A Little Background on Your Anonymous Blogger

Because I'm by nature a rather private person, I've decided there's no real reason to share my actual identity with readers. However, if there are any readers out there for this blog, a little in the way of personal information would probably help greatly to establish some context.

I'm in my thirties. I'm married to my wonderful, beautiful high school sweetheart and we have an equally wonderful and beautiful baby girl, with a couple of dogs and cats too. And, until very, very recently, I've never attended church regularly.

A big reason of this is that mine was simply not a church-going family growing up. By and large, if we were gathered in church, somebody in the community was probably dead. On top of that, the few Sunday church experiences I did have were not terribly pleasant - "church," to me, came to mean a building with no air conditioning where you sit on a hard bench for hours at a time while an old - usually VERY old - man yelled at you that you were going to Hell. It was the kind of endeavor, I decided at a very young age, that I could just as well do without.

In high school, I was friends with some die-hard lifelong Christian kids. I took part in prayer circle, not necessarily because I thought it would help anything but because I figured it certainly couldn't hurt. I went to a couple of youth-group lock-ins that were pretty enjoyable. I did vacation Bible school in the summer because in my rural community, the summer activity options were pretty severely limited.

In college, I took a New Testament course because it was required to graduate. It was interesting, and the professor (who has remained a close friend) was very good. Still, though, my 'Bible study' remained a very scholarly pursuit. I approached my NT reading no differently than my Brit Lit or my reading for Poetry & Prose.

Fast forward to grad school and beyond. I've set goals, some loftier than others, some of which I've met and several I've missed. Through it all, religion came to the fore exactly once. It was the year before I was to finish my MA work, and the pressure was fast becoming unbearable. The graduate workload far surpassed anything I'd experienced as an undergraduate, and the resulting lack of any free time meant little time for friends - not that I really had a lot of those, anyhow. In desperation, and having found out that grad students simply don't have enough discretionary income to purchase alcohol in sufficient quantities to drown all their sorrows, I found my thoughts drifting back to those aforementioned Christian friends from high school. They always seemed so gosh-darned peaceful in their approach to life. I wondered if there might be something there.

So, it was off to the local 'everything's $1' store, where I purchased a Bible. It was a 'New' King James version, but reading-wise it was pretty much everything I remembered from childhood. I could smell the stuffy air and feel the hard bench. I slogged all the way through to Deuteronomy, then slammed head-first into the wall that IS Leviticus. With a sigh, I pushed the Bible off to the side of the itty-bitty coffee table in my equally itty-bitty first apartment, went to the itty-bitty kitchen and got a (full-sized!) beer from the itty-bitty fridge.

I drifted a little more. I let what began as a part-time job morph into my proclaimed identity, which became a big problem once I came to the slow realization that I actually hated the work. I left that job and took another, then set about redefining myself in light of it.

A friend who was younger than me committed suicide. Another, also younger than me, died a shocking death from cancer nobody even knew he had. I finished my master's degree but quit a year into my doctoral work, having already come to the conclusion that I would probably never use either because to do so would just bring back a lot of bad memories.

I drifted still more. After a year out of grad school, I started to miss it. So, I went back and enrolled in different program. I finished that one, got promoted, and now when people ask about me I define myself in terms of that.

All of which is a long-winded, roundabout way of saying that, for someone who prides himself on knowledge, I can be a very slow learner at times.

When we found out we were going to have a baby, my wife and I decided that we wanted to find a church so that he or she could have that sort of influence growing up. Starting around the end of January 2008, we began spending each Sunday with a different church, trying to find one with the right 'feel.' My wife regularly attended a fairly traditional church growing up, and luckily for her suffered no ill effects from it. As such, it fell to me to bring all the excess baggage to this grand experiment. I wanted my child to have a religious influence, but I didn't want it to be the same negative experience that I had.

And, by the time May rolled around, that's precisely what I was afraid we were going to end up with. Week after week, congregation after congregation, we kept finding boring, unwelcoming groups claiming to be churches. (In fairness, they weren't outwardly, hostilely unwelcoming; rather, they just didn't really go to any great lengths to make newcomers feel at home). In desperation (a bit of a theme is cropping up, no?) we decided to go for broke and try one of the area 'megachurches,' Quest Community Church. At least, I had assumed it was a megachurch based on the simple criteria that they have a large building visible from the highway.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Quest is a large place, without question - but it feels much smaller. It's the first place we went where we actually felt as though people were genuinely happy to have us. And, tellingly, it's the first place we bothered returning to.

And we've kept returning. At the end of this month, it will be exactly one year since we stopped church-shopping and set up base camp in the back left corner of Quest. Our daughter has since arrived, and already seems to enjoy the time she spends each weekend in the nursery of the kids' section. Now that I'm 'here,' though, I feel the need to figure out why, and exactly what it is I'm supposed to be doing. This blog will hopefully chronicle this experience, as I continue simply seeking the truth about Christianity and what it means for my life.