Lee Harbaugh

Introduction

This post is part of my series, Who Is God?, an exploration of my personal journey with the mystical and spiritual realities.

In my last post in this series, I talked through my journey during my early adolescent years and how I began to have genuine mystical and spiritual experiences. As I alluded to in that post, I will now discuss my faith journey during my high school years and how I began to deepen my exploration of God. I will also talk about the questions that began to arise during this period and how I first experienced disillusionment in faith.

Glorieta Revisited

As I mentioned in my previous post, my church youth group went to a youth camp in Glorieta, New Mexico the summer prior to my freshman year in high school (1985). It was at this camp that I first experienced a deep internal connection to the Divine. The following summer—1986—we returned to Glorieta once more.

The camp schedule and activities were structured much the same as they had been the previous summer. We were instructed each morning to spend around 30 minutes alone with God, and once again I found a place on a boulder where I could be in solitude in nature to have my "quiet time." During the interim period between these two camps, I had begun to sometimes spend time alone "with God" at home, but it was not something I did every single day. Returning to Glorieta and once again having that regimented morning experience alone each day awakened something in me. It touched something deep inside that I now call the Profound. These morning quiet times would ultimately change my life forever.

In addition to these morning times, we had regular meetings with just our church group after each evening service. These evening get-togethers proved to be significant as well. Typically, we would take turns sharing about our day and how God had impacted us. In the course of these gatherings, it was not unusual for quarreling kids to reconcile with one another or for individuals to share about deep personal experiences they had had with God. Tears flowed regularly and hugs were commonplace during these sessions. These were deep bonding times for us as a group, and the emotions of these gatherings impacted us all. I remember even seeing some of the most hardened kids grow soft and vulnerable during these meetings.

All of these camp experiences gave most of us a kind of "camp high." Invariably, the camp high would seem to last a few weeks upon returning home. But then school would start, life would take over, and for many of the young people, the camp experience became just a distant memory.

I can remember sitting with my fellow youth at church in the early fall following this latest camp experience in Glorieta in 1986. We talked about how we had lost that magicalness that we had so recently experienced. In contrast to the evening gatherings in Glorieta, this meet-up was marked by frustration and disillusionment. Instead of conversations about how God had touched us, we had conversations about feeling distant from God and distant from one another. And it was this seemingly benign post-camp gathering that ultimately flipped a switch in me.

Why Does the Camp High Have to End?

Something in my mind was disturbed by the fact that we could go to camp, supposedly get close to God, and then come home and have it all seem to come undone. Intuitively, I felt that if God was really who we portrayed him to be, then it shouldn't matter where we are. We should be able to experience the Divine Presence anywhere and in any circumstance. After the meeting we had at church in the early fall, I kept coming back to one single question: Why does the camp high have to end?

It was at this point I made a commitment to myself. I committed that I was going to continue to spend time alone with God every day, just as I had done in Glorieta. I went and purchased a new study Bible that was specifically written for young people, and my mom gave me a scripture memory kit that consisted of little cards with a single Bible verse on each. I could carry these cards around with me as I worked to memorize scripture. Armed with these tools, I began to have a little solitude time every day.

A Deep Connection Without All My Friends

At first, I would spend a few minutes each day just reading a passage from the Bible and working on the memory cards. Before long, I began to incorporate prayer into my solitude times. I started praying for specific people, people who I knew who were hurting or in need. And I would pray for people that I knew didn't go to church. This was all in accordance with what I had been taught about seeking God on behalf of others.

Soon, these quiet times went from being 20-30 minutes long to being nearly an hour long. I learned at some point that I could also just sit in silence during these moments; I didn't have to spend the whole time reading the Bible or memorizing its verses or actively praying. And as I began to do so, something remarkable transpired in me. I started to feel that "camp" feeling once again! Only now, it was October or November, and school was in session, and life was happening. For me, this was a eureka moment. I discovered that it was indeed possible to have that camp experience with God without being at camp. In fact, it didn't even have to happen in the presence of my fellow youth. It could happen alone in my closet!

I remember being very excited by this. I had a good friend at church who was also a deep seeker, and I told him about my experience. While somewhat intrigued by my story, he didn't seem to embrace it as I expected he would. I thought that as soon as everyone else learned about my experience, they would all jump at the opportunity to spend more personal time alone with God, and we would all then have a common utopic spiritual base from which we could help and encourage one another. But this just did not appear to be happening.

I quickly made a decision to relentlessly follow God regardless of what my peers did.

Where Are All the Adults?

I also thought that surely the adults in my church understood this closeness to God phenomenon. After all, every Sunday School teacher I had ever had talked about being close to God and giving one's life to him. If my fellow youth didn't yet get it, it was just because of their current maturity level—or so I thought. I assumed the adults—at least most of them—understood this.

But it didn't take long for me to realize that even the adults didn't seem to get it. As my own inner experience began to deepen, it became apparent to me that most of them were not living from that same place. They had what I perceived to be a surface understanding of God, but there just wasn't a deep lived experience of God apparent in their lives. This was not judgmental at this point. It was simply observation on my part. (By my early 20s, I would get somewhat cynical and judgmental about many of my fellow Christians. I perceived that they were obstinate and simply unwilling to grow. Today, I regret this attitude. It was not constructive. Though I think I was correct in my intuition about their spiritual state, I was, sadly, toxic in my expression of it. And ultimately, I don't believe most people can help it.)

And so, for the first time in my life I gained a perspective of what it was like to walk a spiritual path that seemed to be taught all the time but practiced by few. For the first time in my life, I recognized that all is often not as it seems.

The Deeper Questions Start to Arise

As I spent more and more time alone, I gained much insight and understanding, but I also found myself considering deeper questions. If Jesus said that one could command a mountain to move if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, why weren't we seeing mountains walking around all the time? Sure, as a younger adolescent I had done my little faith-walk experiment with my friend, but that was nothing compared to seeing a mountain move. And what about all the miracles I was reading about in the Bible? Why didn't I see people healed of diseases or crippled people jumping up and walking? Why weren't we seeing people raised from the dead? And why, again, is it that we trust the Bible so implicitly?

I would take these questions to my youth leaders, and they would give me well-rehearsed and logical sounding answers. As such, I took them at face value. I didn't think to question my leaders or their authority in these matters. They said that the Bible was the inerrant and completely inspired word of God. They said that miracles occurred in the early church days because those people needed the miracles in order to believe the message of Jesus. We, in our modern church, did not need miracles in order to believe the word of God, so they didn't occur today.

This seemed reasonable to me, and so for the time being I left it alone.

My Introduction to Denominational Theological Differences

But it wasn't long before the issue of miracles came up again for me. While the answers from my leaders at church seemed sound, I had friends at school who belonged to other denominations (i.e. Charismatic, Pentecostal, Assemblies of God, etc.) and who would tell me about practices in their church that seemed to contradict some of the teachings I was getting. For example, I had friends who would tell me people were being miraculously healed in their church.

This was confusing to me. How was it that my church leaders were so convinced that miracles just didn't happen today, but my school friends were claiming to see miracles happen with their own eyes?

The Next Chapter

Though I continued to spend considerable time alone with God during the rest of my high school days, and though I relied heavily on my perception of God to help me make life decisions (i.e. what college to go to, who to date, what classes to take, etc.), the questions that had surfaced for me went with me into college. In my next post, I will talk about how these questions eventually shifted my faith and led to me embracing a more mystical experience with the Profound. I will also expound on how I went from simply observing faith incongruencies in others to becoming judgmental about them.