My conversion to faith came like a lightning bolt from the sky—well, sort of. My heart resonates when I read the story of the apostle Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus (as told in the Bible in Acts 9). Granted, no visible light burst out and blinded me, and I didn’t hear the audible voice of God calling me. Mine was not so dramatic as that, at least not outwardly. However, in a compact car outside a small town in New York, I was blind, but after about two or three hours, I could see!

You see, I lived with guilt since my childhood, thinking I could never meet up to God’s standards. I had just enough religion to make me feel bad. In college, I gave up trying, moving away from religious inhibitions to give free rein to campus life in its most ribald and decadent way. Nothing was off-limits as long as I didn’t kill myself. When I left home for my first year at Oregon State University, my dad’s advice was only, “Don’t get anyone pregnant.”

Binge drinking became my usual weekend pastime, and soon I was smoking marijuana (nothing serious like psychedelics—stories of guys thinking they could fly off roofs nurtured in me a modest sense of caution). Smoking cigarettes became the norm, which grew to two packs a day and a bowl of pipe tobacco.

I fully engaged in the usual collegiate banter over philosophy and deep things, like whether or not God existed. When I say deep, I was scratching the surface, searching for contradictions and reasonings against God, the Bible, and religion. In my pseudo-intellectual endeavor, I collected arguments from only the skeptical side of the story, thinking there was no other perspective that was rational or intelligent. Blind faith was irrational and not worthy of my time.

Along the way, I met a few people I still remember. One was a frat brother who lived a pretty clean life, and it became clear he had changed from Roman Catholic to Baptist somewhere along the way. I was confident enough in my agnosticism to quiz him about his change. Inwardly, I still had enough Catholicism to think that I was better than he was because although I was probably going to hell (if it all were all true), at least I didn’t join up with a Protestant group. Converting to another religion made him worse than me, a professing agnostic. That’s how convoluted my “philosophical, educated” thought was then.

I met a girl who invited me to a campus “talk” with a group of students in one of the dorms. I looked through the small glass window in the door and saw a mass of bodies—I wasn’t about to enter the lions’ den of religious people. This girl was good-looking and pleasant to be around, but she was what we called back then a “Jesus freak” (this was 1969). Any efforts to engage her with my “deeply philosophical” thoughts got nowhere. She was not interested in arguing but just wanted to talk about her faith in Jesus (however little opportunity I gave her). What do you do with that?

Then there was Tim, selling newspapers to work his way through school. He lived in the “Shiloh House” or something like that. One day after an intramural basketball game, whether that Bible stuff rubbed off on him. He responded, “I’ve been with Jesus for two years.” This was in a public locker room with guys all around; I felt like crawling into a locker, lest people thought I was one of them. How do you respond to that? But I had to admire his guts.

A few years later I found out that our fraternity “mother” was a Christian (in those days, Greek houses had an older woman living in the house to keep a bit of decency about the place, and she ate her meals in the dining hall with twenty or thirty of us guys). Her presence certainly curbed our language and jokes and kept the rowdiness down on the main floor. But she was not allowed in the upper floors or the basement—where all the fun was. She, too, was one of those people who believed in Jesus. She was the kindest, nicest lady I had ever met.

Fast forward to graduation in 1972, a year of financial recession in the U.S., and finding a job in my field of study was challenging. After seventy application letters followed by rejections from all over the country (I was willing to go anywhere to work and start making good money), I was hired by an advanced research company called Cornel Aeronautics Laboratory, later renamed Calspan Corporation. I was soon rubbing elbows with PhDs and engineers on far-ranging projects like radar simulation for the U.S. Department of Defense and auto safety research into the effectiveness of seat belts and airbags (remember, this was the early 1970s) and traffic safety simulations. My job was to code the programs on the now-ancient mainframe computers (back in the days of punch cards).

My goal of becoming a wealthy, young playboy scientist was not materializing as I thought. I was young, but that was about it. And I was striking out trying to meet girls in the bars and nightclub scene. Then I met one where I worked, a summer intern still in college. She was friendly and attractive—and a Jesus person. I figured there was nothing to lose, so I began regaling her with my great learning, just out of college in my first job. My friends teased me that if I went after her, I would end up getting converted. But I was well equipped to handle her, having taken a course in my senior year called “comparative religion” taught by a self-described “Christian atheist.” He held to the teachings of Jesus as a great moral revolutionary, but he didn’t believe Jesus was God or even that there was a God.

With that as my background, I avalanched her with all my reasoning against the existence of God and organized religion. But she would look me in the eye, without a blink, but a friendly smile, and say things like, “Jesus is more real to me than you are.” What do you do with that? I kept trying to disrupt her faith and free her from mythical superstitions, but I was failing. On one level, I was trying to free her from archaic ideas about a divine creator-god, but on another, I was hoping she would not succumb to my arguments. By this time, I knew my life was hollow; hers’ was full and authentic. I thought she was dead wrong, but I wanted to understand what made her tick. Why would a lovely young lady need a crutch like religion? Intellectually, I wanted to win the argument, but emotionally I wanted to find something solid to believe in to make sense of the remainder of my life. (To be continued)