EDITOR’S NOTE: The Times Free Press is continuing a series of stories from readers about life experiences they attribute to divine intervention. We’ll publish another each week as your stories continue to arrive. If you have a God Thing to share, email Life@timesfreepress.com, or mail to Life Department, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 400 E. 11th St., Chattanooga, TN 37403.
This week, Amos Taj reflects on the difference between an examination of conscience and an examination of consciousness of God’s grace.
Growing up in a Muslim country and a Christian home, I was the naughtiest child in the neighborhood. In my Christian childhood, I learned how to pray with a kind of examination of my conscience. Both my Sunday School teacher and mother led me in inept confession of my sins saying, “Remember your day and all the unkind and naughty things you said and did. Ask God to forgive you, and promise to try to be better tomorrow.”
Those good women were attempting to instill in my young heart the beginning of remorse and sense of guilt and the ever renewed possibility of God’s patient mercy. This was the time when I had dutifully and anxiously learned to search each day’s events and to train myself to recognize only the wrong things I had done. I never questioned God’s odd preference for only the wrong things I had done. Naturally, I had no idea how deeply I was shaping my image of God and my sense of myself.
At age 18, while teaching in the Missionary Language School, I became interested in the Christian ministry. I was learning a whole new way of offering my life to God. No longer was I just emptying the day’s trash before God. Rather, this was a whole new and redemptive way of finding God’s presence in all things. Instead, I could rejoice in discovering gifts received. Now I found a purposeful God in my life and looked forward to the goals that he set before me.