My Own Path to Belief
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I JUST WANTED A HAPPINESS
THAT WAS MORE SOLID
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How I Ended Up Finding Something Far Better
I’d always been a reasonably happy person. But there had usually been a certain uneasiness lurking in the background...
Partly that was because it seemed there was always at least one aspect of my life that still wasn’t how I felt it needed to be, so that I kept feeling unfulfilled, incomplete.
And partly – the worse part – it felt like if I wasn’t careful, if I didn’t make sure to stay on top of everything, some key piece of the life I’d constructed could go wrong, destroying what happiness I had. I felt vulnerable.
Actually, it wasn’t unreasonable for me to feel that way. My happiness was in fact dependent upon many things’ going well: my job, my health, my home life, my relationships, my comforts and pleasures, my self-esteem. I was vulnerable.
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I would have liked my sense of well-being to be rooted in something that transcends the ups and downs of life, something somewhere in the “spiritual” category. And I’d been making efforts in that direction. They hadn’t been a seeking for God. I was an atheist. In order to believe in God’s existence, I would have needed strong evidence, and I wasn’t aware of any.
But for over 20 years I’d been trying various “spiritual paths” that didn’t require belief in God, including several different meditation and mindfulness techniques. They’d ended up, however, seeming more like psychological therapies than paths to a spiritual reality. They didn’t have the power to change the fact that, deep down, my happiness still depended on my job, health, relationships, etc. – things that were unpredictable, changeable, perishable.
It did seem that if a spiritual path were one designed for us by God, it would be in a different league from the ones I’d tried out. That is, if God were real! The only such path I’d ever thought might possibly be reality-based was Christianity.
That was because key beliefs of Christianity were tied to historical events – things for which there could possibly be evidence. It claimed that a certain man in 1st-century Palestine, Jesus of Nazareth, asserted he was the incarnation of God, taught other revolutionary ideas (“Love your enemies,” for example), and proved he was the real deal by physically resurrecting from the dead. But, unfortunately, I’d heard that a big part of the evidence – the Bible’s record of Jesus’s life and teachings – wasn’t reliable.
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So, on into my 40’s I kept trying out the ideas and practices of various philosophical and religious schools of thought. And kept feeling unfulfilled and vulnerable. —Until I made a startling discovery. It was the beginning of the end of the “evidence barrier” between me and God.
The discovery was that several world-class scholars were claiming their research indicated that the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead did actually happen. Their analyses were based on historical evidence and didn’t depend on putting special trust in the Bible. Presentations of the evidence by three of the scholars (also a pair of brief animations on the subject), are included among the videos on Exatheist Friend under the heading, "The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: The Historical Case that It Really Happened."
I realized that if Christ’s resurrection really happened, my skepticism about Christianity, including the existence of God, would no longer make sense. I looked into not only the case for the resurrection, but also other evidence for Christianity I’d been unaware of. That included evidence that the biblical accounts of Jesus are based on reliable eyewitness testimony. See the videos under "Are the Biblical Accounts of Jesus Reliable?"
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It became clear to me that belief in Christianity is entirely justifiable intellectually. That led me to explore who this Jesus Christ is. The basics were that he said he’d joined us here – as God-become-man – out of love for us, in order to guide us, to share in our sufferings and, most importantly, to put things right between each of us and God.
He said our deep-rooted selfishness and other un-Godly qualities stand between us and God. But he would take the consequences of our wrongdoing on himself by dying on the cross, and thus clear the way for us to be with God forever after we die. This was his free gift to us; we only needed to accept it and become his follower. (All other religions say we can only attain the ultimate by earning it, by being good enough.)
Even after I’d become convinced that belief in Christianity is justified by the evidence, I hesitated for months to take the big step of becoming Jesus’s follower. But his loving invitation to entrust my life and eternal future to him came to be utterly compelling to me, and one spring evening in 2012, I accepted it. As for what happened then...
It’s a basic of Christianity that when someone entrusts their life to Jesus Christ, his Spirit immediately takes up residence in them. They’re a new person. In my case, although I still experience worries and frustrations of course, at the very moment I accepted Christ’s offer my underlying sense of vulnerability and incompleteness was
replaced with an underlying peace and joy. And they’re still there to this day.
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Come to me, all you who are weary and
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
— Jesus Christ
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If you decide, upon reflection, to entrust your life and eternal future to Christ…
You can take that step, via a simple prayer, on your own (if you’re clear on who Christ is, his offer, and your need for it) or in the presence of believers. As for the next step, Jesus taught that it doesn’t work to live as a deliberately solo Christian. Being his follower involves being in relationship with fellow members of his family, who are now your “brothers and sisters in Christ.” That can be lived out by being connected with a local church -- one where biblical Christianity hasn’t been altered to fit cultural trends; here are a few in the Piedmont of NC.
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Where two or three are gathered in my name,
there am I among them. — Jesus Christ
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