Quest for Truth

It all concluded on Thursday, October 25, 2012.  A younger person whom I befriended through work had invited me to visit with him, and some of his friends who were watching a series of videos about Christianity.  The speaker was presenting the cause of Christianity before a body of students.  He first spoke of the natural view of man as being inherently good, and gave some of the world's evidences which support that.  He then stated that the Bible's view of man is that he is fallen, and needs a saviour.  Just as he said that I heard a literal, though not audible voice speak to my mind, “Wait a minute! I've read the Bible, and the Spirit that I am of tells me that the Bible's view of man is that man is the son of God because he has a saviour.”  When the video was finished, I told the people there what had happened to me.  Not surprisingly, they were rather perplexed.  Not that I heard a voice, but due to the ramifications of what that statement means if it is true, regardless of whence it originated.  One person responded with a predictable, “well...yeah, but.”  I could only shake my head, and soon leave that house because I had already agreed with what the voice said.

One of the effects of this agreement was that for the first time, I have an identity.  That is, I now know who I am in relationship to who God is.  And with that came the knowledge that this is what I have been looking for my entire life, and didn't even know it until it came.  And now that it is here, I can finally have a genuine love for people because knowing who I am empowers me to know who everyone else is too.  That is, I understand why people are as they are, and can respond to that from principle, and not my natural human reactions of offence, or flattery.  But the most striking thing of all is that it became evident that what that voice said is the same conclusion I would have eventually arrived at when I first started reading the Bible if I had not previously gotten involved with the religion that the man was advocating in the video.

You see, our family regularly attended a United Church of Christ in Chester County, Pennsylvania for the first thirteen years of my life.  And despite my participation in it, I had no idea who God was, or the significance of going to church in the first place.  Around my eighth birthday, I prayed one day, asking God that if He was real, to make these things clear to me.  There was no obvious response like me speaking in tongues.  Looking back I can see that if He would have shown me everything that would be required of me to bring that prayer to pass right there and then, it would have literally scared me to death.

Around this same time, I was given my first Bible.  For whatever reason, I did not start reading it at the beginning, but in the book of Isaiah, which is slightly past the middle of the Old Testament.  I ended up reading from there to the book of Matthew, only to conclude that I had no idea what the point of any of it was.  As a result, I put it on a shelf where it sat until getting packed away in my parent's basement prior to moving out of their house soon after graduating from the Phoenixville high school in 1989.

Although my parents allowed me a great deal of freedom to live and believe as I desired, being on my own started to open my eyes to other things (like love and relationships) that weren't as easy to pursue in a half-duplex house full of kids and parents.  By 1992, an experience of heartbreak brought me to the conclusion that I was not a true man, and that everything I had adopted of myself as being true was now questionable.  This began my quest for the truth.

As I would share my observations with my peers, I kept getting responses like, “you should read the Bible, you seem like you're smart enough to get it.”  I would then think that if I were really that smart, I shouldn't have to read it.  The fact was, if I did read it, then I couldn't take the credit for coming to a knowledge of the truth on my own.  It seemed that credibility was the big thing missing from my life at that time.

Later that spring, a couple I had previously worked for invited me to stay in the guest bedroom of their new house in Chandler, Arizona if I ever thought of moving out of PA.  By August 22, I had sold, packed away, gave away, or thrown away everything I owned, and boarded my first commercial flight to Sky Harbour International Airport with a boombox, backpack, and two suitcases.  Upon arriving at their house that night, I dropped my stuff, and took a long walk around the neighbourhood.  The thing most striking was the amount of visible stars.  It was like being on another planet.

I got my own apartment two weeks later, and after dealing with a bout of homesickness, I realized that since I didn't know anyone here, I didn't need any credibility.  And as a result, I started reading the Bible...from the beginning.  After reading it, it was on my heart to start attending a church in an attempt to associate with others of a like mind.  The only choices in my neighbourhood were a Mormon or Baptist church.  Since I had no interest in the book of Mormon, I went to the Baptist church.  Eventually I was baptized into their fellowship, and that began a twenty year journey through the land of confusion called Christianity.

The reason why Christianity is so confused is the same reason the Bible was written in the first place.  And that reason is a principle called sin.  If there was no sin, there would be no need for a Messiah, or the Bible apart from the creation account with “and they lived happily ever after” at the end of it.  But since there is sin, there needs to be a way to resolve it in order for the character of God to be vindicated before a watching universe.

Part of the reason behind my participation in Steemit is due to my conviction that this platform can serve as a means of participating in that vindication.  Not so much by people hooting and hollering about Jesus, but how we treat one another.