Recently I have had some discussions with non-Christians and seen a few videos by non-Christians on the subject of God. There have been many ideas I ran into in these experiences that I had struggled with before my conversion but which nonetheless came as a shock as I had left them behind so long ago that I had completely forgotten them. What really startled me though, was the way God was discussed as some kind of immobile theory and the believer was discussed as the one around whom everything was centered. I have indeed learned about God as a foundation of philosophy (as the Foundation of philosophy) and the central subject of theology, but for a very long time I have also viewed Him first and foremost as a person. How could I not? He has approached me as a person.
As much as I love philosophy, it aches sometimes to talk to people and have to get caught up in a conversation about the intellectual theorem of God when all I want to do is tell them as much as I can about the Father and Lover and Savior that it is my delight to worship. Once again, how can I not? He pursues me, comforts me, romances me, teaches me, rebukes me, urges me, suffers for me!
Even in my boyhood I see His hand preparing me. It was then that I struggled with the question of purpose. Why do we exist? Is it for our own happiness? Then why do we thirst for purpose? Is it to obey moral law and be good to each other? If it is then either we are good to one another so that we can all be as happy as possible and we are really going back to the first failed answer or we are saying that acts of goodness are themselves our purpose, but that can't be right because we do good acts out of love for someone and not for the acts themselves. In the end I could never give myself an answer. It was not until I became a Christian that I saw the truth I had been both desiring and fearing: if there is purpose, it must come from something that is so good that it is its own reason to exist and we all exist for its sake. It is no great leap to see that this thing is in all likelihood a person. When I finally accepted this truth, that God is the ultimate good and the source of all other goodness and purpose, it became central to my faith. I came to see how He is the premise of all morality, all science, all philosophy, all art, all happiness, and all knowledge. I learned why He called Himself the great I Am.
As I passed through high school and then through my first year of college I continued to develop in my knowledge of the Lord. I read all the classic writings of C.S. Lewis, I read Love Your God With All Your Mind by J.P. Moreland, and I ate up as much apologetics as I could find. But the really astonishing thing was still to come and in my senior year the groundwork was being laid down as I learned not only of theology but also of prayer, servanthood, and God's miraculous activity.
At the end of my first year of college I listened to a recording of Kingdom Triangle by J.P. Moreland and realized that though I had grown greatly in the Christian mind, I had grown little in terms of action. I began to try developing skills in this area but progress was meager at first. I entered fellowship more and eventually I started attending HELP Ministries, which I had attended in my senior year and stopped going to when I totalled my car at the start of my first year of college, but there was little else. Then God moved in on me.
I tried to start a Christian philosophy group. The project died. I began to pray daily and reached the point at which I would pray when I woke up, when I got on the bus for classes, when I got back on the bus to go home, when I went to bed, and before any other endeavor that happened to come up. I fell into complacency and laziness and the prayers stopped. The entire semester I was constantly passing through spiritual peaks and troughs, both more intense than I think they had ever been before.
Then the next semester came and after some flatlands I was back in the peaks and troughs. I found the revival in encouragement from poets at a Black History Month event who spoke openly about the greatness of God, in a Spring Retreat, in a struggle lasting over a month with procrastination and sloth and shame. I had already faced serious academic failure the past spring and that semester I saw God reach in again and again at the very last second to deliver me from academic habits, from missed deadlines, and from unmet requirements so that I could make it to Fresno Pacific University this coming fall.
The real leap forward in my spiritual life, however, came when Osama bin Laden's death was announced. It is possible that my entire Christian journey until then had been planned around that one event. That night I wrote a facebook note entitled "Mourning Osama bin Laden" in which I poured out love for my brothers and sisters in radical Islam and broken-hearted sorrow over our reaction to Bin Laden's death that could only have come from God. It was a wonderful opportunity to bless and admonish my fellow believers and I am thankful that I had the privilege to be used by God in that way. But, as had been the case so many times before, there was greater yet to come. Inspired by the response to my note, I set out to organize a prayer meeting to come to God on behalf of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Throughout the scheduling process I experienced constant difficulties in getting people to give me available times and at the same time received incessant encouragement from God in various ways until I finally decided to just trust Him by setting a date and time without waiting to get the thumbs up from everyone. When the time came, I was the only person there as every single interested person had either finals, work, transportation problems, sickness, or simply fell into forgetfulness. Fifteen minutes after the prayer meeting was supposed to start, I decided to lay down and pray for all the things that we had been planning to pray for and that if there was still no one there when I opened my eyes I would go catch a bus home. In the time afterwards, I was surprised by my own calmness and realized that if God had simply not shown up there would have been one or two other people and that having no one but myself was just as miraculous as if one hundred people had come to pray with me. I saw on the way home how, in addition to resulting in my being invited into my college groups leadership, the prayer meeting had taught me that I was emotionally capable of standing around looking like an idiot because God had other plans. Serious prayer and faith involves a risk of just that humiliation and disappointment and I knew now that I could take that risk.
To understand how incredible that experience and the events leading up to and following it were, you must understand that I am not an extrovert. In fact, I am not just shy but was actually diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (a "mild" form of autism) as a child. Until about the fourth grade I didn't even know the names of my classmates, many of whom I had been in the same class with since first grade. In my free time, I would automatically seek out some place of absolute solitude and stay there for hours. Even in high school I would invariably choose to spend my breaks this way until the end of sophomore year, and while I began to choose companionship more and more to choose companionship during my free time I still will frequently seek out solitude for enjoyment. I was often shy and I was absolutely terrified of social interaction, but I was also antisocial. A person who is shy wants to talk to others but is afraid to, but an antisocial person has no desire to speak to anyone else and may even be resentful of others. Quite the snob, I was very resentful. Fear and distaste characterized my view of all but a few carefully selected friends.
So how can be through anything or anyone aside from God that I called for that prayer meeting an nagged and announced and put myself out there in everywhich way? How else can it be that I went on an inner-city mission trip one month later and found myself in constant fellowship and upfront servitude and loved every minute of it? How else could I have come back full of ideas on how to serve and fellowship even more back at home and then gone online to nag everyone else about those ideas? How else could I have resolved to go out onto the streets every week with a sign and a song when others much more extroverted than I have expressed admiration for my "boldness?" Is there anything besides God's delight in confounding worldly expectations that could possible have made a snob like me a beacon of joy and boldness?
I have accomplished much since my conversion and my accomplishments have all been accompanied by failures. My discoveries of my honored place as a member of the Kingdom of Heaven have been followed up immediately by reminders of my absolute sinfulness. I have no explanation but the Lord.
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