Only a vampire can really tell you what it is like to be a vampire. Sure, plenty of non-vampires (mortals, ugh) can give TedTalks, write best-selling books, or teach a university course on the life of immortality and wearing a cape.
Mortals would tell you about the costs and benefits of living in a coffin, a radically changed diet, different senses, and a different sleep schedule. Yet, they could not tell you about what it means to be a vampire and, thus, what it is really like to make such a life-altering decision.
Making changes
In her book, Transformative Experiences, L. A. Paul raises this very predicament as a metaphor for experiences in life we are unable to quantify. Whether getting married, having children, or other substantial life choices, Paul suggests that such decisions not only change our circumstances, but they also intimately change us.
Priorities, perspectives, values change as a result of the life choices we make, but these are not easy to measure. One example of this is what it means to be married.
Attempt to ask a married person their lived experience of marriage and you may or may not get an answer, but the answer will inevitably fall short. Why? Because the perspective, priorities, and values driving the response you get are radically different because of how marriage changes people.
Russ Roberts, author of Wild Problems, puts it this way,
“The biggest mystery isn’t what goes on behind closed doors when couples are free to be themselves, but rather what happens behind closed eyes when married men or women reflect on how marriage alters their sense of self and how that sense of self ripples through the rest of their experience of life.”
The unmarried man is a foreigner to the married man he becomes by virtue of the reality that he is married.
The harboured self-deception
Whether such a change is for better or for worse raises a further issue. When life happens, and in such dramatic ways, one only has the option to choose how one responds, and how one responds will shape one’s character.
Reflecting on such a question of self-awareness, Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments puts it this way,
“He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-deception, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct.”
When the decisions we make change us, radically change us as they inevitably will, it takes boldness to confront the change and to consider how one ought to act. What the impact of such a change has on a person, and what this change means.
To refuse to do so will not keep us from changing, but it will leave us open to changing in ways that could be for the worse.
Someone once told me that being in a relationship taught him how selfish he was. The point is not whether or not one was selfish beforehand. Rather the dynamic of what it means to be in a relationship inevitably sheds light in unanticipated places.
These are places in our lives that we were unaware of before simply because of how change works. What we are left with is what we choose to do with this new, unanticipated knowledge.
Becoming a Christian
This journey of change is not unlike the experience of salvation, of becoming a Christian.
Writing on the impact that salvation has and quoted in Burk Parsons, John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine and Doxology, John Calvin stated,
“It is entirely the work of grace and a benefit conferred by it that our heart is changed from a stony one to one of flesh, that our will is made new, and that we, created anew in heart and mind, at length will what we ought to will.”
Salvation brings about change, radical change, where our desires, our thoughts, our aspirations are dramatically altered by what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. This is why C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity described this very process as becoming a new person, not a nice person.
This sort of language is not alien to Scripture. Scriptures speaks of:
● becoming a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17),
● of having the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 16),
● and of being transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans chapter 12, verse 2).
Salvation brings radical change that transforms who we are, not just the way we act, dress, or where we go on Sunday mornings.
Testimonies are powerful. They speak not simply of the work that God has done external in our lives, seeking to describe the miraculous around us.
They speak also of the greatest miracle: the work he has done within us, the renewing of our minds, the salvation of our souls. This transformation is often beyond words, being made a new creation. It is unquantifiable and incomparable but entirely and radically meaningful.
Hailing from North Auckland, Blake Gardiner sounds American, looks Swedish, but grew up in Laos. As an introvert, Blake lives life on the edge by socialising. When he isn’t putting his life at such risk, he enjoys reading theology and debating whether Interstellar is truly the greatest movie of all time. Blake is married to fellow young writer Jessica Gardiner.