[Jennifer]

Went to church today, where a 20-year-old girl (who will be baptized tonight at a special service with some other people) gave her short testimony.

She's an ISxx of some type (don't know her well enough to go further) and I like her so far, she seems quite nice. But her testimony basically involved all "spiritualese" terminology.

("Went to Catholic church growing up but it never meant anything to me, then I started going to this church and I felt something i had not had before, but I was running away from the Lord into a life of sin, and then I was reading in my Bible and struggling and felt God knocking on the door of my heart and so I gave up living my own life and now I live for God, yada yada.")

In the past, hearing testimonies similar to this really bugged me a great deal, because it all sounds so cookie-cutter and thus "inauthentic" -- like people just repeating the standard Christian testimony and not really describing anything personal or involved.

Then, today, I was thinking about her, since she was so young, and trying to hear what was UNDER the surface... and realized that just because she's expressing herself in a fairly conventional way doesn't necessarily mean she did not experience something unique and personal. It could merely be an attempt to "communicate" with other like-minded people, using the language of Church-ese, sort of an Fe convention among Christians. People who aren't naturally communicators fall into the trap, anyway, of using cliche phrasing to describe what could easily be a deep and meaningful experience internally.

So I'm thinking that, just because I didn't much like her delivery, it was no excuse for me to automatically dismiss her... and I wonder how much of the stuff from SJ types that I might have routinely dismissed is actually authentic... but just poorly articulated, or at least is articulated in a way that doesn't speak much to me but speaks a great deal of others who share that mindset.

Ideas?