The Bible Comes To Life

This weekend I shared an exercpt of an email describing someone's journey towards faith. Although this person wouldn't call themselves a Christian yet, it seems like Jesus' words about seeds and yeast are taking root and creeping through them. Here's the unedited version:

I was asked to write something about my spiritual journey toward faith. It has been a long one so far and I'm not quite finished yet. This all started about 10 years ago when a friend of mine from work started having conversations with me about God. I had lots of issues with the subject based on my experiences in early adulthood with my family's church and my general disillusionment with "believers", but he made a lot of interesting comments and didn’t seem to be like those other people so we kept talking.

Over the years, our conversations continued until finally I was able to take a step forward and we started having a weekly Bible study session. Now it started getting sticky since I had moved from idle conversations at lunch, to a formal sit-down thing. On top of that, my wife wanted to join in since she hadn't really studied the Bible before. During the year and a half that we had the study sessions, I passed through a lot of points on the spectrum from "How can I even be considering this stuff?" to "Maybe there is a God, but Jesus was either a made up character or just some Jewish teacher" to "I just don't know what to believe".

I am a very intense person and when I start studying something, I really dig in and study it. And boy is there lots of materials on this topic! I tried reading books that had been recommended to me, but they seemed to either be too superficial or didn't address the issues that I felt. I started looking for other resources and read a ton of stuff from the web. I was trying to intellectualize believe. I wanted to understand the logic behind God. Somehow, I just wasn’t able to understand everything…

For a while, I really got to the point where I didn't want to think about it any more and I had to take a break. During this same period, my wife began attending church on a regular basis. She accepted Christ soon after and was baptized. I would attend church with her maybe once a month so she wouldn’t get too upset with me. She had also enrolled our kids in a Christian school, so I had to set a good example for them as well…

I was being surrounded. After a break of about a year, I decided to give it another try and started to attend church regularly and to study again. I was still trying to rationalize believe, but I took a more relaxed approach this time. My wife had recommended that I look at it as a ‘philosophy of life’ and not get so caught up in the things that I couldn’t comprehend intellectually. Basically, I should let my heart lead me instead of my brain.

I have been trying to follow that advice for the last year. I try not to expect everything to make perfect sense. As my friend tells me all the time…”You just have to accept that you aren’t as smart as God”. Hard to accept, but it could be true. I am experimenting with living life like a Christian to see if and how it changes me. I am becoming more involved with the church and more giving with my time and resources.

What this has meant so far is that things are happening to me that I didn’t expect. I am finding that I have lots of people around me supporting me in my quest (many more than I realized) and I have ended up inviting an acquaintance of mine to attend Crossroads (getting in deeper and deeper). I’m still searching and I’m still dealing with my own intellectual pride, but the journey continues.