I am not the first.

I am reading an incredible book by Dave Gibbons entitled The Monkey and the Fish: Liquid Leadership for a Third-Culture Church, and I read a snippet that caused me to suddenly sit back in my chair.

The internal dialogue that was charging through me at the moment was simple. “I am not the only one!! This has happened before!!”

See, I keep telling people my story. That I was born into a Christian home, grew up on the mission field, worked at a church, was a pastor even, and THEN I fell in love with Jesus. It seems backwards, I know, because I suppose that it is. But it is what it is. I have always loved Jesus, because he was like family. A good uncle, pretty much. But I had never fallen in love with Jesus until I came to understand what grace is. Not the “grace period” that I once thought it was, but as Brennan Manning describes it, the furious longing of God… for me.

When I came to understand that, I fell in love. And as people in love tend to do, I began saying crazy things like, “Wherever you go, I’m going with you.” “Whatever you want me to do, just say the word.”

That’s why I’m planting a church. The one I love asked me to.

That I didn’t have this experience of falling in love with Jesus until recently is no reflection upon the way I was raised or those who mentored me. Now, looking back, I can think of countless ways I experienced the grace of God, never realizing it for what – or who – it was. Somehow, someway, I simply did not understand grace. I’ll take full credit for being dense. Grace surrounded me all those years and I didn’t get it until early last spring, when I had a similar experience to the one described here.

[Excerpt from transcript of a roundtable discussion recorded in The Monkey and the Fish. My own commentary is in parentheses.]

“I lived twenty years as a missionary kid (I lived only ten years as one), and I was the best missionary kid around (I was not!), and yet I didn’t know Jesus Christ. But I was a Christian, because I was a missionary kid. Well, I was in seminary, and I was twenty years old (I was on staff at a church and I was 30) when I truly came to know the grace of God and actually had a conversion experience.

I was studying Greek for a summer at Fuller my last year (I read a book by Joseph Prince, then another by Brennan Manning), and I got down and I wept for three hours one night (been there) because I looked at Ephesians, and somehow God’s grace came alive, through Greek of all things. And I thought, ‘If this is true, then this is the best thing that I have heard in my entire life!’ Because I had always been performing for God (me, too). God just broke through to me (And I’m so thankful that he broke through to me, too).” -Jim Gustafson, son of missionary parents in Laos and Vietnam.

Glad to know that I’m not the first one. Even more glad to know that I won’t be the last.