Stewart was baptized in April 2024. If you have interest in getting baptized at Hope Community Church, you can learn more by visiting hopecc.com/baptism.
But can you save me?
Come on and save me
— Aimee Mann
I was taught to love Christ in an international church by a host of devoted Chinese ladies. I prayed “The Sinner’s Prayer” with “Aunty Velma” when I was four years old, and eleven years later, I was baptized at that very same church.
Looking back, though, my testimony betrays no confession of sin. In fact, quite the opposite resides there: a spiritual arrogance, an assurance that because I love Jesus, I am a good person.
It is amusing, if quietly alarming, how often the religious self-justification that I am a good person is accompanied by a proportionate amount of self-hatred. Chalk it up to religious self-hatred, a blasphemy Calvinistically arrived at. The best kinds of lies are built upon half-truths. And the lie I believed was no different: You are too sinful to be kept around on this earth for long.
I struggled with crippling anxiety attacks and, at times, thoughts of self-harm, for many summers throughout my young adulthood. These attacks incapacitated me, often for hours at a time.
The fear at their core was a universal one: the fear that I was totally unlovable. This fear was brought to fever-pitch the summer after my senior year of college, when a girl I had loved dearly since high school broke up with me over the phone. And I stood there on my best friend’s lawn in East St. Paul listening to her cry from a place with poor cell phone service, and I stared at the oak trees on the boulevard, all shot through with June sunlight, and I sort of laughed to myself darkly, wondering how God could be love.
The world is strange in heartbreak. To be in love is, after all, to experience a foretaste of Heaven. To have loved, on the other hand, is to know the grip of Hell. And there was rain the day after, and my little brother’s graduation party, and a whole host of unwanted thoughts: Thoughts of inadequacy, thoughts of self-hatred. Because of course this is how it all turns out, Stewart. You were always destined to fail.
And my immediate experience seemed to confirm these feelings of self-revulsion.
Two weeks later, however, I was in Italy for a study-abroad program I had signed up for months in advance.
And in Rome, something wonderful happened.
As I stared up at the Final Judgment of Michelangelo, painted on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, I began to weep uncontrollably because I knew that I was loved. The painting, for those unfamiliar, depicts Christ’s return, much to the ecstasy of all the watching saints. And I knew that, despite all appearances to the contrary, despite what I’d been given to believe for several years, I was loved. Really loved.
I saw that I was indeed envious, prideful, a fornicator.
And yet I was loved.
A lover of self, a lover of money.
And yet I was loved.
An idolater.
And yet loved.
Two years have passed since then. Two years of painful, often dark, and certainly ongoing repentance. In the spells of anxiety, which still come in full force with the seasons, I return to the words of one of my favorite writers, the inimitable Julian of Norwich. She says: “Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love.”[1]
You are loved.
What if you really believed that, reader?
Whole hosts of people find that notion totally unfathomable.
And trust me: You can be very religious and miss that basic truth entirely.
[1]Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich
Stewart has also written an extended reflection & testimony called News from a Far Country: Notes from an American Conversion.
