My Journey to Faith

The first thing to understand is I’m a relatively new convert to Christianity (less than 3 years).

I was raised in the LDS (Mormon) church, but I walked away from it at the tender young age of eight. It just didn’t feel right to me. Too much of what my visiting teachers taught me smacked on nonsense to me. And, if I’m being honest, that fact coupled with some of the hypocrisy I experienced in the church left a bad taste in my mouth for a very long time.

And not just for the Mormon church, but for Christianity in general. I spent a long time conflating the two.

For more than thirty years, I was pretty staunchly anti-Christian. I investigated a great many world religions, mostly in the realm of paganism. I did do some looking into other forms of Christianity, but as much as I thought I was being open-minded and exploring different belief systems at the time, I can tell you now that my heart and my mind were not open to the Word of God in the slightest back then.

The truth is that at the time, when I read anything from the Bible I was doing so in an attitude of cynicism. I was always looking for any detail that I could point to and say, “See this? How can anyone reconcile this obvious fiction and/or contradiction/inconsistency?” Even though I can tell you now that I didn’t know half of what I thought I did about Christ.

I eventually settled on a belief system that was all my own, and fell squarely into what I call agnostic paganism, which basically just means a belief in multiple gods without claiming to know or understand what those gods are or what they desire or expect from mortals.

Thinking about it now, it seems quaint and not a little absurd. Much like what I think of Agnosticism as a whole at this point. While I still hold to my belief that no mortal can truly know the mind of God (we simply aren’t capable of thinking on His level), there is simply too much evidence in front of me to ignore the existence of just one God and his infinite love and power.

It is absolutely as C.S. Lewis told us, either Christianity is false and is of no value, or it is true and is of inestimable value.

And as Bible Commentator Chuck Missler was fond of saying, in light of scripture there are only three possibilities. Either A, Jesus is God and he knew it, and therefore is owed our awe and our worship; B, He is not God and knew it, making him a liar, or C, He was not God and didn’t know it, making him a madman. No other interpretation is possible.

But early in 2023 I had a series of experiences that began the journey of opening my mind and my heart to God. Interestingly, it all began with a friend telling me about this book, “The Veil,” by Blake K. Healy, which is an exploration of one man’s visions of the spiritual realm.

I honestly had a bit of a crisis of faith as I was forced to consider that it could all be real. I’m not entirely certain why this book affected me the way it did, but it was undeniable. After reading it twice, I sat down and had a very long conversation with one of my believing friends who gave me some suggestions for other books to read to help me open my mind and my heart.

See, I was self-aware enough at that point to realize that I couldn’t just jump into the Bible. My mind and heart were still pretty closed to it, but I wanted to see some other experiences that might help me to open them so I could give it a real chance.

From there, I read a number of books. I started with Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ,” and then picked up a few other books in a similar vein (I’d love to share other titles, but I just don’t remember them). I read “He Gets Us,” which led me into an exploration of a couple different Max Lucado books before I finally dove head-first into the Bible (KJV), which I read twice in succession before I took on the NRSVUE, the NIV, WEBUS, and then I got my hands on the Septuagint and I was almost obsessively fascinated with the ways it diverged from every other translation I had read. I followed that up with a huge collection of apocryphal books (such as the books of Adam & Eve, the book of Enoch, the book of Giants, Tobit, Sirach, Judith, and the books of the Maccabees, among others). Since then I’ve read the NKJV, the JPS Tanakh and The Hebrew Bible (translation & commentary by Robert Alter) along with the New Testament for Everyone by N.T. Wright, and I’m currently working my way through the NLT and NKJV as well as a reread of the Septuagint.

During that time, I have devoured dozens of deep diving commentaries from more than a dozen authors (including John Oakes, Chuck Missler, Sir Robert Anderson, Tim LaHaye, and N.T. Wright, and many others), giving me a wide range of perspectives.

Apart from a period of a few months when I was trying not to pursue this project, almost all of my free time since before my conversion has been spent diving deep into God’s Word as I try to dissect and understand as much of it as I possibly can.