This is a really important question I want to address. Below is a letter I sent out to freinds about 3 years ago. I wanted to lay out my case for faith so people close to me could understand why I have chosen this path. As time goes on my knowledge grows and I want ot update this document. I also would love to hear comments. I enjoy nothing more than a good tought provoking debate on this topic.
Dear Friend:
This letter is an explanation of my faith and how I got where I am today, and if I have given this to you, you are important to me. For those of you who have been in my life a long time, you may or may not know that I am a Christian. I have not been overly vocal about this fact. As it has become more important to me to practice my faith more completely I began thinking that some of you may be turned off as you begin to see me pray before my meals or in restaurants and speak more about God and his role in my and my families life. You may think I’ve gone off the deep end or worse that I am now somehow acting “holier than thou”. I thought about how to deal with that because something this important in my life is something I want to share but it is also not a topic everyone wants to discuss. So I thought a phone call or lunch out of the blue might seem like it was coming from left field and would be very out of character for me anyway which may just reinforce peoples fear that I am no longer one they can trust. I decided a letter would be a good way to discuss the topic. I am not expecting any acknowledgment from anyone here, I simply wanted to state to you my thoughts and provide some background as to how I got here.
So, no I have not gone off the deep end, in fact quite contrary, I finally have the courage to stand up for my beliefs and faith, which I believe to be the one and only truth. Now this may rankle some people, so let me be clear, I believe there is a lot we do not know. So those who want to use the Bible as a weapon to alienate those who they feel vary from there belief system is not where I am coming from. I am simply trying to walk the talk in my own life and I want to provide you a little explanation of what it all means to me.
All my life I have never felt that this one life here on earth is all there is. I have always talked to God in times of personal crises even as a child, as I suspect many of you have as well. As my life progressed into my late teens, I began exploring various concepts of spirituality. All the while being more aware of the spiritual side of my life and integrating it more into who I am. At the age of 20 or so I began finding meaningful writings and teachings coming from what some people call “New Age” thinking, some of which I still think is very good and not necessarily contradictory to Christianity, I think those teachings simply fall short of the final step. During all this exploration I am convinced God was in my life and leading me to him in the gradual path he knew it would take for me to accept him.
You should know that I have spent and continue to spend inordinate amounts of time examining my faith. Do I think I have all the answers? No way. It took many years of study and consideration before I understood who Jesus was and why he is important in my life. My fear was always, I could not let myself fall into some “cult like” thinking and try to ignore all I know about science and technology. So for me I had to follow a certain path of discovery, since I like facts and science I applied some very critical thinking including some of the latest discoveries in physics. Now I know, ultimately none of this matters because it comes down to faith but you can find some very interesting and compelling facts in science which may lead you to God.
I would say ask yourself this (I did). Is this all an accident? Did the earth just develop as part of some unknown cosmic coincidence? Look how perfect the system is. For those of you who are engineers like me you can appreciate the infinite complexity of biological life and the ecosystem of earth. Can you imagine writing a software program and algorithms that tried to accomplish all the complexities of weather systems, dirt that produces food, not just nourishment but wonderful juicy oranges and many varieties of crisp sweet apples, the ingredients for chocolate, the complexity of biology and animal bodies, insects and the important role they play in everything from spreading disease which controls population to worms that filter the dirt so it can produce crops, the ocean environment, the unbelievable beauty of sex between a man and a woman, how perfectly we physically fit together? It goes on and on. Think about the technological advances we have made as human beings, all from this self contained environment we call Earth. The advanced metals we produce, the next time you drive your car think about everything in your vehicle, how all its parts came from raw materials found here on Earth. Can this all be just coincidence? I think not. Sometimes it is easier to either not think about it or pretend it is coincidence because when you really start to examine the facts it can actually be frightening. It is actually frightening to think there is some being out there that is greater than us, that will actually judge us on our actions. This seems ludicrous at first, so we reject it out of hand. After all were is the evidence? God does not talk to me. I’ve never seen a burning bush with God’s voice telling me what to do. This all sounds like ancient civilization hocus pocus used to explain things they did not understand or tools to control and lead nations of people. Surely today science has helped us debunk much of this. Well, quite the contrary, science is proving the existence of God, a creator. Einstein’s theory of relativity has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt (see Nobel Prize winner Russell Hulse). This theory as it fully plays out leads us to the unignorable fact that there was a single creation event for our universe. To have a creation event, there must have been a creator, hmm just think about that for a minute, there must have been a creator. At the same time this was being proven in physics, astronomers and astrophysicists have also proven that unlike previously thought, the universe is not like a rubber band that will expand from the momentum of the original creation explosion and then the pull of gravity would contract it and over billions of years the whole process would repeat. We now know the universe is forever expanding. We know there are 10 dimensions, of which we can only experience 4 (the three dimensional space we know and time being the forth). For a 10 dimensional universe to be created, the creator must be able to operate in all dimensions, thus God is well beyond our ability to comprehend because we are three dimensional beings and while we can mathematically prove 10 dimensions we have no way to relate and visualize what that is. This is very abstract stuff and difficult to grasp but we have proven it and it is ridiculous to ignore it ( a great book which talks about much of this is Beyond the Cosmos by Hugh Ross PhD.).
Sometimes the most obvious things sit right in front of our face and we don’t see them because they simply don’t enter our perception of reality. Then some event may occur which causes us so see things slightly differently. Death of a close friend or relative is generally one of those events. When we look at the popular culture around us many of us don’t think about it. I’d like to share an example of something that always stuck with me. It was the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. There is a scene when they recover the arc of the covenant (basically a trunk that the early Jews used to carry the original ten commandments from Moses). In the scene the Nazis open the arc and beautiful angels from heaven descend, then all of the sudden the angels turn into frightening beings and all who don’t know scripture (the Nazis of course for the movie) are killed by Gods wrath through the angels. This scene always sent chills through me, from the first time I saw it as a kid. It was as if something resonated deep inside me about the battle of good versus evil and the power of God. Then the movie was over and I did not think much about it anymore. It struck me later in life that that feeling is part of our internal knowledge that God is real.
I always struggled with some of the facts around Jesus Christ. I moved fairly easily to the place where I believed in God or a god force. But I could not accept that I needed to communicate with God through Jesus. Why did I need this guy? I felt I always had a relationship with God, what was the role of Jesus and could this guy really have been the Son of God. What about this story about his resurrection, could this really be trusted? How many men have had there hands on this text of the bible. The questions go on and on, what about Adam and Eve? Surely we know there were Neanderthals and other early forms of men. (Actually a careful reading of Genesis does not contradict what we have found about early man, it states God created males and females in Genesis 1:17 and later begins the story of Adam and Eve, and in Genesis 4:13 Cain, Adam and Eve’s son, expresses concern over being killed by “others” implying there are many other men in the world at this time). At the end of the day, not having all the answers is what faith is all about. I cannot explain everything in the bible. Much of it appears poetry to me sometimes to be taken literally other times to be read into. The bottom line is faith is a personal decision, if you want to find reasons to dispute Christianity there are plenty to pull from.
What I can tell you is my personal experience, which happened in 1995 at a Promise Keepers event with my Dad. About this same time I had been reading some of the bible and a book given to me by my mother in law by Marcus Borg (a well known biblical scholar) about the life of Jesus Christ. At this point I believed Jesus was a real man who was very wise, clearly worked miracles and affected thousands of people he came into contact with. He seemed to truly grasp the nature of the Old Testament, understanding it was more important to have faith in God than to be a blind follower of rules. But the one and only Son of God? I was not convinced and still did not understand why he was so important to my relationship with God. It was about 9:00pm at the coliseum and Reverend Jeffrey Johnson was speaking. I truthfully cannot remember exactly what he said but he was talking about the story of Zaccheus (Luke 19), what I do remember is that as I stood there in prayer to God during his sermon and he was explaining the importance of Christ I received a vision of a bridge over a canyon in a beautiful meadow with a brilliant white and yellow light coming from beyond the bridge and that light was bathing and illuminating everything. It became clear to me in that moment that God was too great for man to truly fathom and that Christ came as a bridge between man and God to facilitate our relationship with God, that our belief in Christ as the son of God is a manifestation of faith and asking of forgiveness from God for the sins of the imperfect life we live. God/Jesus knew man could not live to God’s standard and so our faith in the gift of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for us is our way of showing God we believe in him, we trust his word and we are thankful, to the point of utter astonishment, in his willingness to love us as a father loves his children and to accept our mistake ridden life. I felt full of love and overwhelmed with emotion. How could I have doubted one who only had love for me and wanted to help me fulfill my relationship with God, something which deep inside I had always hungered for. I told myself, whatever happens after this moment that I will remember this vision. It is my faith. Can I answer all the questions, no, but I don’t need to because I have faith in God and Jesus Christ. Ultimately I know what I need to know will be revealed to me. Do I still have doubts, yes. I have years of non-believing thought processes that have become so much a part of me that they are unconscious, so my faith and relationship with Christ is always growing and evolving. The more I put into it the more it grows. Just like any relationship.
In some ways it is harder for us today because there are so may distractions and we know so much about how our world works. Marcus Borg put it well. To paraphrase him he said that ancient man, and really man before the real birth of science had so many things he could not explain that spirituality was as much a part of his daily life as air and water. There were simply things that happened which he could not understand and therefore explained via the supernatural. So spirituality was a part of there daily life. I believe they were not so far off in their thinking, science is simply a tool which is helping us explain and learn the mystery of Gods universe, things like a solar eclipse are no less supernatural today than they were thousands of years ago, now we just understand better how it happens, we still don’t know how all that stuff got there in the first place.
I have also always been uncomfortable with all the religious words we hear like scripture, Christ, Christ’s blood, sin, Father, Lord, etc.. Church also made me uncomfortable, it was too often filled with hypocrites and men and women playing politics trying to see who was holier than who. Any time you get a group of people together you are going to get human behavior in all its good and bad forms and I sure didn’t need some guy (a pastor) to tell me how to have a relationship with God, no man was above me or any other man. So I stayed away from church for several years until I felt more comfortable going, on “my terms”. As my Christianity grows and my relationship with God and Jesus matures I am less threatened by the religious words and have come to understand they are just words, nouns, adjectives, verbs, like any other word. My point here is please don’t let things like this turn you off to your discovery of a relationship with God and Jesus Christ. And don’t let any person or persons turn you off, if this letter turns you off throw it away or ignore it, but please do your own exploration. It is your life and you owe it to yourself to really examine your relationship with God and learn about Jesus and make your own decision, not out of fear or peer pressure but from your heart.
I pray for blessings in your life,
Ron
