3 small posts I hate books but to answer your query I ended up writing
one. You asked here it is.
Kelly
I did not grow up in a Christian family; I didn’t even know a Christian most of my life. I had a couple of experiences that were quite brief, but no religious training to speak of at all. I was sent to a church once when I was about 7 on my own; I was given some money and told to put it in the plate when they passed it around. I did that, and left right after that since I thought that was the only reason why I was there. I was asked if I wanted to go back, and I said, “No.” If I had money I wanted to keep it was my thinking at the time.
The next time I went to church was when I was in high school, a girl I was seeing asked me to go. I recall the message, but it didn’t make any sense to me at the time. The message was about a guy who worked in the church most of his life, but on his death bed cried out that he was lost and died screaming he wasn’t ready. It didn’t seem right to me that someone who did that would lose out with God, the Pastor was saying it was because no one could work their way into heaven.
I might have put more faith into the sermon, but the only reason I was even in the church was to party with this girl. She wasn’t living a holy life either, seemed like if there was something to that church she was going to, her life would have been different than mine, it wasn’t. God wasn’t part of my life at all growing up, the only time I recall ever praying growing up was when someone I loved died, and I was pleading with God to bring them back, and they weren’t. Jesus’ name was just part of a cuss word for me, he wasn’t someone I talked about, thought about, or cared about growing up, I had my life and the only spiritual training I got were basically from scary stories and movies about ghosts and alike, nothing more.