A Simple Choice

  For many years I’ve kept my religious convictions pretty much to myself. People that know me well didn’t know what was going on in my heart and mind. I’ve come out and stated that I believe in God a few times in this blog but left it at that. I’ve been received less than favorably for doing so. That kept me from elaborating further. But no more. I’m tired of apologizing for what I believe in as though I’ve done something to be ashamed of. I’m not ashamed. And I’m not just “playing the odds”. My convictions are real. So I feel like I need to finally come clean and tell the story of how I got to this point and made the “simple” choice to believe.

  I was not brought up in a religious family. Far from it. My parents didn’t go to church and never encouraged us to do so. I don’t remember ever seeing a Bible in our house. My first encounter with religion came by way of my Aunt Vern, who was born and raised Catholic and determined that my father was raising a bunch of heathens. She got into an argument with him about it one day, and he told her that if she was so worried about it she could bring us to church. So she did. Aunt Vern managed to get her sisters there to be godparents and got us all baptized in the local Catholic Church. Aunt Vern was my godmother. We then had to attend something called catechism and go with her on Sundays to mass. Back in those days, the mass was all in Latin. Also, even the choir sang in Latin; I know because I was briefly a member of the choir and had to learn songs in Latin without knowing what I was singing about.

  One of my most embarrassing moments happened early on during my Catholic experience. My first confession.  I wasn’t really sure what a sin was. Or what I was supposed to do in there. Nervously I entered the little closed in box with a sliding window. I could hear the priest mumbling something to the person on the other side but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then the window on my side slid open with a bang and startled me. I blurted out, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” I was pretty sure I had, but didn’t have a clue what I was going to say other than that. After all, I was only about twelve years old. How bad could I have been? The priest was praying and I blurted out, “I said some bad words.” I hadn’t really but then I froze and couldn’t think of anything else so terrible that I needed to confess it. The priest asked, “Is that it? What words did you say?” Oh crap! I was supposed to actually tell him what I said? “Hell, and th…th.. the “S” word, Father,” I stuttered. He mumbled something about repenting and then told me that for my penance I should say two “Our Father’s” and five “Hail Mary’s”. Then the window banged shut startling me again. “Our Father who art in heaven”….I began quickly. I knelt there and got about half way through the third Hail Mary when the window banged open again on my side. The person on the other side must not have had too many sins to confess I guessed. I stammered out that I had already had my turn. The window banged shut again. Father was in a hurry to get this over with I guessed, and I was holding up the line. I exited the booth without finishing the requisite Hail Mary’s sure I was now condemned to hell forever because of it. When I went back and sat next to my Aunt Vern she whispered, “You sure were in there a long time. Did you have that much to confess?”  I slid down in the pew sure that everyone else in the church was looking at me and thinking the same thing. In the car on the way home, my Aunt asked me again about it, and she laughed all the way home when I told her what happened. She told me I was supposed to say the prayers after I left the booth. Who knew?

  Anyway, determined to discover what all the fuss was about, I went to the YMCA, that was near our house, the next week and pulled down the huge Holy Bible that was perched upon a podium in the small reading room off to one side of the main playroom. It was the biggest book I had ever seen, and the only way to manage it was to lay it on the floor in front of me. I sat cross-legged and began with Genesis. I worked my way through the whole book that summer in just such a manner. For some the King James is almost like a foreign language. But I had always been an avid reader, so I had little difficulty understanding the words. But the concepts were strange and puzzled me greatly.

  After I finished it, I had a multitude of questions to say the least. Well that’s what catechism is for, right? Being a very shy kid, I didn’t have the nerve to ask the priest who taught the class any of my questions. But fortunately, my cousin was always around and was sort of a teacher’s aid. So I asked him to ask the priest for me. First question was why do we say there is only one true god but we pray to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Wouldn’t that count as three? And then there’s the Virgin Mary as well. Don’t that make four? The priest answered a couple of my easier questions at first because he thought they were coming from my cousin. But when he realized that my cousin was just the go between, he told him that I shouldn’t be worried about such things because that’s what the priesthood was for. They did the worrying for us, and all I needed to do was go to church and do what I was told. Feeling totally patronized, I abandoned all hope of finding any answers in the Catholic Church. So, to the dismay of my Aunt Vern, I quit going. At this point I can honestly say that I didn’t have much faith in organized religion or what they were all about. I was basing this on a sample of only one of course, and that may not have been a fair assessment. But I was only a teenager, after all, and had little opportunity or desire to broaden my base line.

  At a very young age, and way before my aunt dragged us kicking and screaming to church, I believed that there was a God or at least some kind of creator for the universe. My brother, Don, and I laid on top of the Sears warehouse on nights when it was too hot to sleep looking up at the stars and speculated about it all the time. He had his doubts back then, but somehow I just knew there was a God. Where that knowledge came from, I couldn’t say. But I had no such inkling of what to do with the whole Jesus thing.  So, after my disappointing Catholic experience, I put that question on the back burner for a while. I muddled through school without thinking overly much about religion after that.

    However, when I graduated from high school, I began reading everything I could get my hands on pertaining to religion. I had already read the Bible so I thought it only fair that I read other religion’s scriptures and holy writings as well. I read them all even the Book of Mormon which is one of the hardest books to read all the way through, by the way. Because to me, at that point, it was one of the most boring books I ever read. Not to mention that I had decided early on, after noticing some historical discrepancies, that it was a total fiction.

  Anyway, after that, I began reading what the opposition had to say. I got very excited when I started reading about the great philosophers and scientists and what they had to say on the matter. Uncle Sam’s Army got in the way of my further studies, though, for the next four years. I did attend several different churches with various Army buddies just out of curiosity when they invited me, but still came away from them uninspired and with the same old unanswered questions.

  After the Army, there was college. I jumped into that with both feet. The University of Lamar had books on cosmology not found at our local library. I read them all. I was majoring in English Literature and noticed that many of the great poets and authors were struggling with the same questions I was. It stoked the fires of my quest to understand…well everything. Even after college, I continued to read everything on the subject of how we or the universe got here.

  So here I was with tons of knowledge and arguments from both sides. I knew all the arguments made by theologians and the counter arguments made by scientists. But I was still no closer to determining which side was closer to the truth --- and let me just state here that at that point I was pretty convinced that neither side was. Because of my lack of conviction one way or the other, people on my job started calling me an atheist. I let them believe that for a time, although I still had that deep seated conviction that there is a God.

  My first very real religious experience happened several years after I graduated from college and close to the end of my first marriage. Of all places it occurred at a New Year’s Eve Party my wife and I went to at a local night club in Beaumont. All my years of studying this mystifying question left me a pretty serious, quiet, and introverted individual. A few minutes before the stroke of midnight, when the crowd was making so much noise you couldn’t hear anything but a constant roar, a sudden silence fell over me. The noise seemed to vanish as if someone turned off a switch. Then the most peaceful feeling I have ever experienced overwhelmed me. Then I heard a voice say, “Life was not meant to be so serious all the time. Live in Joy. Enjoy the life I’ve given you while you can.” No, I had not been drinking anything other than a glass of champagne. I was the designated driver. At the stroke of midnight the sound came flooding back in, nearly bursting my eardrums. I sat there laughing, with tears streaming down my face. My wife noticed when she tried to kiss me and wish me a happy new year. She asked what was so funny. I don’t think she ever believed me when I told her what had just happened.

  Our marriage ended not too long after that. What followed was many years of depression and self-destructive behavior on my part. Years I’m not proud of at all. I hear many testimonies of people who say that just such times are when the Lord comes to them and they are saved. Not so for me. I reached rock bottom a couple of times during those years. But no angels appeared to pull me up off the floor, and no more mystical experiences occurred that might grant me some kind of revelation. I was still determined to pry out the answer from the universe itself if I had to. If there was a God, I was going to find him on the sheer strength of my own will and brain power with clear and unequivocal reasoning. I spent many more years trying to do just that all the while hating myself more and more for my many failures.

  None of what was becoming a battle royal in my mind was evident on the surface of my day to day life, however. There were times during my second marriage when I was even reasonably content. But I was still reading and studying everything I could both in science and religion. I read the Bible all the way through once again hoping for inspiration. None came right away. Only more questions. During that time, I began listening to a Bible teaching Pastor on TV that had quite a different slant than any I had ever heard preached before. This Pastor actually answered quite a few of the questions that had been bugging me for quite some time. Then my second marriage hit an inevitable rough patch. I say this because I had known from the beginning that this marriage had been undertaken for all the wrong reasons with the wrong person. My second wife had a strong stance against organized religion at that time and wouldn’t even discuss it with me. I had to watch my favorite Pastor on TV when she was not around even.

  Finally, I realized during this time that the quest I was on was futile. It was set up this way on purpose. We will never have definitive proof one way or the other. The whole point is that we are to make a choice without that kind of proof. If God were to reveal Himself in all His glory to the whole world in the next five minutes, most of us would immediately fall down and worship Him. But would we truly love Him? Or would we be doing so because we would be afraid to do otherwise. Have you ever had the experience where you tried to make someone love you? Can love exist where free will is absent?

  So, I finally understood that I could not get to God by the sheer strength of my own mind. So while my marriage was crumbling around me once again, I did the only thing left for me to do. I surrendered. I said ok, God, here I am. I am yours if you want me. At that moment that peacefulness I had experienced once before fell over me, and my heart was filled with a love so overpowering that I wept. My life began to change from that moment on. My wife and I filed for divorce, and I began going to a Baptist Church with a friend of mine. I wish I could say it was a drastic change. But it wasn’t. I was still just me – a wretch in every since of the word. But I no longer doubted God’s existence at all.

  All that was left was to come to grips with Jesus. I knew I could do it with God in my corner. After weighing all the insights I had gained both in science and religion, I realized that it all came down to a simple choice. I asked myself which worldview I would prefer to be reality. The sterile, accidental, scientific, atheistic, worldview in which there is no purpose or meaning to life -- Or the religious worldview with the possibility of an ever lasting life of joy and peace. There’s no contest, really. I chose the later simply because I wish it to be so. As soon as I made that choice, I began to literally fall in love with Jesus. The instances where he has spoken to me and guided me since then are too numerous to go into here. But my doubts are a thing of the past now. My life has still taken many twists and turns since then. I have been tested often. But my faith has remained strong deep in my heart. But unlike many new Christians who want to rush out and tell everyone, I kept my new light under a bushel basket. So many of my friends and family were if not openly hostile to any sort of religion, they were at least indifferent and didn’t want to hear about it. So I kept my new found faith to myself for the most part.

  Do I understand the difficulty many have of making the same choice I did? Yes, very much so. But I can say without a doubt, it was the right choice. I have changed since that day. I am a different person now. Not perfect by any means. And life is still hard; perhaps even harder now because I made the choice. I have suffered losses that have tested my faith. But my faith has overcome and is stronger than ever. I no longer fear death or anything else for that matter. And that big empty hole in my heart and soul that I carried around for so long is full of joy and love for my Lord and Savior.

  I have heard it said many times that such a choice requires a leap of faith. This is true. To believe what the secular world tells you to be the truth requires just as big a leap of faith. I’ve heard secular people declare that the universe didn’t need a creator to come into existence from nothing. It only required the laws of nature, and those alone could create the universe out of nothing. Oh really? Does a law have will. Can it make something happen just by simply existing as a fundamental law? And if so, then where did the laws of nature come from? Who created them? It seems to me that you’re still being asked to take one giant leap of faith to believe such an un-provable thing. This is basically what Stephen Hawking is saying now. So you will have to take that leap either way.

  All the big questions out there that we all ponder from time to time really do just boil down to a simple choice. Which leap will you take? I believe it’s why we’re here. Will you make an informed choice? Or just go whichever way the wind blows without putting much of your own thought into it? Is it possible to make that choice on the last day of your life? Yes. The thief on the cross with Jesus did so and was promised everlasting life with the Lord. Will you risk waiting until then just so you can live your life anyway you want to? Sadly, some will risk it. Some who do take such a risk will fail and lose their opportunity forever. Others hate the whole idea of God and heaven. I feel sorry for those. Not for any punishment they might receive after death, but for the fullness of joy that they walk around every day without. I know what it is to live like that. I would never go back to that. So, although the journey I took to get there was arduous, the choice I finally made was simple. And that supposedly giant leap was more like just a step across a line from one side to the other. I’ve never regretted it since then. I pray for your wisdom and strength to make your choice and take that step. When you do, I hope you land on the same side that I did before your time runs out. If you do, I and many more like me will welcome you with open arms into a very big and loving family. Peace and Love be with you.