Defining Salvation (A Four Year Old’s Crisis)

I do not ever remember a time when I did not believe in God. 

And I do not ever remember a time when I did not know that God was my destiny (not sure of what other word would fit), and that includes my post-highschool foray into the alternative underground in the Dallas area, when I was most certainly doing my best not to think about Him.

My mother, having come back to the faith of her childhood after I was born, loved to teach me Scripture.  I have many happy memories of her and I memorizing together, and I could probably recite more at age three than many churched adults can today.  My favorite was Psalm 23.  More than any other mental image, I pictured God as my Shepherd and I loved Him.

Then one night, a visiting missionary’s child told me that God was going to send me to Hell where I would burn forever in fire.  I was outraged.  We fought for a while, we two girls in our sleeping bags, side by side in the dark, but I was only four and she was two years older than I, so I finally resorted to what all kids with loving parents will do in a time of crisis: ran to mom.  She greeted my tear-streaked face with surprise and listened as I gulped and sobbed out my story, my friend standing by with her arms crossed in frustration at my obstinance, and then my mother did something that took my breath completely away. 

She said that my friend was right.

 I don’t remember the exact details after that, other than the shock that I felt run through my little body, and the obvious response of asking how I could get out of such a horrific fate.  I quickly got on my knees and said the Sinner’s Prayer and that was the day, written in my mother’s hand in a little Bible she gave me, I was “saved.”

It is the day I have referred to for years now, only to question it recently, particularly as I muse over the different ways of looking at the atonement and begin to recoil from the predominating (at least within my evangelical culture) “legal-transaction” view.

Is being born again a moment where one says a prayer? 

Is being born again the act of performing a required duty in order to escape eternal burning? 

Is being born again the assent to a set of mental beliefs? 

I already loved God.  The only thing that night did was change the way I viewed Him.  Instead of a Shepherd with a smiling face, I now had a different image of Him, a schizophrenic one, if you will.  On the one hand, there was the good Jesus who loved me.  On the other hand, there was the Scary God who would burn me. 

In order to keep my faith sane, I buried the image of the Scary One until it came up later to haunt me, floating there beneath the shallow surface in the form of an unspoken picture of a God who demanded perfection and who’s approval was given only after the performance of proper actions.

Though my fundamentalist childhood would decry a faith that said God only granted approval after the performance of specific actions, their definition of salvation was an example of that very fact.  It had less to do with Christ than it did to do with a legal transaction, the Sinner’s Prayer being my part of the deal.   

So tonight I wonder if they were right, or if they, with good intentions, missed the fullness of the truth.  I wonder if I was my Shepherd’s lamb all along.  I wonder if a heart turned towards Him is a more accurate definition of salvation (or the evidence of salvation?) than saying a set of legal words is.  And tonight I wonder if, in that dark bedroom when my little friend repeated what her parents had taught her, the resulting experience was actually more destructive to my Godward heart than it was salvific.