I was raised in church the way some children are raised near the ocean — it was simply there, a fact of my landscape, not something I chose so much as something I was born into. I knew the songs before I understood the theology. I knew the routine of a Sunday before I understood what it was pointing to.
The gap between inherited and owned
Paul commends Timothy for a faith that first lived in his grandmother and his mother before it lived in him (2 Timothy 1:5) — but the phrase “I am sure, now lives in you” implies a transfer that had to actually happen. Inherited faith and owned faith are not automatically the same thing, even when they look identical from a pew.
My own transfer happened slowly, in my early twenties, during a season when nothing about my life was falling apart — which is, I think, exactly why it happened. I was not desperate. I had the space to actually ask myself whether I believed any of this because it was true, or only because it was familiar.
What made it mine
What made it mine was not a single dramatic moment but a decision, made and remade many mornings, to actually open Scripture instead of merely knowing it existed — to pray instead of merely having been taught how. Joshua’s declaration, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15), reads to me now as less of a proclamation and more of a daily renewal. Every generation, every person, has to make that choice themselves. My parents’ faith gave me a head start. It could not make the choice on my behalf.