My father died less than a week after my tenth birthday. Before then, at school I’d always been disturbingly obedient. As far back as kindergarten, I can recall being irrationally afraid of accidentally breaking some rule and being punished, though I didn’t behave nearly this well at home. But in the fifth grade, with the sudden death of my father, something snapped inside me. In hindsight, it’s as if I subconsciously realized life could be taken away in the beat of a heart and was too short to be lived in fear. I began mouthing off to my teachers and openly criticizing the rules. But more significantly, my mind became stunningly morbid for a ten-year-old. This progressed over the next year and a half. Looking back, I’m both astounded and bothered that such dark things went through the mind of a ten and eleven-year-old child.

After my father’s death, my mother retired from work and began dragging my younger brother and me to church. We hated it, and the practice didn’t last long. My mother conceded defeat. But I could still hear Charles Stanley’s soft, Georgia twang from the TV in my mother’s room—it was to me some sort of haunt scratching its nails on a chalkboard. The awful things he said, words of forgiveness and love and life. Disgusting.

But for some reason, in the summer of 1998, the summer I turned twelve, I began to hear Jesus calling me.

Everything about me—my mind, my spirit, my heart, my body—put up a conscious resistance against Him. For nearly two years, the other kids at my school, and even I, had only thought of myself as “the kid with the dead dad.” Students didn’t often lose parents at my school in my small town, so when it happened to you, it stuck. And for all the death and morbidness that occupied me, this Force of life was something that brought discomfort and agony to me.

I’d always believed God to be real and present, but I’d never been convicted by Him like this. The gloom and misery inside me continued to try and fight Him off, but I could feel death losing the battle. I suddenly believed in Jesus so strongly that I might as well have seen Him walk on the sea with my own eyes. He was calling me to go with Him, and I consciously replied that I didn’t want to go. Adamant that I’d never go with Him, I promised myself I’d never leave my comfort zone. If I’d reacted physically the way I felt spiritually, those around me would have seen a bitter child running away from Someone only he knew was after him.

The battle for resistance was officially lost in August, the day after my twelfth birthday, when I inexplicably accompanied my mother to church. At the conclusion of the pastor’s sermon (which I couldn’t recall to save my life), during the invitation, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in front of the congregation of South Seminole Baptist Church in Seminole, Texas. I wouldn’t remain a Baptist, but Jesus was in my heart and would always remain there. The fear and doubt, the rage and lies, all subsided like a storm that knows its only fleeting nature, but groans with several last waves and gusts as a last act of defiance. I realized I could not live without Jesus Christ, nor did I want to.

I thank God that He never ceases to pester me with His Holy Spirit. If I were pressed to cite just one passage that describes my salvation—before and since—I’d point to these verses from Psalm 139*, which describes the impossibility of escaping the Lord who loves us:

“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.”

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* NIV.

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Bud Sturguess resides in his “adopted hometown” of Amarillo, Texas. He is the author of several novels, his latest being Saint Calvin the Cannibal, and his work has appeared in Ekstasis Magazine, Longleaf Review, and New Pop Lit.

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