1. A Personal Polemology: Three Vignettes from a Decade-Long Holy War

You say that I showed you the light,
but all it did in the end
was make the dark feel darker than before.
— Lucy Dacus

How wonderful to be hidden,
how terrible not to be found.
— D.W. Winnicott

What follows are three vignettes from three different periods of time in my life, all of which provide insight and context into the conflict that was long waged within myself. I debated whether or not to separate them or keep them together, and opted for the former - so read them all at once if you wish, or read them separately.

The water sparkled with the midday sunlight on the backyard pool of my grandparent’s house.

It was Sunday afternoon, and we were in Australia.

My grandparents had been missionaries and church planters for the Independent Baptists for over 30 years, and we were on holiday visiting them in the country where my mother grew up as a missionary kid.

The air had that quality of immediacy and imminence that always seems to hang in the air in the moments just before a big event or special gathering.

We had just come home from church.

The menu had been planned: an authentic Aussie “barbie.”

The house had been cleaned.

The occasion was announced, and invitations extended.

Chairs had been set up around the pool for the church's congregants to watch and bear witness to the wet sacrament about to take place.

The occasion? My brothers’ and my baptism.

Baptism is a Christian ritual that symbolizes an individual’s spiritual regeneration, purification, and admission into the Christian church and community. 

Even while all forms of Christianity practice baptism, the beliefs concerning it, and thereby, the forms it takes, vary significantly within Christendom at large. Catholics and Lutherans, for instance, believe in infant baptism, which involves pouring or sprinkling water on the baby's head. Others, such as the Orthodox, practice immersion baptism, requiring the candidate to be immersed three times.

The tradition I come from believes in what is called “believer baptism,” which is the practice of only baptizing those who have explicitly made a personal profession of faith in Jesus. Thus, baptism only becomes necessary once the individual reaches the “age of accountability” which is the respective age at which a person is cognitively able to choose for themselves whether or not they will place their faith in Jesus Christ. Rather than pouring or sprinkling water, the mode of believer baptism is the full immersion of the candidate into and out of water. 

A paramount expression of Christian faith and obedience to Christ, immersion baptism and one’s submersion in and out of water symbolizes the candidate’s identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Often described as “an outward expression of an inward change,” it publicly signifies the beginning of the candidate’s “new life with Christ” and is seen as a momentous occasion in the community worthy of special celebration. 

I was six years old.

Like any kid, I was just absorbing the world around me as voraciously as possible and learning what it required of me to be safe and loved—in other words, to belong.

I had been to Sunday school enough to know that the ultimate source of safety and love was found with God.

After all, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

I didn’t know much, but I knew that hell was a real place and a place I needed to, no matter the cost, avoid going to.

And I knew evil existed in the world, that the world around me was dangerous and bad and full of evil spiritual forces. If I wasn’t careful or cautious, then I could get misled and deceived, and I would suffer terribly as a result, possibly being sent to hell to be consciously tormented for all eternity, the epitome of being unsafe and unloved.

As all kids do, I accepted the world presented to me, and I assumed my experience to be normative.

Just like how I assumed that all my elementary peers also stayed up late at night terrified of the thought of hell. Worried that maybe, when they said the prayer of salvation, they didn't say it exactly right, that somehow it hadn't “worked.”

How could you be sure?

What if I died in my sleep and woke up in hell because I said the prayer wrong?

Or how I also assumed all my childhood friends also had regular nightmares of being demon-possessed.

I had heard the stories of the many exorcisms that my grandparents had performed during their many years as missionaries. And I had heard the stories of people unknowingly buying “sinful items” that had demons “attached” to them, demons that would follow them home and cause them to sin and jeopardize their lives and the lives of others.

Or how I assumed all my friends, as a result, also slept with Bibles by their beds as a means to ward off demons seeking to possess them. It was “The Sword of the Spirit” after all, as I had learned in Sunday school, God’s Word — my greatest spiritual weapon. 

Little did I know just how weaponized it would become.

I remember on nights when I was afraid that demons were literally in my room, lurking to possess my body and lure me away from God, I would sit up in my bed in the pitch-black darkness of my bedroom and, with silent tears streaming down my face, I would frenziedly swing my bible in the air mimicking the movement of a sword whispering the name of Jesus over and over, unsure of what I was more desperate for - to fend off the perceived evil threat or to not disturb my sleeping family.

These moments, I would soon learn, would become a model for my life: fight your demons, but do it quietly.