TMI Thursday: in which i was born again

Now, first and foremost, let's just get one thing straight. Yes, this post is going to be rather churchy, but I'm not here to talk you into having more or less faith that you have today. This is not a sermon. There will be no altar call. There will be no cold and broken Hallelujah.

That being said, I used to be a bona fide Jesus freak.

My family started attending an Assemblies of God church when I was in middle school.

(We're talking about a tongues-speaking, slain-in-the-spirit type of place. Think: charasmatic as the Pentecostals, but with shorter hair and in pants, occasionally.)

(No snakes.) (Btw.)

So, yes. In those days, Christ (and not caffeine) was my personal savior and I was supposed to "go...into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith blasted from my boombox, and in the family car we all sang along to our local Contemporary Christian radio station, WJIE. (Where Jesus is exalted!)

I experienced a very weird intense spiritual upbringing.

When I started high school (I don't know, actually. I might have been in eight grade or something) I joined the Senior Bible Quiz team at my church. We traveled around (via church bus!) to other AG churches in Kentucky and competed against their teens academic-team style, with buzzers and the whole shee-bang.

We had study questions and practices after church on Sundays. (I had no sociallifespice.)

During a match, there were all these certain rules and regulations which were adhered to more strictly than the ten commandments.

A quizzer could call a point-of-order if there was a procedural error. There was also a "judge's ruling" that was used like a coach's challenge in football, in which a coach or quizzer could claim why their answer should be ruled correct after it had been deemed wrong. (That was my favorite part -- arguing my case like a lawyer!)

There were quotation questions (i.e. "Quotation Question, ten points. Has Jesus always been God?")

(If I buzzed in, I would have said, "John 1:1; In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.")

(Which doesn't even really answer the question, in my grow up opinion, but that's neither here nor there.)

Yeah, so I was really, really into that quiz team. And, I kind of rocked at it. Memorization has always been one of my strengths.

I was, in fact, the number one quizzer in the entire state. And I won that title by a mother fuc mile.

But, because I knew -- even then -- that it was super lamespice, I never got to brag about it to my friends.

Until now.

Don't mess with me biblically -- I will school you in some Jesus trivia.

Visit Lilu's blog (she's doing Post Secret again!) for more tragic tales.