This post at Meta Filter sparked a memory.
I grew up in a Christian home, and once I left home for college, I got involved in the college fellowship group at a nearby (very wealthy) Presbyterian church. The group was called Time Out, and was more to my liking than the more conservative InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Time Out sponsored working trips to local soup kitchens and men's and women's shelters. The overall message from the staff members was that we could live a balanced life - that we could be successful professionals and still be good Christian folk. (This was the appropriate message for a group made up primarily of Carnegie Mellon University students, we bunch of uptight wannabe professionals.)
Every winter Time Out held a retreat where we learned and sang and cried and played snow football. One of the most vivid of my retreat memories is getting a massage (fully clothed, of course) on the floor of the assembly hall from two women at once. I was quite a wild man in those days, I tell ya.
The retreat was an event to which we were encouraged to invite outsiders, both Christian and non. During one retreat I was watching a game of pool when one of these visitors approached me. He had punked-up hair, wore a black U2 t-shirt (this was probably in 1982), and was drinking a can of Coke. He walked right up to me and said, as if he had been preparing and rehearsing all morning, as if he had been watching me from the doorway working up his courage, he came right up to me, looked me in the eye, and this young guy said to me, "So, what do you think about God?"
I usually think of my 1982-self as a miserable dork, with barely enough social skill to talk to the people I knew, let alone strangers. But I have to give my 1982-self credit for this: I laughed. Yes, I laughed before saying, "God's okay." I was still smiling as the kid turned and left the room.