So there I was, having spent my best arguments against her, the college student working a summer job where I was employed. In my mind, I won all the arguments, if winning meant having the last word. But although I was convinced on one level that I was right, her confidence in what she believed unsettled me at a deeper level. What if my reasoning was wrong?

How could there be a God if there was so much suffering in the world? Didn’t what you believe depend on where you were born? In the U.S., the figure of Jesus Christ could dive into the ocean, swim over to India and become Buddha. How could one religion be right and all the others wrong? Isn’t it more important that you believe in something, anything, regardless of what you believe?

Finally, she gave me a New Testament that included pictures and was not written in ancient English (it was the Good News for Modern Man paraphrase version). And it was only the New Testament. “Read it for yourself,” she challenged me. My immediate response was, “I’ve read the Bible.” Not! I had heard the homilies between sleeping at Sunday mass throughout my childhood, but most of the time, I slept. Once in college, to be well rounded in my education, I set out to read the Bible, but got only as far as the long genealogies and then stopped out of boredom.

But the gauntlet was thrown down, and I couldn’t back away. It was as if she were saying, “If you think I am closed-minded, and you are open-minded, then read this book for yourself.” Not wanting to look like a hypocrite, I took the Bible and began going through it that night with an “open mind.” By that, I mean I was openly looking for contradictions and inconsistencies to use against Christianity. Little did I realize that was like putting me in a room with a lion.

As I read, my heart began to burn inside. Recognizing some of the stories in there about Jesus, I found myself each day rushing home from work to read more. I stopped looking for contradictions and began looking for truth. Meanwhile, I accepted her invitation to get together with some of her friends, thinking it was a party of some sort. There I found very ordinary-looking people, not freaks or losers, as I had thought all Christians were. One fellow was a policeman who talked about how Christ changed his life. Others were saying the same thing. Wow, these people really have faith in this stuff, and they were otherwise ordinary twenty-somethings.

As I continued working my way through the gospel accounts, I discovered two things that cut to the heart. First was something I feared would be in there, that I was not in God’s good books. I was a sinner and deserved His judgment. There was something wrong with me, not God! Until then, I agreed with the popular notion in college that religion puts a guilt trip on people, you know, hell, fire and damnation. But now, it resonated with me. I was, at the core, a sinner who had rejected God.

However, this truth did not push me away from God because of the second thing I found in my reading, that the God of the Bible didn’t want to condemn me, even though I was a God-rejecting sinner. That is why Jesus died on the cross, to show that He loved me. I didn’t have it all figured out, but there came an overwhelming sense that He wanted me to be with Him! What an incredible thought that was, since I spent so many years thinking that God had it in for me and did not like me. And here I was reading that He loved me and wanted me.

I tried to have faith, closing my eyes and praying “hard.” For a while, it seemed to work, but then I would think this was all nonsense; it didn’t make sense. If there was a divine being who really did exist, then I should be able to understand Him and figure this out with my rational thinking. I felt like my faith efforts were about as effective as picking up a screwdriver by the oil-covered blade—slipping away at every struggle to believe.

Finally, I was becoming messed up with all this Bible talking and thinking about spiritual things and what it all meant, whether it was all true. One evening, after having spent some time talking more about God, I drove her home to the country. As we pulled into her parents’ driveway, I had my goodbye speech all set and told her I wouldn’t be seeing her anymore; I was done with our conversations. I was essentially admitting defeat, I couldn’t convince her that she was brainwashed with religious superstition, and I didn’t want to waste any more time. This was it; I wanted no more. (To be continued.)