Tired of Running

By: John Spellman

When I was tired of running, and felt like I had gotten out most of my aggression and I stood on the sand by the shore and just

stared out into it. I decided that I would ask God where I was supposed to go from here. I had returned to his church and continued going every Sabbath. I wanted to know what more I needed to do before I could receive his blessings. I wanted to be able to talk to him or to hear from him but not just through prayer. I wanted something else.

I stood on the shore asking God in my mind to appear in front of me and give me some direction. I didn’t understand what he wanted from me. I was out there for a long time. The only thing I saw out there were the birds searching for food over the water. I refused to move from where I was standing.

“God” I said in my mind, “I know you’re real. I know you’re out there. I believe in you and I’m showing you my faith by standing here and refusing to move until you show me or tell me something. I’ve come back to the church, I’m trying to do the right thing and I know you are out there and that you hear me. Why don’t you answer me? I know you are real and that you can answer me, so where are you? I will not move until I hear from you! What am I supposed to do now? How long will you make me wait? What do I do now?”

I found myself talking to God about things going on in my family, with my friends, and how I needed his power. I became obsessed with trying to understand how to use it. It was too the point (and still is) that I attend church with a notebook and take notes on the sermons. I wanted to know what kind of new potential God’s spirit could unlock in me. I needed it! My obsession with ascending and bettering myself could only take me so far working at it on my own. If I was truly going to find out how to be at my best, there was only one I could think of who could truly get me there.

It sounds crazy, but if you really think about it, if you have a desire to become better than yourself isn’t God the most logical recourse? Since I believed in him, I thought if I was persistent enough that he would answer me. It was a matter of time. What did he want me to do now?

I started thinking about how God would answer me. If he would send an angel or if Jesus himself might come to talk to me; perhaps he would just send me some sort of sign to point the way. I started thinking about how God sends signs and began looking up into the sky, down into the water, at the birds, and across the sand for something. But I found nothing.

I needed some direction and only God could give it to me. I had to take my spirituality a step further. I wanted to see just how much faith could accomplish. Through my time in church I developed this equation that the amount of faith was directly proportionate to the authority and power that manifest in the real world. In other words, the more faith you have the more spiritual power you could use. So, literally, with enough faith we could have power to move mountains and I wanted to see if I had enough faith to make something happen that night. What would happen if I confronted God and talked with him?

A voice in my head told me that I should go home. That God perhaps would strike me down for being so bold and unworthy to come before him. But I said in my mind that everyone is unworthy and I was coming because I wanted to learn how to not be so unworthy. God knows all things, and he knows that I didn’t mean any harm in calling out to him, but rather I wanted to see what would happen.

Again a voice in my head began to suggest to me that perhaps the sea would part or something crazy would happen and perhaps I wouldn’t be able to handle what would happen if God actually did answer me. But, I stayed there on the beach saying, “If you’re real, and I know you are, than you can make yourself known to me. In the Bible you say that ‘none seek after God’, and I’m coming to you, looking for you. I’m trying to seek you.”

“None seek after God.” It’s kind of scary when you really give that thought. Everyone wonders if there’s a god; is God really real? But no one looks for him; certainly not in the right places. Everyone asks things of him, but how can the heavenly father give something that would hurt one of his children in the long run or perhaps immediately. When they don’t get what they ask for, they don’t believe.

“My boyfriend dumped me, therefore God doesn’t care.”

“My cat died, therefore God can’t exist.”

The Bible says, “Seek and ye shall find”. But, “none seek after God, no not one!” and we say that there’s no God, when no one seeks after him.

It started to get cold and I was considering calling it a night. Yet, I was stubborn in just about everything else I did so why not be stubborn today. I stayed out there at the shore of the beach a while longer. Then, I started hearing police sirens and since I wasn’t sure if they arrested people for being on the beach, after hours, I moved to the boardwalk. Looking down the boardwalk I saw that it was cleaned perfectly. No trash or anything on the ground. They seemed to really take care of it. I decided that I wasn’t going to give up. I said in my mind that I may have had to leave the shore but I could stay on the boardwalk all night. So I resumed asking God to make himself known to me. “What am I supposed to do now?”

For some reason it came to my head that sometimes God doesn’t send you big flashy extravagant miracles; it may be something “right under your nose”. So I looked down and saw a piece of paper a few feet away from me. It was the only piece of paper on the entire boardwalk. The whole thing was completely cleaned. I walked over to it, thinking that maybe before God could make himself known to me I had to do a good deed. So I intended to pick it up and throw it out. Then, something told me to read it.

“The Big Question” it said on the front of the folded paper. I picked it up. Maybe God had sent an answer to my big question. I unraveled the paper and read the next page. What it said shocked me.

“What to do now…”, it was the first line and exactly what I had been waiting for; in big bold letters. It then had a list numbered from one to six. Pray daily, read the bible daily, witness for Christ daily, confess Christ openly and be baptized, attend church where the Bible is preached and Christ is honored, and Keep Christ’s commandments.

I began to rejoice that I had actually made contact with God. I knew that this paper was sent from him and placed in a spot where I would find it. After all, it was the only paper on the boardwalk for as far as I could see. God had actually taken the time out for me. I loved him for that.

When I returned to FL I was getting ready to call my pastor and asked him when the next baptism was. I decided that I was ready. Originally I had planned to wait till I got back to NY to be baptized in Bethesda, but now I wanted to get it done right away. I had put this off for a long time. I wanted to be born a new person in Christ, and start making a difference. There were people in my church asking me what I was waiting for and I told them simply that I wanted to have the baptism done in the church I grew up in. But now, I felt like time was slipping away from me and that I needed this done immediately. I was hoping that maybe I’d have enough time to call my Grandma and invite her to come. Before I had a chance to get the phone it started ringing and of all people it was Pastor Sabo. I told him I was just about to call him to ask when he was doing a baptism.

“Well actually,” he said, “that’s what I was calling to talk to you bout. We’re having a baptism this weekend and we are baptizing 12 people”.

“Can you make it 13?” I asked.

Pastor Sabo assured me that I could be included. When I hung up with him I was surprised again. “Man”, I said in my mind, “Somebody [God] wants me on their team.” I knew God wanted me to join the church but I had no idea that it would be this soon. I thought I had at least a month before this would happen. My baptism would be in 3 days.

At the time I was arguing with my parents so I didn’t think they’d want to come. I thought I was going to go through the baptism alone. I never told them about my experience in Virginia. I didn’t think they’d take me seriously; I thought they’d call it a coincidence, but the way it happened I knew it was of God.

On Friday night my mom had asked me what I was doing that night and I replied, “Um… I think I’m getting baptized tomorrow so I have to go to a meeting at church.” She looked at me kind of confused and said, “You think?” She seemed kind of aggravated that I didn’t know much details about my own baptism and that this hadn’t been discussed with the family.

“What about Grandma and Glory”, she said “don’t you think they would have liked to come. Grandma will be so upset that she didn’t get to see you get baptized. What about Buddy and I? Don’t you think we would like to come?”

I didn’t want to tell her the whole story about my encounter with God. I didn’t think she’d believe it. So I told her part of the truth. “I didn’t know I was getting baptized until yesterday.”

“What do you mean you didn’t know?” my mom said, annoyed with the answer.

I started to giggle a little bit because this experience had been just as spontaneous as I was making it seem. It was totally unplanned but it was of God that this was to be.

“Don’t laugh” my mom said, “This isn’t funny! You’re church does full submerging, that’s no joke. You’ve never had that before. You just come up with these things and you don’t tell anybody. That’s a big decision and you didn’t even bother to include Buddy and I. Doesn’t ‘family’ mean anything to you?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer before she turned angrily and walked away. She called one of friends on the phone and told them about what I was doing. As she was explaining my spur of the moment decision from her point of view, I was sitting at the computer laughing as I thought about how quick and unplanned this was. I didn’t know how to tell my mother that this was news to me, just like it was to her; I didn’t have any control over the situation.

“He just does these things” I heard her say, “Somebody needs to teach this boy the meaning of the world ‘Family’! He needs to look that up in the dictionary.”

I considered telling my mom the story, but we had recently been arguing so much that I didn’t know how she’d react to it. I really wanted her to come to the baptism but I was afraid to talk to her about it because I thought she wouldn’t really support the decision and that she would just call me a hypocrite and think that I wasn’t sincere about what I was doing. I kept the paper from the beach in my wallet as proof. If someone had told me a story like that, I might not have believed it either. I felt that a baptism was a personal commitment between the person and God and not so much a family event. It really wasn’t something that I thought I needed to discuss with them. I was thinking that I just needed to do it because God impressed it on me. This was between him and me.

I didn’t mean to laugh when my mother was talking to me but the thought of how fast God was moving this on me was making laugh because it made me feel like he wanted me to be his “yesterday” and I was late in getting it done tomorrow. I couldn’t help but smile knowing that God was taking the time out to make moves for me and that all this was taking place so soon for me. Even the pastor had called before I had a chance to pick up the phone and ask him about the baptism which meant that God had put it on his heart to call me and make sure I was there.

I invited my mom and my stepfather to come. They gave me a hard time about it because they had thought that I had done this on purpose not to include them. I knew they’d come though; my mother wouldn’t miss a full submerging baptism for her son.

So that’s how it happened. Throughout the whole ceremony I was a little nervous but I was ready to give my life to Jesus; knowing and understanding what I was doing. I must have had that smile on my face the whole time as I imagined heaven throwing me a party and angels dancing because I had finally come home. As I was lowered into the water I said to God in my mind that I was his now and that I would fight for him and leave everything else behind me. When I came up out of the water I was a new person in Christ.

The whole week I had spent tossing out rap music, violent movies, and sinful video games. Anything that I thought would keep me out of the kingdom I tossed into the garbage. My frequent trips to the garbage cans in the garage were the first things that made my parents want to figure out what was going on with me. My stepfather, who doesn’t like for anything to go unknown to him, came out to the garage to check the garbage and see what I was throwing out.

“Is there any reason why you’re throwing out all your tapes?” he asked.

“I don’t need it. Its garbage” I replied laughing and taking out another bag. I thought about telling him that I had it impressed upon me by the Holy Spirit but to hear that come out of my mouth would have been too strange and I didn’t think he’d believe it. I had called people up and started forgiving them for all the things they had done to me and making peace with people who I held grudges against. I prayed for them also, that God would lead them to something better. My mission in life had changed. Now, I wanted to fight for God.

Even though I had regretted coming to Florida, I realized that this thing must have been of God. He needed to isolate me so that he could teach me and mold me. If I had stayed in NY, I never would have taken the time out to listen to him as intently as I did in Florida. So my year in Florida was my “Wilderness experience”.

When I came back to NY to see some of my friends after my baptism they began to notice that all of a sudden I had become really religious. I began talking to them about God and witnessing to them. Hearing these things from my mouth was strange to them. But, they listened! Some started calling me “Charley Church”. I didn’t mind though. To me, I was taking some verbal abuse for Jesus and I thought it was funny; I knew they were teasing because they didn’t understand.

Every time I did or said something, some of my friends would say, “Did GOD ask you to do that?”

“Did GOD tell you to say that?”

“Are you sure that GOD would allow you to do that?” Where as some people would get insulted and offended I just thought it was funny.

I think that in a Christian experience it’s not the Christian who should leave his friends when he becomes a new person in Christ. It’s the friends that should leave the Christian. So although I don’t go to some of the places they go or do the things they do, I still spend time with them and hang out with them and when given the opportunity I talk to them about Jesus. That’s exactly what Jesus use to do. He spent time with sinners and they were drawn to him. A lot of them repented and followed him. Once people join the church it’s like they only stay within the church crowd and they don’t bother with non Christian friends out of fear that they’ll be “pulled back in”. But as Jesus says, “It’s the sick that need a physician” so we have a responsibility to spread his love to them. The only thing that separates me from them is the fact that someone took the time to talk to me about Jesus. So I try to do the same thing for them.

I feel that God can use me as a witness because if a random person were to come up to me and talk to me about Jesus (if I was a non believer) I would dismiss him easily. But if someone I knew my whole life all of a sudden had a change of heart and started telling me all these things about a savior and a merciful God, I would start to wonder what’s going on. I would question my beliefs just based on the fact that this person changed so much in a short period of time.

As I told my friends my story they didn’t believe it but they still could see that something was different about me just based on my confidence in what I was talking about. They knew that I really believed in what I was saying.

The more I actually get to know God, I find that he’s not what everyone thinks he is: The king that sits on this thrown above the earth waiting to zap somebody, or send them to hell, every time you do something wrong. In fact, he considers himself a father; “long suffering, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy”. “God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” And that’s something I find myself doing continually.

In my mind comes the image of a car accident. It was me, the day the 18 wheeler rear ended me. My entire car was totaled and had my head been a few inches back, it would have been cut off. Instead, I literally walked away from the accident without even a scratch and refused to go to the hospital. I didn’t need it. I returned to school the next day. They say no one just walks away from an accident like that.