And so I began to fear that I hadn’t really been saved—or, at least, that my story of being saved wasn’t quite legitimate. My before-and-after-conversion pictures (assuming I could even pinpoint a particular moment) didn’t look that different. With no outward markers of coming to Christ, I questioned whether I had at all. Perhaps I was floating on other people’s convictions, happily living in a Christian environment without actually being a Christian. If I didn’t have a specific moment of repentance, maybe my repenting didn’t count. I became convinced that my boring testimony was inferior.

I have no memory of becoming a Christian. I didn’t pray a prayer or walk an aisle or have a eureka moment. In fact, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love the Lord Jesus. My Christian testimony—the story of how I came to faith—is downright boring.

I was born in 1978 and raised in Connecticut by godly Presbyterian parents. I ate my peanut-butter sandwiches with a prayer of thanks, recited answers at bedtime from the children’s catechism, and the songs I remember my dad singing to me invariably were from either the Beatles or the hymnal.

But mine was not merely a private religion. Church life shaped the weekly rhythms of my childhood. The Sunday school teachers and eventually youth group leaders reminded me by their very presence that other people love Jesus, too, and we sang “Amazing Grace” (I can think of three different versions) together.

To this day, many of the Scripture verses I keep in my mind and heart are from the King James Version, a sign that I memorized them early in life, before copies of the New International Version appeared in my church’s pews. To me, John 3:16 will always be a child’s linguistic challenge: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Everything important to know in life, I embraced by age 3 or 4. God my Creator, Jesus my Savior, the Spirit my Helper, the Bible my rule. To someone who didn’t come from a Christian home or grow up in the church, this probably sounds lovely. But it took me most of my life to appreciate just how extraordinary was the grace I had received in ordinary circumstances.

In fifth grade, I began to attend a school where dramatic testimonies were a regular part of morning chapel. Week after week, speakers—a drug addict, a party girl, an atheist—told of God’s rescue. I loved these stories, and today I am thankful for revivals of such “testifying” in places like this regular feature of ct.

In retrospect, though, I’m not sure why the administrators chose to feature only the extraordinary. The pews, after all, were filled with church kids whose parents were committed to their religious education. I suppose such testimonies were meant to broaden our awareness of the world outside our youth groups; possibly the faculty wanted to encourage students who were struggling with sin or doubts. But I am baffled that I never once heard a testimony like my own.

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