I have a confession to make.

I was raised in a middle class military family, guided by relatively progressive values yet revolving around a hub of 1970’s “born again” spirituality, complete with 700-club-inspired family prayer meetings and a minimum of 3 visits to 2 different churches each week. To really communicate the context, it’s helpful to relate a story my father used to tell about standing up in a central-Texas, Lutheran adult sunday-school class and saying to the pastor and all in attendance “you guys are talking a lot about brotherhood, so where are all the black people?.” So you see, it was the natural course of things that I would embark, at the tender age of 13, on a so-called “teen mission” to none other than mother England to cast a light on the obviousness of their sinful ways.

In that summer of ‘79, when Aerosmith and Boston were the heaviest American rock bands of any significance, when Freebird and Stairway to Heaven were always the last two songs played at every school dance, when there were still more “I found it” bumper stickers than “question authority” bumper stickers, little Tommy Trick spent three weeks in missionary “boot camp” in a swampy corner of Florida and another 6 weeks touring the British countryside singing and doing puppet shows in the public squares and witnessing one-on-one to the un-saved. I must have said the “sinner’s prayer” with at least 10 or 12 strangers that summer and there was real tangible energy in those moments of conversion; an unmistakable feeling of power, influence and somewhat smug benevolence. I was overcoming doubts left and right…all except my own.

One evening I tossed and turned in my sleeping bag, alongside my fellow missionaries who somehow slept more soundly than I. Although it was scandalously against the rules, I determined to go out for a walk under the stars, all by myself. On that walk I met an agnostic man walking his dog. Couldn’t tell you how old he was, what he looked like or what he was wearing and I certainly don’t remember his name. What stuck was that he was willing to admit that he didn’t know the answers to life, the universe and everything. I remember feeling a brief compulsion to sell this guy on the bliss of salvation but I was so awe-stricken by the depth of his honesty that it wasn’t long before I realized I was out-classed…and he wasn’t trying to convince me of anything.

That was my own conversion moment. Although I was always told that doubt was healthy and indeed that I had been named after perhaps the most famous doubter in the Bible for that very reason, this was the first time I had been given an adult opportunity to consider the possibility that doubt was more important than conviction.

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