grew up in a Catholic family. As a young child, I think I believed in God and I knew who Jesus was from attending mass and youth groups regularly, but my faith was very basic. As I got older, and started going through the major sacraments of the Catholic church, I began to have a lot of questions and doubts about what I knew of God and Christianity. This came to a head during my "Confirmation" at about 17 years old. Shortly after that, I made the decision to leave Catholicism, and Christianity as whole, behind.
In early adulthood, my doubt and skepticism grew. I found and, if I’m honest with myself, would seek out others who had grown up in the church and had left for the same reasons I did. They served as affirmation that I had made the right choice in deciding that Christianity was just made by man, and that if anyone really looked into it, they would come to the same conclusions I did. I determined that I had “graduated from that type of thinking” … that God may or may not exist, and Christianity is probably not the way to him. I was now basically an agnostic.
"I determined that I had 'graduated from that type of thinking.'"
But my life took a radical turn in my mid-twenties. I went through a painful divorce after only two years of marriage and found myself very depressed and without purpose or direction. I leaned heavily on family and friends during that time. A somewhat new addition to these friends was Heather. I had seen her here and there, through a mutual friend, for a couple of years, but had never really gotten to talk much with her. To be honest, I actually thought she didn't like me. Once we started spending time together, it didn't take long for me to develop feelings for her. When I told her how I felt, I was faced with the first clear sign (at least to me) of God’s grace in my life. She revealed she had seen me many times on campus our freshman year at ASU, developed a crush, and--without knowing anything about me--had been praying for a chance to tell me about Jesus...praying for 6 years, in fact, before we ever met. Thrilled though I was, she then told me her one unbending criteria was that her partner also be a believer in Christ. My joy was instantly mixed with disappointment, as I was sure that would never be me. Still, I recognized and respected that Heather's faith was not blind, but was well thought out... And that this story was either a big coincidence, or there was something more going on.
This prompted me to look into Christianity for the first time as an adult, and give my questions and doubts a chance to be answered. I dove into a great deal of resources on “Christian apologetics” or “arguments for Christianity” and started to really read and study the Bible. More things began happening to me that made me question whether this was all coincidental. One day, not long after Heather told me the story of praying for me for years before we met, a coworker of mine asked me if he could talk to me privately in the hallway of our offices. Though I thought this was a strange request, given that I barely knew him, I agreed. He told me that every time he prayed, my name kept coming up. He didn’t know why, so he wanted to share that with me to hopefully get an answer. I was stunned, and told him about the story that Heather had also just shocked me with a few weeks prior. He offered to go out to lunch with me to share his story of how he came to faith, and to talk more about where I was at with my beliefs. A one-time lunch turned into regular meetings as he also began to break down my barriers against Christianity.
One major thing that I still struggled with in the early parts of this journey was whether or not it was morally just to eat animals. I had been a vegetarian for about 6 years at this point, deciding that: if God exists, and he created everything, then he is responsible for all the pain in the world as well. I didn’t want any part in that. Now here I was, reading in the Bible that God is the creator of life and the author of morality, and that he declares it morally ok for humans to eat animals (Genesis 9:3). Could I trust this? Well at the time, I was having a lot of stomach pain and digestion problems, and a naturopathic doctor had suggested that I take a food sensitivity test to see if certain foods were causing my issues. When the results came back they showed that I was extremely sensitive to cheese, milk, eggs, beans, rice, soy, peanuts, almonds… basically everything that I was eating for protein. And my lowest sensitivities? Meat and fish. The doctor presented me with two options: Either, I could go on an extreme vegan diet, with very little sources for protein, or I could start eating meat. I took this as another sign. I reintroduced meat and fish into my diet and my stomach issues eventually went away.
For months, I continued to really study Christianity. My previous perceptions and/or suppositions about it began to break down. Contrary to what I assumed, I discovered that belief in God and the Bible could be squared with my intellectual side. I found plenty of people who were way more intelligent than me and who had incredible faith and incredible arguments for Christianity being true (This included Heather, who I found out later was a member of Mensa). I even studied other major religions along the way, but others did not satisfy my questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny.
Finally, one day on a trip to California, I was with Heather and a few other Christian friends, just listening to them talk about their beliefs, and I had a realization that I had become a Christian too…that I believed everything they were saying… that I believed what I had reading in the Bible and in the other apologetic books I had read. I was amazed. While I was busy wrestling with all these thoughts, questions, doubts... my heart had been changed.
On the drive back to Arizona, I told Heather about the revelation I had. We pulled over on the side of the road, in the middle of the desert, and walked out away from the highway to pray. I finally let down my guard and declared that I was ready and willing to be a follower of Jesus. (Come to find out later, a friend had a dream that I would come to know Jesus praying “over a rock”. Fits pretty convincingly with the large rock we sat on in the desert that day.)
“I flipped the book over and it said, 'You’re a Christian, now what?'”
I got baptized that October, and proposed to Heather a few weeks after that. We got married on March 28, 2015.
The truth is that I had never really given Christianity an honest chance. I thought I knew what it was, even prided myself on knowing better, but I was wrong. I believe now that Christianity makes better sense of our world and the human condition than anything else. There was an answer to all my questions. I just had to be open to them. Jesus Christ really has changed my life. I discovered that the story of the Bible is the true story of the world, and that story is not one of guilt and condemnation, but of freedom from ourselves and unconditional love--no matter what we do or experience in this life! Before my encounter with Jesus, I was living with a distorted view of life. When life got hard and my world fell apart, that distorted view of reality left me directionless and in despair. As my worldview began to fall in line with the truth of the world, hope and joy were breathed into my life, and I am no longer undone by the uncertainties and pain that is part of a broken world. Instead I have an identity and purpose and place in the story. I've found my home again, with my Creator. If you seek him, you will find him. If you knock, he will answer.(Matthew 7:7)
I'm not going to try to convince you here today that you should become a Christian. You probably have your own doubts and reservations. I just want to say this, if any of this speaks to you, I encourage you to do what I did and challenge the questions you have and openly look at responses to them. You have nothing to lose, but everything to gain.
