is like "okayyy wait for it... and BINGO... now my blood has covered her"? Or is it a life-long process of figuring things out, living your life for good and rejecting evil? Or could it really be a specific point of when you accept the fact that there is hope in God and you want to live your life with that hope, but it could potentially be at a different point than when you vocalized your desire for it and in that... if you just ask Jesus into your heart.. you're missing the boat? If grace is received in the recited prayer, and having a defining moment as a believer is crucial... I might have a problem with it, and my view of God might be completely skewed.

I know that Jesus came to seek and save the lost... being us. I know that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. I know that Jesus' death on the cross was the ultimate sacrifice for the world and through it, the world received grace. So grace is offered to every single person, when do we receive it?

To bring this to a conclusion... throughout the missions work that I did in Vanuatu, I saw validity in the sharing knowledge of the hope that is found in Jesus Christ. There's nothing like it and I know that it has changed my life... everyone deserves to know. However... should it have stopped there? Should there not have been a defining moment of people "becoming Christians"? Was it real when they did? Was grace received as a result of those moments, or will it come on its own... the repeat-after-me being a waste of time?

I'll stop before this gets even more incoherent.

...Yuck. I'm so uneducated.