Leaving Campus Crusade

I hate meeting strangers and striking up conversations and I hate asking for money. Not a good combination for a Campus Crusade for Christ staffer but there I was - - a missionary to college students I didn’t know and a fund raiser for the cause. Both aspects led to a break between me and CCC.

These days, though, when I look back, I see a much more telling episode that says a lot about who I was then, why I left and who I am now. It was a Spring day at Rutgers on one of the wide open lawns where students hung out on nice days. I ran into a female student lying on the grass studying. I approached her and was amazed that she welcomed me and asked me to sit down.

I went through the niceties - - you know, be friendly so you can get to the real goal: sharing God’s love. But as I started to share the Four Laws and explain God’s plan she started to tell me her beliefs. I was amazed. So much so that I later went back to my apartment and told my CCC roommates what a bizarre person I had met. I told them how genuinely crazy she was and couldn’t understand how someone like her could even be in college.

Here’s what she told me. She believed in an ancient Egyptian religion that worshipped frogs. I thought she couldn’t possibly be serious but she was so earnest. She seemed to have really thought this out. These days, I don’t remember the details but it was something like frogs were the symbol of change and flexibility. As amphibians they lived in two worlds and served as a guide for us. She believed that God was essentially amphibian in nature. Her religion included baptism, of course, water being all important.

Since she was serious and since I wanted to enter into a dialogue that I could direct to the Christian God, I asked her questions about afterlife, and prayer and communion. She had answers to it all. She was completely unpersuaded that there was anything about Christianity that had anything to offer over her own beliefs.

This is what I reported back to my friends, shaking my head in amazement that there were wackos out there like her.

These days, of course, I now realize she was playing me. I was so serious about my proselytizing that she decided, why fight it; she would just make up something just as ridiculous. She must have been amazed at how gullible I was. I wonder what she told her friends when she went home.

Now I think, what difference really is there between a person who believes in a celestial frog or the one who believes in an anthropomorphic one? Why is one any better of an explanation than the other?