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the long way home
by Mandy Zhang
Mandy attends the Westside gathering, and serves on the Connections and SHE teams. She has a heart for helping those who have had negative experiences with church or other Christians. Mandy's heroes in life are Jesus and her mom. |
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“Your dad has gone away for a while,” my mom said, blinking back tears. “He won’t be coming back for a really, really long time.” Her face crumpled, and she began to cry silently. At nine years old, even I knew that my dad wasn’t ever coming back.
While carpooling with a friend to work one morning, my dad became the victim of a terrible car accident. He was thrown out into the middle of the freeway. In the blink of an eye, my dad was taken from us forever.
I was born in Shanghai, China, and came to the U.S. when I was only six. My dad had spent his entire life planning on a better future for me. Having grown up in a country with a deeply oppressive government, he always knew that he wanted to come to America, where he could give me a better life than the one he had. After years of studying English, he finally got his chance. Being extremely bright, and having gone to the best university in China, my dad was sponsored by his company to get his masters degree in America. So he set off for a foreign land, and mom and I followed. But we only had two years together before he was killed.
After his death, I watched my mom struggle. She barely spoke English and had never held a job in the States. Suddenly she had to become the backbone of our family. The next few years of our lives were difficult, but my mom and I became inseparable. Watching her toil at her minimum wage job to put dinner on the table caused me to grow up overnight. My mom used to always joke that I was the adult, and she was the child. I helped my mom practice her English at night, and checked up on her after work if she was late coming home. I suppose experiencing tragedy when you’re young does that to you.
My dad’s accident was the first of many things that caused me to become a bitter and vocal agnostic later on in life. I didn’t understand why such a terrible thing would happen to someone who worked so hard and had such a big heart. His death prevented me from believing that there was a benevolent force out in the world. Interestingly enough, when I was younger, my mom and I always attended church. While we were culturally Buddhist, I went to Sunday school, hung out with church kids, and even went on retreats. Eventually, I approached my mom about getting baptized. Her eyes widened with surprise. Then she said the words I would never forget: “Mandy, just because we go to church doesn’t mean we believe in that nonsense.” I was crestfallen, but I was still at an age where I believed parents were always right. That was the last time I went to church for a long, long time.
Three years later, my mom became a follower of Christ. She had come to a low point in her life where she had suddenly lost her job and her boyfriend of five years. Devastated, my mom ran into the local church in tears. She was greeted with love and compassion. If this was what being Christian was about, she thought, then she had a lot to learn. My mom became a devout Christian and dedicated time to her relationship with God. She soon started her own business and got remarried. Today, she is one of the happiest people I know, despite having experienced so much hardship earlier on in her life.
Yet when she first told me, I was so angry — I thought she was a hypocrite to change her mind.
“Having a relationship with God is the most important thing in life,” she said serenely.
“Remember when you told me it was all ‘nonsense?’” I countered, rolling my eyes in disgust.
My mom and I would repeatedly butt heads about Christianity over the next seven years. I knew it would mean the world to her if I accepted Christianity, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe something I couldn’t see or feel. Finally, I gave her an ultimatum: I didn’t want to talk to her about religion anymore. Ever. I felt she was too closed-minded to accept the possibility that Christianity wasn’t the only way. So from then on, mom never brought up faith again, though I think she was sad not to be able to share that part of her life with me.
Other Christians also tainted Christianity for me. When I began law school at Pepperdine University, I felt disgusted by the hypocrisy of the “Christians” there. Everyone was trying to make the grades and grab the best jobs, and I felt that Christian students used religion to curry favor with professors. Moreover, I witnessed Christian guys who attended Bible study during the week, but then got drunk at a bar the following night and inappropriately hit on girls.
Why would I ever want to associate myself with “Christians”? I thought, disillusioned. At least non-Christians are truthful about who they are, and don't hold themselves out to be something they’re not, I decided.
But in my final year of school, I began to feel a sort of spiritual hunger. I was convinced there was an alternative to Christianity, so I read books by the Dalai Lama, and tried meditation. Around this time, God permeated my life in three different ways.
First came prayer. Being a sensitive person, there was a time in my life where I was bogged down by everything from boys to school. One day, I poured out my heart to my mom about all of my problems and waited for her usual wise advice. I noticed that she was uncommonly quiet.
“Well?” I prompted.
My mom hesitated. “You’re not going to like what I’m about to say, Mandy, but…” She paused. I braced myself.
“Well, I was just thinking… maybe you can try praying,” She said simply. “Just telling God… well, it really helps. You don’t even have to tell anyone else about it.”
A few nights later, when my worries overwhelmed me again, I decided to try my mom’s advice. Nobody would have to know, I told myself. I curled up in my bed and wondered how to begin. “Hi God,” I whispered. And then, I couldn’t stop. I told Him everything… all of my fears, all of my hopes and dreams, and all of my doubts. I told Him I didn’t think His religion was doing very well. I told Him about all of his problematic followers I had met in my life. What was amazing about it was that it felt… nice. This doesn’t make me a Christian, I reassured myself. But I was hooked. I looked forward to climbing into bed a half hour early every night just to chatter to God. There was an indescribable warmth and comfort that I experienced from my nightly conversations… It was like coming home from a faraway place. And for the first time since I had lost my father at age 9, I felt like I had a father — someone who loved me unconditionally. I became an in-the-closet prayer junkie.
Second came purpose. I began wondering about the purpose of life. It seemed like everyone just shriveled up after eighty years or so and died, I thought dejectedly. After traveling to different countries, I had convinced myself that the purpose of life was to travel and experience different cultures. It was too easy to stay in the U.S., I reasoned. We’ll all end up moving to the suburbs, living out our lives in monotony, and never experiencing anything new. Yuck, I thought.
A couple of days after “figuring out” the purpose of life, I watched the movie “Into the Wild.” The film, based on a true story, is about a brilliant college graduate who was set to begin his law school education, but was discouraged by his parents’ obsession with material wealth and the dullness of life. So, on a whim, he decides to leave everything behind to hitchhike through the U.S. so he can eventually end up in Alaska to be self-sufficient. He’s just like me! I thought excitedly. He’s in search of travels and adventures! He’s living out his purpose in life!
This next part spoils the movie. At first, I was in high spirits as I watched my hero trek through the States, all the while meeting interesting people and having exciting escapades. But fast forward to two hours later, and I sat paralyzed as I watched my hero dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness. Upon his final days, he wrote this note: “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all.” The hero then proceeded to head toward a white light, seemingly content, despite oncoming death. It seemed like God had disproved my theory on life’s purpose methodically through this movie by telling me that His was the only way. The boy in the movie started out like me, but only found peace and the meaning of life when he found God. I couldn’t shake off a feeling that something was happening to me… that God was trying to send me a message.
Then the next remarkable thing happened. A day after watching that movie, my friend Matt Kraus and I were chatting when he asked me a question.
“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Into the Wild’?” He asked.
Matt and I had our differences. He was a devout Christian who decided to stay friends with me despite my vicious attacks on his faith for the previous two years. Similar to the request I made of my mom, I had politely asked Matt to refrain from talking to me about faith after some heated debates. I would later find out that Matt had no idea I just watched the movie, nor did he know that I was secretly praying at night. Now I know that God had planned for Matt to ask me that question at that moment in time.
So I told Matt everything… He was the first person I told about my prayers and my feelings of realization when I watched that movie. “I’ve prayed for you for a long time,” Matt said, voice husky with emotion.
From then on, I would go to Matt with many of my questions about faith. He eventually gave me my first Bible, took me to Mosaic, helped baptize me, and gave me C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
That book played an important role in the third and final way that God entered my life: coming to know Jesus. To outsiders, my life was nearly perfect this past May. I was about to graduate as a professional, and I had a job lined up despite the difficult economic times. I was about to make my degree-obsessed Chinese family proud. And yet I felt empty. I just knew that there was something more to it all — and it came to me when I finally understood who Jesus was.
While reading a chapter of Mere Christianity, something clicked within me. I remember I was reading about repentance, and I was still agonizing over Christianity. I had a million questions about becoming Christian, and I was determined that faith was like law — you had to thoroughly do your research before you can jump onto the bandwagon. And interestingly enough, for all my years of church going, I never knew the guy after which Christianity was named.
So back to repentance. I came across this passage:
…we now need God’s help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all — to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God’s nature corresponds to this process at all… But supposing God became a man — suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person — then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence; but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.
I felt stunned. The beauty of that passage overwhelmed me. How could I have missed it for so long?
Jesus was the missing link between God and man! Even though God lived in heaven, a place of joy and perfection, and could have stayed up there and left us to wallow in our dying world of misery and greed, he didn’t. God loved us so much that He humbled himself by coming down to earth in the form of a man (and a perfect man, no less), to show us the way back to him. Through Jesus, God was able to fully understand and walk in the shoes of men. He suffered humiliation and the treatment of the worst kind, and even died a human death to bring us the truth. That is the extent of God’s compassion and love.
And that’s when I knew. I sat and contemplated my decision. I could turn around and go back to the life I had before — the life where I went through all of the motions and tried to be “successful,” worried about money, had fun by drinking too much, and in the end still felt completely empty... or I could begin a new life where I would follow Christ.
I knew then I couldn’t turn back to my old life — not anymore. So I made the leap of faith… and gained so much more in return.
Sometimes I wonder why it took me so long to get here. For years and years, I lived apart and separate from God. I suffered terribly. I held the most unimportant things in the highest esteem. Sometimes I was catty; at all times, self-absorbed. And worst of all, I was like a wall when anyone tried to tell me the Truth. Then God connected all the dots for me, to gather me to Him. And now, I want so badly to tell nonbelievers that their negative observations of Christians do not symbolize the Christian faith and a relationship with God.
So this is my story. And my mom was right. Having a relationship with God is the best and most humbling thing that has ever happened to me. I’m finally home.
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