Conversion

I ran across a post today on conversion at Thoughts on the Way to the Abbey. I found it compelling because I never had any blinding flash of light conversion experience. Conversion seems like a rather slow and not always pleasant process, and accepting Christ as savior is just the beginning. I was “saved” at the age of seven or eight, when I didn’t have much understanding of what it meant, and then life led me away from faith and then I started inching up to it again. Anthony quotes a monk, Father Simeon, in his post. Here is what he says:

Father Simeon said that if conversion means anything,it must mean that your life is not going to be the same. If your life is basically the same after you said some words or something, you have not been converted. He said that he sometimes wonders when he hears people talk about their conversions, and he wants to ask them, "Is your life any different apart from a few added on religious observances? Has your life been disrupted?"

Has it disrupted mine? I have to admit that I very much like to be comfortable. I wonder how much conversion actually disrupts the lives of most Christians. I witnessed a lot of emotional walks to the altar. People get caught up in the emotionalism of being saved--but as for fruit . . .

I was also captured by the idea of marriage as conversion:

He said everyone who has been married for very long has been called to conversion, because that's what marriage is, a call to conversion, though people seldom see it that way, and that may be a reason so many marriages fail. We enter marriage with the idea that "this person will enhance my life." Father Simeon says, "What, like a new Lexus will enhance your life?" And notice the emphasis on "my" life. Marriage is no longer my life, but our life.