I sought the Lord, and he answered me.
— Psalm 34:4a
A few months ago, I was baptized.
For the second time, technically. But the first time, I was a baby without much of a say in the matter.
When Mark Twain was asked whether he believed in infant baptism, he replied, "Believe in it? I've seen it." What I realized, only after I finished writing you this, is that Twain's comment captures the reason I returned to faith: I believe in it because I've seen it.
When you get to the end of this letter, maybe that will make sense.
I didn't want to write this, but I couldn’t help not writing it. It's all I've been able to think about. Any quiet moment of my day—biking to work or washing dishes or walking through the woods—it’s the gravitational mass all my thoughts orbit. It’s the thing that has filled the pages of three notebooks, set off the sparks of a thousand thoughts. Writing anything else has felt trivial in comparison.
Sometimes I’m not sure faith can be talked about, never mind written about. Whenever I wade deep enough into these thoughts, and approach anything approximately true, words begin to fail. But writing is the only way I know to make sense of my head and let you into my world.
Talking about this stuff is confusing and hard and, not to mention, scary. We live in a time of religious liberty where, in theory, everybody is free to discuss religion but, in practice, no one is allowed to mention it. Most of my friends would think I'm weird or violently out of touch if I said I believe in God. But, despite the temptation, it’s not something I want to hide.
It’s impossible to share intimacy with someone who doesn’t see the biggest parts of you.
Four years ago, when I told my last girlfriend I wanted to read the Bible, she said she'd break up with me if I became a Christian. Perhaps that's what I'm afraid of, when it comes down to it. Somewhere along the path of life, we’ll look up from our feet and realize we’re far away.
Separation rarely looks like a hard, clean cut. Separation, in reality, looks like a slow distancing, as cracks become canyons we can no longer traverse; too weak to be felt, until it is too strong to reverse.
I read somewhere that understanding is the basis of love. We need to understand people in order to love them. Or, we could love almost anyone if we understood them. That’s why love is an action: because understanding is an action. It takes effort and time to understand someone, a kind of sustained tenacity, but it never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
I'm writing this because I want to build a bridge between us. I want to explain how I got here. I want you to see the reason behind it and where reason fails. And hopefully, out of that understanding, a deeper love will grow.
This letter is long-winded and hastily edited and writing it nearly killed me. It’s tricky to translate the slowly layered levels of sediment we accumulate in life into a cohesive narrative. It’s hard to know when something ends and another begins. If I had more time I would’ve written something shorter, but defining its scope has been like trying to put a boundary around my brain. Any line I draw turns out to be merely a mark in the sand, and then I look up and smile because I'm sitting in the Sahara.
It cannot be a defence of the faith, only the story of how I came to believe it. And like any story, it will contain only the most memorable parts, with most of the mundane day-to-day left out, which is always where the most meaningful work gets done.
I’ve been thinking about this stuff for the last four years, and pretty intensely for the last two. My mind is a big melting pot of books and letters and sermons and dreams and late-night conversations, all swirling around, infusing my blood and coursing through my veins. I can't quite tell anymore which of my thoughts came from where.
Reading this may feel like getting hit over the head with my brain. That is somewhat the point. To stretch reason until it snaps. To crowd out the head until we are forced into the heart. I am trying to show how three-dimensional chess flattens into a two-dimensional cross. If that doesn’t make sense, now you’re getting it.
Every night I go to bed consumed by these words, wanting to quit, but every morning I wake up with enough courage to continue. I am nervous of the masses and terrified of the mob, but ultimately I’m writing this for you.
Whenever I get cold feet, I come back to that line: it’s impossible to share intimacy with someone who doesn’t see the biggest parts of you.
After all, it is only courage if you are afraid.
I'm spending it all, losing it all, giving it all, gambling it all, laying everything out. Nothing is hoarded and nothing is held back. Like the poor widow in the temple, I hope to make the smallest of contributions, knowing it is everything I have.
And I'm consoled by the fact that no matter how much I labour, it's always going to be hideous compared to the image I have in my head.
The hardest thing is to start. Really, where did it all begin... Maybe from the day we met? Or nine months ago, when I wrote the first draft, which I've now rewritten four, maybe five, times? Maybe two years ago, when I started compiling fragments and notes, sensing something was on the horizon? Or four years ago, when I read that first essay about faith? Maybe it only really began in the last three months, writing every morning from 5 to 7am before work, trying to sift through the rubble of words for something that makes sense.
But, at the risk of cliché, the correct answer is: my whole life. My whole life has led me here. Which, funnily, is close to the day we met. When I was five days old and Mom took me home from the hospital and put me on your lap on the living room couch and you looked down at me, confused and serious and full of devotion.
The crazy thing is, I started writing this before I fully believed. It's like I knew what was coming, even though I wasn't there yet. Meaning, this letter is not a remembrance of things past, nor a podium to preach on, but a living document that I wrestled with God in as I continued to draw closer to Him.
I will start at the beginning. I’m going to tell the truth, as best as I know how to tell it.
Let’s hope I don’t say anything heretical.
From early childhood, I have dim and distant memories of St. Paul's on the Hill. Images that crackle and flicker in my mind—I can only hold them there a moment or two—now consigned to the imperfect and unstable domain of memory.
I remember how the stained glass windows glowed in the morning. I remember the tapestries of fish and nets that hung on austere white walls. I remember the smell of soup from the kitchen and old carpet in the lobby. The memory of scent is very rich. I remember VHS tapes of Veggie Tales and the cover of a book we read in Sunday school: God as a bald man in his seventies with a white beard and huge outstretched hands, hovering above the clouds. For some reason, only his torso was shown. Perhaps it's blasphemous to draw God’s legs. And I remember when the Shaw's grandmother got sick and, at five years old, you took it upon yourself to pray for her every night until she passed.
When we got older, cynicism snuck in. It was easy and fun to ridicule the nonsense they tried to sell us. That two of every animal in creation boarded a boat, or that some man floating in the sky is king of the universe.
When I was about the size of a fire hydrant, we stopped attending church as a family. At the time, I didn't think anything of it. After all, hockey was on Sunday mornings.
From that point through adolescence and early university, I placed religion in a big dusty cardboard box marked "irrelevant" and moved on. If you asked me then, I probably would have told you Christians were absurd, outdated. Blind believers, unable to come to grips with the realities of science and the modern world. And I would have been confident and assured in that answer, thinking I knew better.
It wasn't until the summer after I turned twenty that any of this resurfaced.
At the time, I was reading Mary Oliver and Viktor Frankl and Rainer Maria Rilke. They kept referencing the Psalms and using that word: "God". I remember sitting on a sunny park bench in Trinity Bellwoods, closing my dog-eared copy of Devotions, opening my journal and writing, "Why does God keep showing up?" I didn't get how these brilliant writers could seriously believe in a man in the sky. Yet, there they were, writing about the transcendent with the humility of a child.
My idea of God said a lot more about me than it did about Him.
That year, God whispered to me through nature, spoke to me through poetry, but shouted to me through pain. Midway through university, I was working from 7 in the morning to 10 at night, just to fuel my burning desire to get ahead, to be the best, all while ignoring family and my health and anyone who couldn't help me get what I wanted. I saw the world as competition and a career as something to conquer. Whenever I wasn’t working, I’d turn to drugs and alcohol to help me forget.
Once, in a job application, I felt I had to lie about my GPA, saying it was a 11.8/12.0 when it was only an 11.6, then became a nervous wreck for a good two months afterward, convinced I was on the verge of being found out.
I was friendly and functional on the surface, but below I was thrashing my legs just to tread water. Then the flood would come. Always unannounced. And I would be dragged under, drowned in anxiety, tossed and turned until I forgot which way was up. It took a few weeks to resurface. Sometimes months.
Once I told Mom I was never lucky enough to hit rock bottom, for things to really fall apart but then get better. Rather I was being dragged along a few feet above the bottom. Low enough for my life to hurt, but okay enough to stay that way.
I didn't think anything would change. I didn't see how it could. That's the thing about darkness; it makes you forget there's ever been anything but.
A part of me enjoyed playing the victim. A part of me savored the rotten luxury of being lost. I took pride in my hurt, it made me feel large and tragic. Despair is only an extreme of self-love.
The funny thing is, on paper, I was successful.
I was on the most prestigious clubs on campus, the ones that wear special jackets. I had my top choice of internship. I had a girlfriend and a close circle of friends. At 20, I was working at a hedge fund on the 51st floor of a bank building in Toronto, where I was making as much money as Dad. I graduated in the top 1% of my class, then went off to travel the world and work on a NYT best-selling book and read and write, and finally hit that glorious 1,000 subscriber mark on Substack and then a piece I wrote went viral and 1,000 turned to 5,000, and then more.
But none of it mattered. Not in any ultimate, enduring sense. None of it made an ounce of difference in how meaningful my life felt. Each milestone quickly became mundane and the restlessness remained.
I reached the heights of my ambition and could barely breathe. I made fistfuls of money and still felt impoverished. I wandered the world and found it empty. No matter how many of my aspirations materialized into abundance, I was as anxious and lost as ever. I was doing it all my way and my way was not working.
Rilke said that a man who feels life's pain falls right into the center of God.
It is in the darkness that one finds the light.
While all this was going on, I began to take an intellectual interest in Christianity. I had read two essays by David Perell on how every Westerner is implicitly Christian—because they live in a civilization founded on Christian ideas so immense they’ve become invisible—and how the Bible is the one book you need to read to be educated and is the key to understanding almost all great Western literature, art, architecture, and music. I was persuaded, but only passively decided that "one day I would read the Bible". It sat on the back burner of my mind, simmering, but never quite reaching a boil.
Meanwhile, I spent three years crashing and burning through beliefs in atheism and stoicism and Buddhism, plus my own self-concocted test run of Epicureanism. I read Seneca and Aurelius and Epictetus, listened to long dharma talks, and meditated with the consistency of a monk.
It's a long story, but it all culminated in a seven-day silent retreat at a monastery in Thailand that I left feeling utterly alienated and imperially alone.
I didn't understand how the relationships of love that I cherished most were all an illusion, why I wasn't allowed to be attached to the world when that is the engine of all improvement, and, deep in the Thai jungle, why I wasn't allowed to kill mosquitoes. I couldn't see how being harmless was an effective strategy when I knew that good needs the capacity for violence to defend itself against evil. It seemed naive for my past to all be an illusion, because if I fail to face my mistakes, I'm going to repeat them. And I knew I was responsible for my past; I carried its weight. There is no meditating my way out of the terrible things I've done. And I didn't agree that being happy is the point and purpose of life. Being happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. The capacity to love deeply is the capacity to feel deeply and suffer great sorrow. But the love heals the grief; the love wins.
Suffering seemed not only inevitable, but an essential part of being. It is compassion that defines our humanity, but having compassion means the pain of another is contagious (the word compassion literally means "suffering with"). Whereas all evil stems from the refusal to see oneself in another.
And even if the pursuit of pure happiness was the point I'm alive, it's strictly a solo exercise. Was I to put my own enlightenment first and leave all the people I cared for in the illusory dust?
“Love is our true destiny,” Thomas Merton wrote. “We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.”
That week at the monastery, I spent hours staring at statues of the Buddha, cross-legged or reclined on his side, sleek and smooth body, eyes sealed with sleep, a ghost of a smile playing across his lips. Removed from the world. Almost sedated. When confronted with the reality of suffering, how life can drag you to the rack and there is no awakening as from a bad dream, I didn't feel connected to a figure who was immune to it.
What I didn't know then was how different the image of Christ on the cross is. Body broken, six-inch iron spikes driven through both wrists, two feet fixed by a single spike, skin lacerated and bleeding, side pierced and gushing blood, parched with thirst, crown of thorns on his head, slowly suffocating, but eyes frightfully alive. At the center of the Bible is Christ in a moment of more pain, more abandonment, and more suffering than you and I will ever experience.
What I was just beginning to sense is that I could not believe in a God who did not suffer. For my suffering becomes manageable in light of His.
After years of "inner work", as I was led further and further into my self, my inner world only became more confusing and unsafe. The walls of my mental prison only pressed closer. My pain was only magnified. I learned the hard way that self is the gorgon: staring at it turns you to stone.
Spiritual seeking seduced me to worship a state of my own mind, this candle flame of calmness, that everyone and everything else only interfered with. Any obligation to others only took away from my meditation and journaling time.
Mere spirituality made me fragile. Worse, it made me selfish. I was so heavenly minded that I was no earthly good.
The stance that "unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it" inherently assumes that there is nothing I can do to change the situation, which is a convenient avoidance of responsibility to make things better. When the reality is, sometimes our surroundings suck and sometimes we should be dissatisfied. Maybe that will make us improve them, instead of reorganizing our inner feelings so the world does not bother us. If mankind followed Eckhart Tolle's teaching from the dawn of time, we'd all still be living in caves, dying of disease at thirty.
These kinds of individualist philosophies may work well personally, but they scale terribly. They give no guidance on our duty to others and the world around us. More than that, they disregard our immense dependence on others and side-step the recognition of the sweat and sacrifices of our ancestors for almost everything we have.
I had lied and cheated and twisted the rules to get my way. I didn't need emotion; I needed obligation. I didn't need to be soothed; I needed to be sent out. I didn't need to be satisfied with myself; I needed to be dissatisfied with the world. I needed to be burdened for another. I needed responsibility, a rock to push up a hill.
Religion is not just reckoning with God and the world, but reckoning with myself; all the ways I fall short and fail to put others first. It's not about feeling better, but being better. Not better thoughts (which can quickly convince me what a good guy I am) but better actions. That was the main lesson Aristotle taught me: You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. Good people don’t just think good thoughts, they actually do good things.
It is only when we come to the end of ourselves that we realize we need something outside of ourselves. That we need to be saved from ourselves. Really, that we need a saviour.
A wave of conviction began to crest that going inwards would not be the solution to my pain. I did not need to be more self-immersed. I had to stop shutting myself out of the real world for the sake of examining my inner world. My inner world was not that interesting and the real world needed me.
Only later did I realize that is exactly the Christian message: the door to happiness opens outwards. "Christianity came into the world to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards," G.K. Chesterton wrote. "The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners."
That was the first thing I learned about the faith that felt capital-T True. A good life is one of both contemplation and action. Work and prayer.
That year, reading Joseph Campbell and Rene Girard opened my mind toward the divine and how the Christian story is the crescendo of all mythologies.
The foundation of existence itself is the spirit of loving sacrifice. You see it in good parents and volunteers and front-line workers and those who risk their safety to serve the marginalized and oppressed. That's what a hero is: someone who has given their life to something bigger than themselves. Someone who goes beyond only thinking about their own self-preservation. And when we witness it in another, we all want to stand up and cheer.
Through this heroic self-sacrifice, made in the name of love, reality snaps back into proper order. On the cross, the mythical and the historical collide, because that is exactly what Jesus embodied: a willingness to die to yourself so that you can be reborn. That is the way to life. That is what saves the world.
In the wake of His life and death, Christ asserts that the force that rules the world is not violence or power or even wisdom, as the Greeks and Romans believed. It's love. Love is the undercurrent of all creation. Love is an outpouring of everything good in us. And love will bear all things. Even though it takes us and transfigures us and breaks our hearts with its unbearable beauty, it's worth it. Relationships of love are the fevered pitch of existence.
All the other ancient stories were reaching and stumbling towards Christ's ultimate conclusion. All myth culminates in Christ.
Despite learning all this, it wasn't until I watched Jordan Peterson's wildly popular lecture series on Genesis that I decided it was time to read the Bible. It was time to see for myself what it said, instead of listening to what everyone else told me it said.
It took two and a half years, but the pot began to boil. In January of 2024, I cracked open the cover.
While I was working my way through the Bible, beginning with the New Testament then going back to the Old, I started listening to Tim Keller's Questioning Christianity series. Keller, a long-time Presbyterian pastor, delivered a series of talks on the Christian faith in New York City to a crowd of young, ambitious atheists who had been driven by the glories of the material world, but began to sense the emptiness at the heart of it all.
Keller, to say it lightly, threw my worldview into a blender. He wasn't a radical, pulpit-pounding Christian like I expected, but one of the most well-read and rigorous thinkers I had encountered. There was no fire and brimstone fear, no "holier than thou" posturing, no blind assertions. There was only humility, and looking.
He taught me that every human lives by faith. We cannot prove there is a God, but we also cannot prove there isn't a God. We all hold beliefs about the nature of the universe—beliefs that shape everything we say or do—that cannot be known for certain. Faith is an unavoidable part of being alive. While Christianity can't perfectly explain everything in the universe, neither can any worldview. Atheists, for instance, are forced to believe that at the beginning of time, matter just generated itself out of nothing.
Through Keller, I came to see that I was embraced by a moral order. That there is an objective moral law, carved into my heart, that every human being deserves dignity and basic rights. Good and evil are not just preferences people invent or a difference of opinion. Genocide and slavery and torture are wrong, at all times and in all places. In other words, morality is not just a majority vote. Wrong is still wrong, even if everyone is doing it. All moral progress has relied on this bedrock belief.
But, there is no explanation for the existence of an objective moral law without the presence of a transcendent God.
The Christian ideas our culture has unconsciously inherited, but now takes for granted, were the very ideas that propelled us forward from the barbaric age. The compassion for the poor and sick and weak. The pursuit of truth. The equality of man. Freedom of speech. None of these things existed, in any uniform and agreed-upon sense, in previous civilizations. Aristotle said it was right to have slaves. Spartans threw unfit infants off cliffs. In one pagan culture, parents would sacrifice their baby on the outstretched hands of a scalding hot bronze statue of their god as a fire blazed beneath. Before Christ, there was no such thing as a victim. You were just weak. That was the Roman way: "Woe to the vanquished."
Human rights only exist in their modern form because they are founded on the insistence that every human being is made in the image of God. Human equality isn't self-evident at all unless you assume God has given us natural rights. Anything we invent, rather than discover, can just as easily be invented away.
I was forced to face the fact that if I choose to believe in human rights but not in God, I had an impossible rational argument to construct.
Another stamp Keller left on my mind is that an identity founded on God and His love is the only identity that will stand the torrent of tragedy and time. In other words, only an identity founded on something outside of this world will work within this world.
Everyone builds their identity on something, whether they like it or not. Everyone has a god. It's whatever their highest thing is; whatever they honor and admire and love before all other things. Everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the reason to choose something transcendent, as David Foster-Wallace writes about, is that anything else will eat you alive.
Our world still bows down to idols; now they just look like influencers. And the thing about idols is, they always break the hearts of their believers.
If I worship money or fame or power, and that is where I tap real meaning in life, I will never have enough. If I worship my beauty, I’ll feel ugly. Power, I’ll feel weak. With all the things of this world, I will endlessly race to fill myself up, only to find myself empty again before the next pour.
Most of my life, I worshipped my intellect. I wanted to be seen as smart and complex and interesting. I hoped it would bring happiness or, at least, make my life bearable. It's a very strange thing: to live for the imagination of others. But the more I sunk into the mire of my intellect, and the more attention it brought, the more stupid and guilty and sad and disgusted I felt. And because the foundation of my identity was so unstable, I was defensive and volatile. Any challenge to my intelligence was a threat to who I saw myself to be. It's why, after my first year of university, I couldn't check my exam grades for five months. My entire identity was on the line.
From Tolstoy, I saw where this road led. At age 50, when he was most invested in intellectual pursuits, he was on the verge of suicide, having to hide ropes and sharp objects from himself. He had written War and Peace and was at the peak of his literary fame, but had no answer to the question that sat in his soul, that sits in the soul of every human: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
Even if I found my identity in noble things, it still fails. I still will be self-centered, instead of letting my heart be drawn out toward others.
If I make being a great parent the purpose of my existence, what happens if my child is bad by nature? Or, if they're a great person, what happens when they turn 18 and leave home? If I rely on my role as a parent to be the highest calling of my life, I will be left lost and aimless and broken and bleeding when I realize that not even my child—something born of my own body—I can hold onto.
Or, if I make my (hypothetical future) wife the main object of my devotion, if I depend on her to give my life ultimate meaning, what happens if she gets cancer? And all I am left with are the memories of those early days we first met, when she was full of joy and danced in the kitchen and had all these ideas and plans and ambitions for herself and for me and for our future children, and none of it turned out as planned. Even if we get fifty years together, one of us will have to spend some days alone.
If I make my longevity the purpose of my existence, and live only to live longer (circular reasoning, I'll admit), what happens if I get into a bad car accident? What happens when I hit seventy and my back starts to break down? I will be left scratching and clawing, like a rat in its cage, raging against the slow, creeping, crushing, inescapable shadows. I will die a million deaths before they finally bury me.
I could have all the success in the world. I could have all the money and fame and women I wanted. I could have AI that writes my emails and a microchip that downloads books into my brain and a device that teleports me from a F1 race in Tokyo to an opera in Vienna, but there still looms like a specter those ultimate and very human questions: What for? Where next? And what then?
That was the main lesson King Solomon imparted. He had all the power, all the success, all the wealth, all the women, and all the wisdom—every worldly thing you can imagine—yet it all felt meaningless.
Kierkegaard said that without a relationship with God, man is left trying to fill the void with finite things that ultimately fail because they can never satisfy our infinite spiritual needs. Every human has eternity in their hearts. With expectations of Heaven, the things of this earth can only fall short; to disillusionment, followed by disaster.
Many people look to romantic love to give them the fulfillment once found in religious experience. To give the sense that their life matters in the grand scheme of things.
My entire romantic resume has been two long-term relationships. In the early days, I glorified those girls. I put them on a pedestal and abused them with my love, but after discovering they didn’t fill the hole in my soul, I got bored and went back to my books. And that was the beginning of the end.
That's how it happens. The girl becomes idealized, where it's not about her, exactly, but what she represents. She becomes the embodiment of all we crave: beauty, acceptance, comfort, consolation, validation. First we want to be noticed, then we want to be seen. We want their eyes to be a mirror that reads back: you matter.
And the early stages of falling in love give this. It makes us feel something beyond survival. It makes us feel alive, like we're not living just to die. But then comes the rejection or the dejection from the difficulty of the relationship with a real, imperfect person. The fantasy fades. The vision cracks. And it doesn't just bruise; it brands. The realization that the ideal isn't real, that the other person is just like you, tired and flawed but trying, shatters the hope of final fulfillment through romantic love that we're chasing, that we've spent our whole lives trying to earn. But instead of seeing the game is broken, instead of making the quiet and terrifying choice to stay—because love is less knowing and more deciding—we blame the person, or the relationship, or ourselves, and look for something new. We chase the falling in love, addicted to the thrill, not realizing that if we never stay in love, we're just falling.
If we build our worth around it, that high of being wanted, we'll stay starving. Because no human can fill the orchestral bodily ache we carry. No woman can ever fix our wounds. No one will ever just understand us without having to explain. Not in the way we hope. They may make us feel happier, but they will never make us feel whole. And without that backbone of knowing we are loved, in an enduring and ultimate sense, we will just bleed on whoever is foolish enough to try to love us.
Real love is two people meeting on equal ground. Not as each other's savior or judge or solution to emptiness, but as partners against the storm, looking outward together at the same horizon. Real love is two people inspiring each other to live, recognizing how hard living is and how easy it is to lose passion for it. Real love is less a reward, and more a responsibility. It’s choosing to love someone just as flawed as you are and giving them the space and slack and support to be unfinished; to find out who they are and who they want to become. It's having someone stand beside you in all your fears and dreams and weird quirks, knowing your humanity is a shared blessing and not a unique curse. It’s standing beside them in the same, even on days you don't feel like it. Really, it's loving a person as they are, not as you’d like them to be. Not for all the ways they are perfect, but for all the ways they are not.
It is not polished and rarely pretty, but the messiness of it all is human and insanely meaningful. It is the good stuff.
Keller explained that if he loves his wife more than anything else in this world, he can only crush her with his love. If he places all his spiritual and moral needs on her, all his hunger for purpose and forgiveness and ecstasy and meaning, that weight will ruin their relationship. But, by loving God more than his wife, he finds the freedom to love his wife more. Once his love is rightly ordered, all of his love is lifted up.
For the unromantic, work has become a religion. People sacrifice for salary, pray for promotions, and pilgrimage for higher pay. They substitute Jacob’s ladder for the corporate ladder.
I remember spending at least two hundred hours one summer networking and prepping for interviews to land an investment banking internship. I remember nailing the interview, getting an offer, signing a contract for $85,000 at 19 years old, then feeling… absolutely nothing.
Time and time again, I thought once I got that next job, then I would feel fulfilled and financially secure and recognized and worthy. In a very real sense, I pinned my salvation on it. I ran face first into that wall more times than I’d like to admit, until one morning I woke with a growing terror of a life spent chasing a receding light, being the Dad who was never around, only after thirty years to get to the top and realize nothing is there.
This whole time, I was searching for something firm to hold onto, something real to grab and keep close. But everything was distant and dismal. Nothing felt stable. Nothing was there, in the final analysis. It all turned to dust in my hands and ash in my mouth. The truth gazed back at me, clear and cold, that everything in this world will eventually go its way and I shall go mine; and that is an existential dread that no one can soothe with rational argument or reassuring words.
It took me years to realize that very desire is the desire for God.
For I find in my heart a longing that nothing under the sun can satisfy. I find an emptiness that cannot be filled by the things within this world, no matter how hard I try. Money won't do it. Fame won't do it. Power won't do it. Health or beauty or brains won't do it. Not even mortal love. The restlessness remains, as I am haunted by the feeling of having had but lost some infinite thing. As Augustine wrote, “Our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
Put simply, a discontent with the terms of this life led me to wonder whether I was made for another.
After coming to these personal convictions, I looked at the world around me and saw the destruction and depravity that the decay of religion had caused. I saw my generation feeling lost and confused and alone, hurtling headfirst through life with no guidance and no guardrails, crushed by the cold meaninglessness of it all. I saw a world where each person is placed at the center of their own universe, told to satisfy all their needs, to gratify all their urges and desires, to expand their needs and demand more, and told that this is freedom.
The secular narrative that we’ve been sold looks like freedom, no doubt, but tastes like tyranny. Because here’s the thing: the more I put myself at the center of existence, the more I make my life all about me and follow all the whims and wishes of my ego, the more miserable I become.
That’s the freedom that Satan sells in Paradise Lost: do whatever you like. “It’s better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”. Except absolute freedom looks like absolute anarchy, a slave to the passions, which is the worst kind of imprisonment.
Mankind is corrected by punishment, but controlled by pleasure. If you really want a prisoner to be trapped, you let him think he is free.
Strange as it sounds, true freedom is discipline. It’s obedience.
The greatest question posed since the Enlightenment is not communism vs individualism or East vs West, but whether men can bear to live without God. When Nietzsche said, "God is dead," it wasn't a statement of triumph but a declaration of tragedy. If God, the underlying framework for meaning and morality that our entire civilization was built on, was yanked out from under us, all our culture could do was collapse. Nietzsche knew the death of God wouldn't be peaceful. Man wouldn't suddenly be liberated to a lifetime of laughter. Rather, oppressive power systems would emerge. People would become desperate and dangerous and rush into fanatical ideologies. "When men choose not to believe in God," G.K. Chesterton wrote, "they do not believe in nothing. They become capable of believing in anything." Or, as Dostoevsky put it, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.”
And that's exactly what happened.
In the blood-soaked 20th century, fascism and communism killed one hundred million people. If one death is a tragedy and one million deaths is a statistic, one hundred million deaths is an abstraction; a number so large it becomes a sentence to skip over. In his Nobel Prize speech, when asked what caused the revolution that killed sixty million people in Russia, Solzhenitsyn could only reply, "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
History’s lesson is clear: There is no replacing God. Any tower we build will topple. That's what Babel is all about.
The most haunting part of Nietzsche's words isn't even God's death, but his guarantee of the guilt that will follow. "Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
The human instinct to worship didn't go anywhere. It was just pointed in a tragic direction: back on ourselves. We are our own gods and we suffer infinitely for it.
I thought hard about the atheist's argument that it's immature to look at something outside yourself to give life meaning. That true adults can make their lives fulfilling, all on their own. And without the presence of God, man would be free. Free to love others and pursue truth. Free to stay tender and tap dance to work and laugh to the grave. To create a utopia, all of his own ingenuity.
In this way, an atheist is far more faithful than a Christian. He thinks humans, left to their own devices, are fundamentally good. A belief that becomes hard to explain in the face of the atrocities humans have committed.
Don’t get me wrong, many of atheism’s ideas sound splendid in theory but, as with communism, fail terribly in practice. They don't work.
I read an old novel, Nils Lyhne, about a boy who renounces religion because a girl he loved got sick and, despite all his prayers to God, died. He views religion as a crutch for the weak and is confident that human intellect and a free spirit can make life meaningful. But in rejecting religion, Nils doesn't become vital and courageous. He becomes lost. He spends his adult life going in circles, unable to commit to love and unwilling to aim at anything because he lacks a compelling reason to suffer, sacrifice, or hope. He writes a few half-hearted poems, too depressed to create the great art he once dreamed of, has an affair with his best friend's wife who, after his best friend dies, hates him for what they did, and ends up dying alone. Nils finds atheism's promises—of strength, beauty, or peace without God—prove empty in suffering. He’s an atheist until tragedy strikes, then finds himself on his knees praying to God.
Atheism works, until it doesn’t. Atheism works when you’re young and healthy and beautiful and no one you love has left. When life hasn’t sunk its teeth into you yet. But, another Biblical idea that proves capital-T True, the Flood is coming. And the unanchored, those unable to answer the hard questions life asks of them in those moments of absolute adversity, will be washed away. Left bitter and resentful and hurt and searching.
Now that we're already off track, I would also argue that no one is a true atheist in practice because there is not a single human being who isn't even a little superstitious. And superstition is nonsense if we do not live in a supernatural world.
Another interesting thing, only relevant for the sake of its irrelevance, is how often even the unreligious speak religiously. I hear "Jesus Christ" or "God help me" all the time in casual, unconscious conversation. It's not conclusive, but it is curious.
In a million little ways, the unseen is proved by the seen. You just have to look. To want to see. Attention is the gateway to devotion. It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.
But here's the miraculous thing: After centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and oppression and injustice and war, the human race still stands, still strives forward, still has men and women who choose good over evil, love over hatred, and generosity over greed.
It is only the humble man who can step back from all the givens that he normally takes for granted to realize the world is a very good place that could have been something much worse. To realize the world is here at all and didn't need to be. It is only the humble man who knows he did nothing to deserve it, yet gets to experience the beauty of this world; even if it is a dreadful beauty, one doomed to decay.
All gratitude rests on humility.
In rare moments of reverie, I hold the conviction that life is this achingly beautiful story. In its shoeless summer days and still winter nights. In the falling in love and falling out of love. Moving away and missing people and trying so hard to be better than you were yesterday. The heartache and homesickness, the joy that comes with the morning, the memory of those days you know are never coming back. How time just continues on and everything changes and there’s no way we can stop it. Even when life hurts, it’s a sweet and vicious pain.
And when I looked back at the narrative of my life, I had the felt sense it was orchestrated. That it was not all random and senseless, but there was some narrative arc, as mysterious as it was intelligent. Hidden from sight but hinted at, in all the near misses, the close calls, the chance encounters, the instinct to go right instead of left, to walk up and say hello. I saw it most clearly in the people I’ve met—people who have changed me irrevocably for the better, that I'm terrified to imagine never knowing—I just happened to stumble across. I can call it serendipity, call it synchronicity, or call it an everlasting coincidence, but what I really must mean is God.
I have not been given what I thought I wanted, but what I needed. Countless times, I was crushed when something I wanted so badly didn’t happen, but then raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the realization that it would’ve been terrible for me. Really, I have always been lucky, especially in my bad luck.
Even the low points, the times I felt buried from above and below, taught lessons I could learn in no other way. Not until we are crushed do we know what we are made of. As Dickens wrote, we are all bent and broken by this world but, must hope, into a better shape. And when the dust clears, we are stronger at the broken places.
This is to say, my life surpasses any story I could have written if I were holding the pen. My past proves there is a vision for my life which is higher and truer than anything I could have imagined on my own. That continues to unfold around me in miraculous ways.
All along, someone else has been for me more than I am for myself.
Once these conclusions began to crystallize, I began to wonder why.
Why do I believe in a moral law that cannot be explained without God? How could only an identity rooted in God work if He does not exist? Why do I have these desires that nothing in this world can fill? If God isn't real, why did His "death" send us into catastrophe? And if I life sense is a story, doesn’t there need to be a storyteller?
It was a shift in consciousness when I stepped back and saw that these immovable intuitions I had weren’t crazy, I just didn’t have the right framework to make sense of them. I began to sense an intelligent design behind it all. That I was made by a Creator, for a Creator’s love. That we live in a transparent world where the divine shines through in everything. But it is so obvious, it's not obvious at all.
There’s a story I heard from David Foster-Wallace that explains this shift better than I could.
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after the fourth beer. The atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist, all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
Carl Jung said men do not find God because they do not look low enough. Men do not find God because they fail to see the very water in which they swim. He is so big and so close that He is so easy to miss and just take for granted. It's an exercise of imagination to envision what a truly random, accidental, survival-centric world would look like and compare it with our own.
What Tim Keller did was make the Christian faith attractive.
I realized all my arguments against faith were based on half-baked assumptions that I never bothered to investigate. I didn't see through Christianity. I saw through this straw man version of the faith that I had casually constructed. My entire basis of belief was fragments from Sunday school, the weird Christian kid from gym class, and a couple of offhand comments from my uncle at Thanksgiving. I felt so silly and stupid to build such important beliefs on such shaky ground. As the saying goes, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for certain that just ain't so.”
Lies wound, but an ignored truth can kill.
Keller got me to lower my guard and question the certainty I had lived by for so long.
Not only did I not want to live in a world where there was no God, I started to see the living presence of one. I wanted to be a man who had faith. Like Peter dropping everything and running to the empty tomb, I wanted Jesus to be who He says He is.
What if it were true? Wouldn't that be something?
While I was listening to Keller's talks and working my way through the Bible, I was invited by a friend to church in Austin, Texas. It was my first time attending a service, besides a Mass in Buenos Aires, just for the vaulted ceilings and singing. I went in without expectation and went out with an aftertaste of revelation. Not only from the practical wisdom of scripture, but the earnest desire of a community of people to lift their eyes toward something higher and holy.
Everywhere I went, I kept meeting Christians who were nothing like I thought they would be. An old Irish philosophy professor in Newfoundland, who said “God bless you” so casually mid-conversation, you hardly noticed. A black belt businessman from Houston who trains with Navy SEALs. An environmental engineer from Beirut, who dragged me through a crowded night market in Thailand to buy food for this eight year old girl who asked for money.
These people weren’t the belligerent Bible bangers that I loved to criticize, but rather were cornerstones of their communities, quietly rooted in their faith and devoted to serving others. They broke out of every box I tried to put Christians in.
When I came back home after my travels, I started to go to a local church whenever I had a free Sunday morning. First, as an intellectual exercise. Then, it became something more.
I was still far from faith. I was curious, but I never thought I would actually believe any of this stuff. There was an invisible and insurmountable wall I never thought I'd climb over. The wall between my head and my heart.
But I started to read. That year I read the Bible, cover to cover. Then I read books by monastics like Saint Augustine and Brother Lawrence and the Desert Fathers, philosophers like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and Kierkegaard, poets like Milton and Dante, modern Christians like Lee Strobel, Richard Rohr, and Ellis Potter, as well as a whole host of writers who wove their faith through their work, like Tolkien and Austen and Dostoevsky. I spent weeks studying the stories of Cain and Abel, Jonah and the whale, and Jacob's ladder. And the more I read, the more the armor of reason and rationality I once wore with pride began to crack and chip.
I discovered the Christian faith wasn't crazy. Understood properly, it was not only coherent, but logical and convincing. Every objection I had, someone else had before me and found a resolution. The answers were there, I just had to look.
The very first thing I realized was my intellectual argument—that I was too smart to believe in God—held water like a sieve. The writers of these books had an Olympian intelligence and ran circles around my skull, yet still believed.
I thought modern science disproved the existence of God. But, as any real scientist admits, science has nothing to say about God. The idea Christianity and science conflict, and that you have to bury your head in the sand to be a believer, is peddled publicity, not anything rooted in fact. God could have worked through evolution, just as He could have been the source of the Big Bang.
Religious belief is completely compatible with scientific thought. It only states there is a more important reality that science cannot observe. A reality that is invisible to the eye but essential to the heart.
Science can tell you what something is, but not what it ought to be. Put simply, science can tell us about matter, but it is strangely silent about morality.
Some of the greatest scientists and mathematicians who lived were religious and claimed it was their belief in the transcendent that was responsible for their discoveries. Real science is founded on faith that the earth still has secrets. Every great scientist is also a mystic.
It was Christian thought—in its reverence for the truth—that unleashed the science and innovation that have lifted billions out of starvation and poverty and disease. It's not a coincidence that since Christ's death our world has advanced so rapidly, breaking out of circular time into linear time.
In the divinization of science, we seem to forget its dark side. The weapons of mass destruction, the algorithms of addiction, the pocket-sized touch screen pacifiers. After a lifetime studying human history, Will Durant concluded, "Science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build... All technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends."
Science may increase productivity. Science may make us all rich. But science will not save us.
The awareness of our place in the cosmos has led many to reject religious belief. We now know most of the universe consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold. Earth and humans on it are so small in comparison, it's hard to imagine we matter. But scale and significance are not correlated and should not be confused. One only has to look at their wedding ring, or better yet their newborn baby, to realize that a thing isn't important because it is big.
It's hard to imagine that God could care enough to enter into this small world, and suffer and die to redeem it. It's hard to imagine infinite love in finite space. But that's more a reflection of our own refusal of love than any tangible law of impossibility. "It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny," C.S. Lewis wrote, "but then we are wishing not for more love but for less." Because if it's true, if He does care about our world that much, it means our choices and our lives are staggeringly significant. As far as we know, there is nothing else like us that exists. As far as we know, we are the only conscious beings. That has to mean something.
Do we live in a cold, meaningless universe? Whenever I ask myself the question, all I hear from my heart is, “No. An undercurrent of love ebbs and flows through everything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”
There's also the fact that the position of the earth is so finely-tuned that if any physical constant of the cosmos were slightly different, life of any kind would be impossible. “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous," Steven Hawking wrote. "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.” On a probabilistic basis, I either have to believe in a near-infinite number of universes, where one of them just happened to cultivate the perfect conditions for life, or that this one was created by God.
Back when I started reading the Bible, I was never expecting to come to faith. But, as I said to a friend, I can't unread Matthew.
Scripture wasn’t dry and dusty like I expected, but more alive and complex than any literature I'd encountered. Endlessly layered and bottomless in its capacity for insight, I came to realize the Biblical stories are the distillation of what it meant to be human. Steinbeck said the essence of the entire human experience is captured in the third and fourth books of Genesis, two or three pages in most Bibles. Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel. Original sin and rejection.
"I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection," Steinbeck wrote."And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind."
The Bible, I learned, is meant to be read as metaphor, not dogmatic formula. Thinking in metaphor, as Aristotle said, is the highest level of thought. It tends to feel like having my leg broken. But when believers and atheists alike get stuck in the metaphors, interpreting them as facts, they get into trouble.
The early books of the Old Testament cast aside the weight of facts and enter into a misted realm of myth. Eden probably wasn't a real place and Noah probably didn't put two animals of every species on a big boat, but that doesn't mean the stories aren't true. As writers know, fiction is for telling the truth when the truth isn't sufficient. Fiction is abstracted truth, which is more true than specific truth, in that it's both more universal and more personal.
The best arguments in the world won't open a man's mind to change. The only thing that can do that, really, is a good story.
And the stories of the Bible are embodied. The goal is not digesting information or even fully understanding, but rather letting them work upon you, layering over your reality with a new texture of light, in both seen and unseen ways. The gospel isn’t as much of a book as it is a living being.
I was struck by the fact that much of the Bible seems to repeat the same simple message: everyone has a value hierarchy; keep God at the top; things will go better. It’s the first commandment, restated in a thousand ways.
And if it is the Word of God, there should be things I don't understand or agree with. It should call into question how I'm living my life, because I am far from perfect. I am not God. My job is not to examine scripture for things I cannot accept, but allow scripture to examine me for things God cannot accept. Everything that irritates me about the Bible can lead to a deeper understanding of myself. Where I stumble, there lies treasure. Unless, of course, I would rather just worship an idealized version of myself.
The gospels aren't folk tales or legends twisted in the telling, but some of the most reliable historical documents. Jesus was a real man who walked on earth, and if I want to believe any of ancient history, I'm forced to believe the stories of His life are true. The Bible is the single most scrutinized text in existence, yet no fatal flaw or inconsistent detail has been found. In fact, modern archeological and historical discoveries have only further supported its legitimacy.
If it was a manicured manifesto, you’d think they would have cut some parts out. Jesus being rejected by his hometown and his own family thinking he was out of his mind. The continual confusion of the disciples. The garden the night He is betrayed unto death, where Jesus prays for another way.
What if the Apostles weren't crazy when they proclaimed they saw Christ resurrected, all the way to their death? What if they weren't trying to cook up the greatest con-scheme in the history of humanity, but genuinely witnessed something divine, something they could barely believe, and set about to record the story? What if?
Christ's words sought out the contours of my consciousness. Yes, I was weary and burdened and wanted rest. Yes, I was hoping, in some unjustifiable way, I would be healed. Yes, I was lost. It’s like He was speaking right to me, shattering the two thousand years of time between us.
Every time I retreat into solitude and stare into my soul, I see fear staring back. I see how fear lurks behind almost everything I do. I'm terrified that I'm getting older, that I will see people I love die, that I have to die. I'm terrified that I'm alive. From an old journal entry: "I do not know how to love without trembling, when everything I love is so soft and exposed, like the organs in my body jumped out and began walking around." But then I open the Bible. The most common saying in the entire book: "Do not be afraid." 365 times. Someone counted.
Assurance that I do not need to be afraid, from God Himself, was something more than words can capture and I will entrust to your imagination.
Months went by and books piled up on my nightstand. Notebooks were creased and pages were filled. The more I read, the more I began to admire the philosophy that underpins Christianity.
Men love to talk of changing the world, but never changing themselves. Yet, Christianity emphasizes the individual. It asserts that the stability of the world rests on the shoulders of the individual to accept the responsibility of his life, with eyes wide open. To pick up his cross and carry it. Across history, every time this is followed, things go well and every time it's ignored things turn tragic.
Nietzsche said he couldn’t believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time, but what he failed to appreciate is that turning outward from yourself is what saves you. Praise isn’t needed by God. It’s needed by us. God only asks for our praise because He knows it’s what postures us to wonder and love and everything that is good. Like summiting a snow-capped mountain or hearing the final note of an orchestra echo through your ears, a breathless “Wow” is not separate from enjoyment, but the completion of it.
I found the order of Christian virtues to be exactly true. Pride is the ultimate vice and humility is the ultimate virtue. The proud, always looking down on things and people, cannot see something that is above them. The proud, really, cannot see anything else but them.
We are more likely to have compassion for a criminal than for a man who thinks he’s a god. Whereas humility is so practical a virtue, men suspect it's a vice.
The rationalist deducts that the fullest possible enjoyment in life is found by putting ourselves first, but the religious know that it is found by putting ourselves last. Not extending our ego to infinity, but reducing our ego to zero. To make your world large and lavish, you must always be making yourself small. Without humility, it is impossible to enjoy anything.
Yet the truly humble man will not be thinking about humility. He will not be thinking of himself at all.
Sure, the notion that there is a man in the clouds who watches everything you do is a gross oversimplification, but it’s shorthand for a very true idea. In life, you don't get away with anything. (I must’ve written “You don’t get away with anything” in the margins of my Bible at least a hundred times). There is no "pulling one over" God. There is no twisting the rules of reality; they always snap back, and with violence. We always pay the price, sometimes literally, sometimes psychologically, often both. We are the ultimate and final victims of our own evil.
Our conscience always keeps score and eats us alive when we betray it. We can never cut ourselves away from it, even when we cut ourselves away from everything else.
The notion that we have an angel on our right shoulder and a devil on our left, is another example of an embodied, staggeringly deep idea: that man is not truly one, but truly two.
In each of us, two natures contend. Our higher nature and our lower nature. The part that wants to send us up to Heaven, and the part that wants to drag us down to Hell. Every human heart is a battlefield between good and evil, with a line that cuts between the two running somewhere down the middle. All our lives the fight goes on, but, in the end, the side that wins is the side we choose. It’s the wolf, to borrow from the Cherokee tale, that we feed. That is the power we have, regardless of circumstance. That is free will: what we want most becomes what we are.
Good versus evil is the one story of our species, and the final question we will face once we brush off the dust and sit back to look at our life: Was I good or was I evil?
Christian morality inverts common sense. Jesus says the sorrowful and persecuted are blessed, and the meek will inherit the earth. In weakness, there is strength and in emptying, there is fullness. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. To save your life is to lose it, but to lose your life is to find it.
It's all a paradox. It's all so unlikely. Yet, out on the playing field of life, it works. Religious or not, these things are true.
Many of the convictions I had come to on my own I thought were unique, until I realized the whole of Christian thought had gotten there before me.
I believed, long before I came to faith, that a life centred around service was the way to live. That true greatness is found in selfless love. In giving until the giving feels like receiving. I believed that self-centredness is what it means to be a sinner and other-centredness is what it means to be a saint. I wanted, more than anything else, to be a lighthouse for others; someone who lightens their burden.
The interesting thing is, the more I'm able to forget myself, through self-sacrifice or a selfless goal, the more I actualize my potential and the more my neuroses disappear. In other words, the more I love, the more I become what I am capable of becoming.
But that is the gospel: dying to self and rising with Christ. Being the light of the world.
And love is at the root of it all. When you love, you wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve. As Victor Hugo wrote, we can give without loving, but we cannot love without giving.
Now that I'm wielding that word, I want to explain that sin isn't about fire and brimstone and a priest towering over a pulpit. The word sin comes from an old archery term meaning "to miss the target". If a relationship with God is the ultimate target, sin is attempting to separate yourself from God, both by doing bad things and by making good things into ultimate things. It is nothing more and nothing less than disordered love.
While the rules in the Bible may seem heavy-handed and harsh, they were discovered and distilled over thousands of years of observing how reality seems to work. Watching people take certain actions and follow certain philosophies, and then seeing how things go for them. The commandments prove to be the confinements that a good life lies within. In retrospect, the times I broke them and just did whatever I felt like, were the times I was the most lonely and lost and anxious.
The ethics Christianity emphasizes are not about moral scolding or guilt trips. Rather, they sketch out how the fabric of being seems to fold, with clear warning signs along the gradual, gentle, and soft road to Hell.
In my short life, I have watched people fall into sin and not repent for it. I have watched people put themselves first and cut away all commitment and hurt others, but not apologize, not seek forgiveness, not try to make it right. I have seen how their lives turn out, five, ten, fifteen years later. It is not pretty. Sin leaves you on an island of one.
I think our culture has rejected the word at its own peril. "People began to get self-conscious about the fact that their misconducted lives were going to pieces," Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, "so instead of ceasing to do the things that made them ashamed and unhappy, they made it a new rule that they must never be ashamed of the things they did. There was to be only one capital sin: to be ashamed. That was how they thought they could solve the problem of sin, by abolishing the term."
But it is easier to play the victim than to see the hand of divine justice. Still, I believe even with the most prideful and power-hungry on this planet, there is a small voice, somewhere below the surface, saying something is out of tune.
The parts I struggled with most were the Incarnation and the Resurrection; the two central mysteries of the Christian faith. How could God become man, and how could a man be raised from the dead? It didn't seem possible to me.
But, I was caught in my own contradiction. If there was a God, who am I to say what He can or can't do, based on what I think is or isn't possible? If He can form the universe at the beginning of time, creating everything out of nothing, surely He could raise from the dead. The truth is: if God exists, anything is possible.
I never understood Jesus walking on water or feeding five thousand. But the greatest miracle of all is in broad daylight: the conversion of the whole Western world to Christianity after Christ's death, started by a handful of men of no power or position, not performing any miracles. In short, the greatest miracle is the absence of miracles.
We’re supposed to struggle with these things. Even the disciples doubted the miracles, who saw them with their own eyes. But miracles are not meant to convince our cognition, but move our heart. To worship, awe, and wonder.
Besides, evidence of the supernatural surrounds us.
Talk to ten people and half of them will admit they have experienced something that cannot have a natural cause. I have met people who testify that Jesus Christ has changed their lives more than anything else. People who have had their depression defeated, a lifelong nicotine addiction go up in smoke, their baby's heartbeat restored, suicidal thoughts swept away with the morning light. I have heard story after story of surgeons scratching their heads and saying, "Gee, that must've been God." Miracles, perhaps, are not opposed to nature, but only opposed to what we think we know about nature. A miracle only means the liberty of God.
On the opposite end, I have a philosopher friend who came to Christ after having recurring visions of demons at night. What am I to say? That he didn’t? What the hell do I know? Encounters with evil, mind you, are one of the most common catalysts of a belief in God. If absolute evil exists, then so must its opposite: absolute Good.
Christianity isn’t an opiate of the masses. Karl Marx was wrong about that, like he was wrong about basically everything else. It can be used as an opiate, like a badminton racket can be used to bludgeon someone to death, but that doesn’t mean that’s what it is. Anything can be bent by human corruption. A badminton racket or the Word of God.
Christ's message isn't meant for some dreamy, far-off future. It's not meant to reserve salvation for death. A believer must always ask: Is it saving my life, right now? Because when Christ said the kingdom of Heaven is at hand, He didn’t mean "okay guys, now you can go to Heaven." He meant you can experience the life of the kingdom, today. In ways that cannot always be observed, it is already in the midst of us. The kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth but men do not see it.
Christians are called to live in a way that pulls Heaven down to earth.
But the point is not to be upright and good for a one-way ticket to the clouds, like God plays cheap trading games, but to enter a kingdom of grace while I live. It’s not so much to have life in Heaven, but to have life here on earth.
"This is true perfection," Gregory of Nyssa wrote, "not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment, nor to do good because we hope for rewards... but because we have come to love the good itself and to take pleasure in the beautiful nature of the good."
Faith is not an opiate. Faith is a fire for the cold, a rope let down to the lost, necessary as bread in the hands of the hungry. Take away God, and you take away hope. Take away hope, and there is no reason to live. As St. Paul says, faith is the foundation of things hoped for.
Christianity also isn’t just death avoidance. It's not spiritual insurance. Christian theology asserts that no one knows for certain whether they're going to Heaven until it's too late to change it. The judgment of men is not the judgment of God.
If faith was all an attempt to avoid fear, it would be much more pleasant and sunny. Christ wouldn't have told us to gouge out our eye if it's causing us to sin, or that looking at a woman with lust is committing adultery in our heart. There wouldn’t be Hell. A Hell that is entirely self-chosen and locked from the inside.
Nothing about how Christianity is designed is emotionally convenient.
The message of the Bible is more, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, that the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. That the road to life is not through the easy, pleasurable things but through the hard, challenging things.
It's not like atheists are soldiering forth to bravely confront "the raw facts of reality" or scaling a ladder to the stars. Men who deny the existence of God always have a reason for wishing God did not exist. If God exists, they cannot just do whatever they want. Huxley was a genius but didn't believe in God because it would put restraint on his black and deep desires. "I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none..." he confessed. "For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." If he was a Christian, Nietzsche couldn't justify being puffed up by pride, staring down and scowling at the rest of humanity "from the heights". Bertrand Russell couldn’t seem so smart and sophisticated and eccentric in opinion.
Regardless of accolades or intelligence, I learned many men arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they found attractive. Sometimes a man wants to be foolish if it lets him do a thing wisdom forbids.
There are many who reject the Bible because of their past. If what it says is true, they have a lot to repent for. Which is ironic in a sad way, because that's the whole point. The whole point is to admit we were wrong, have our past forgiven, and be born again. Confession is not condemnation. It’s freedom.
Horrible as a man's sins may be, Christ receives whoever turns to Him with wide-open arms.
There are also those who left the faith and returning would mean admitting they were wrong. But the utterly human story is falling asleep. The utterly human story is falling away from the right path and getting lost in a dark wood. Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept. We all turn prodigal, but we are all called home.
If God doesn't exist and the faithful are wrong, they have lived upright lives and lost nothing. But if God does exist, the faithful gain all and the faithless lose everything. Rationalists would call that an "asymmetric bet".
The church has committed atrocities. It has an ugly side to its history that I can barely stomach. Clergy do not always conduct their lives as if God exists and not all who claim to be followers of Christ are actually following Christ. Instead of clearing their own heart, many have tried to clear the world. Many have used the Bible as justification for their own egocentric purposes. Even in his lifetime, Jesus was perplexed that many praised His name but did not do as He said.
One of the best men I know grew up in the mountains outside Venice and told me he couldn't support the church because they sit behind closed doors in big, beautiful buildings while the poor still starve on the street.
That was Nietzsche's critique: the church started strong but has fallen too far away from Christ. It’s twisted too far away from the ideal it was meant to serve.
There's also a lot of guilt and shame and weight associated with organized religion. I have a close friend who was shamed into hating her body by a priest. It’s confusing and sad because the core of Christ’s message is being released from the guilt and the shame and all the weight we carry.
I don't know how to reconcile it all. But I would say it's important not to confuse God or Christianity with the church. The church is made up of men; all imperfect, some corrupt. Faith is supported by community, but it is ultimately an intensely private thing. It is between you and God. We do not need to look elsewhere. He is within us.
Dante was a devout Catholic yet chided the corrupt Cardinals and said Peter, who cared for neither gold nor silver, would be aghast. In his Divine Comedy, we meet more Popes in Hell than in Heaven. Dante saw that some men fail terribly in their pursuit of God, but that does not diminish His glory. In fact, the Bible has the explanation for this behavior built into it: man is a fallen creature.
Despite the wrong it has done, Christians through the church were the first to oppose slavery, invented hospitals, and founded the first universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc). They worked to reduce national conflict, instituted a court system, softened legal penalties, and expanded the scope of charity. "The church promoted morality in a time of moral disorder and chaos," Will Durant wrote. "Immorality still thrived, but it would have been a lot worse."
The church has produced great infamies, but everyone forgets it has also produced great saints.
I would also add that it's not fair to judge a two-thousand-year-old institution through a twenty-year-old cultural lens. The splendour of a church's marble spires wasn't oppressive to the humble peasant, but one of his greatest joys. For he truly believed it was God's house.
The Christians you know who have glaring flaws may not be convincing examples of the faith, but what you cannot observe is the maniacs they would be without it.
There is also the whole problem of spiritual pride. But Christianity asserts that God cannot be manipulated by religious righteousness or acts of altruism. His love cannot be earned with good behavior or lofty thoughts. He is only reached by repentance. Man is not saved by any moral effort of his own, but by grace. "The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good," C.S. Lewis wrote, "but that God will make us good because He loves us."
In Stevenson's masterpiece, Dr. Jekyll tries to redeem his sinful past with charitable giving and good deeds. Yet his acts of service only spur a feeling of superiority as he compares himself with all the other lazy, pathetic, selfish men he sees. One afternoon, sitting on a park bench, bathing in his ego and riding a high of self-righteousness, Dr. Jekyll involuntarily turns into Mr. Hyde. Not in spite of his good deeds, but because of them. The real stab of the story is that what we do is almost nothing, but how we do it is almost everything. Doing good is not being good if it only provides proof for our pride.
A Christian who thinks they are better than others, or better than other Christians, is not being faithful to their faith. What God values most is, conveniently, the hardest thing to fake: the posture of our heart.
There are Christian fanatics. Those who are overbearing, opinionated, insensitive, and harsh. Those who post videos saying women are evil. Those who claim they know what political candidate God supports (which, by the way, is the real meaning of taking the Lord's name in vain: speaking with the authority of God, as if you have a clear window into His will). But, the fanatics are fanatical not because they are too Christian, but because they are not Christian enough. Fanaticism is a failure to understand the message of the gospel.
Jesus said you can know His disciples by the love they have for others.
His call is to love. To love your neighbour, regardless of their sexuality, nationality, race, or religion. Even if you don't agree with them or can’t understand their actions, to still love them. “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” This is simple in theory but impossibly hard in practice, making it convenient to ignore.
You could argue Christianity "doesn't work" because many of its followers fail to follow it. But what's the alternative? Everyone making their own rules based on what they can manage on any given Tuesday? A belief system where people treat each other as equals and work to make the world a better place and follow it with military discipline?
Jesus set the bar high. He broke the four-minute mile of morality. He embodied perfect humility. All I can do is ceaselessly fall below it, but endlessly reach up toward it. That's the point. That’s fighting the good fight. That’s where the growing gets done.
Christians are not called to be perfect, but to recognize their failures, repent, pick themselves up, and begin again. Saints are sinners who keep on trying.
I decided that I could disagree with the avarice of the church and the acts of other Christians, but still remain faithful. It didn't make sense to let the corruption of man lead me away from communion with God.
Of course, Christians think they are right, meaning they think other belief systems are all at least somewhat wrong, but so do atheists. So does everyone. That's how beliefs work. If we didn't think it was right, we wouldn't believe it. It can be seen as narrow to claim one religion is right, but it's just as narrow to claim that they are all equal. In other words, there is one way to think about religion.
I’m not saying you are bad or dumb if you don’t believe in Christianity. It would be nice if it were that simple, but it isn't. Some of the best and brightest people I know aren’t religious. I haven’t seen a discernible difference in intelligence or kindness or moral action between my Christian and non-Christian friends. But, the difference is, Christians know there is a higher standard they are called to, and know when they’ve fallen below it. They have the intent to be shining and not sinful, even when they fail. They want to be good, but need God's help.
The problem with both the religious literalist and the atheist is the same: blind certainty. A close-mindedness that slams the door on any questioning. An arrogance that amounts to an unnoticed imprisonment in a replica world that is entirely too small to be true. A dogma that is held so strongly, it is not thought as dogmatic.
That’s why I go to the woods alone. To step back. To remember the world I live in is bigger and greener and softer than anything I try to make it. This, mind you, is where every religious leader and spiritual teacher seems to agree: it's about learning to see.
The process of coming closer to God is not one of addition but subtraction. Not doing more, but doing less. Unblocking. He is always there, but it is hard to feel His presence when we're fed by a constant drip of drugs and distraction and dopamine (perhaps with a Saturday night splash of serotonin) that all centre our attention on serving ourselves. There's an old monastic saying that God's first language is silence. Or, in silence, He speaks.
Anyways, over a course of two years, as I read about what Christianity really was, instead of what I assumed it was, my objections melted away, one by one.
Until I had none left.
Mankind has a funny way of making the important things trivial and the trivial things important. Everyone is buzzing about the football game and what some politician said and how the Dow Jones keeps falling, but few are pondering the very nature of the world they live in.
It's difficult to ask these sorts of questions. To think about such radical and reorienting things. Many just don't. It's too deep, too heavy, too threatening.
A friend who fell away from faith in university said over lunch, "I don't think about stuff anymore". This, I wanted to reply, is because atheism has no answers. It just tells you to stop thinking. Live your life and have fun and don’t worry about it. Atheists don't spend time building out their belief in nothingness; there is nothing there to believe in. It becomes a black hole that kills all questions.
Yet, atheism is also fragile. A mere glimmer of God can bring it crashing down.
The modern attitude is that a man must stop thinking if he is to go on living. Life is too crazy and complex, intellectual amputation is easiest and—dare I say it—most convenient. The technologies our culture glorifies all effectively do the same thing: make us stop thinking for ourselves. And the more I looked into it, the more it seemed the religious were the only ones still thinking.
When other belief systems told me I was suffering because I was thinking too much, Christianity told me I was suffering because I wasn’t thinking enough. When spirituality told me to step out, religion told me to step in.
Thinking, of course, is difficult. That's why people tend to judge; it is far faster and more certain. Judgment doesn’t ask me to hold any tension in my heart or nuance in my mind. I can just put people in a box, assuming I understand them, and move on with my life.
To be fair, there have been brilliant and honest people who thought hard about these things, but couldn't come to a belief in God. I studied several writers with a large intelligence and a deep heart—a mental complexion I saw my own reflection in—who couldn't bring themselves to believe in anything. Yet, they were left agitated and unhappy by their lack of belief and lived somewhat tragic lives, smashing up things and suffering for their cynicism; bleeding for their badge of intellectual pride. Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and David Foster-Wallace committed suicide. They went on seeing through things until all they saw was oblivion, staring right back at them.
The danger of the day-to-day trenches of adult existence is that many convince themselves there is no life to be found. That the world is filled with unsatisfying things. That the emptiness is just something to put up with and the patterns of behavior they can’t seem to break are just part of them. They lower the horizon of their thoughts and don't bother to think about the ultimate concerns, developing the capacity to compromise instead of the courage to ask hard questions. “The danger,” Simone Weil wrote, “is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.” Losing yourself can occur very quietly, almost as if it were nothing at all.
There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. If you do look, you usually do find said something, but it is rarely the same something you expect.
I would submit, with a quiet desperation, there is nothing more important. There is nothing more important than exploring the big questions and looking for answers. What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Where did I come from and where am I going? What purpose makes the pain of life and certainty of death bearable?
Your core beliefs—the story you tell yourself about how the world works and what is true and what is good and what is evil—decide how you extract meaning from experience and impact every small thing you do. In a very real way, they define the world you inhabit. The story you live in is the story you live out. And maybe your story is a tragedy, and maybe you don’t want it to be.
That's the harsh fact of life I rarely want to face: I’m all in. The stakes couldn’t be higher. No matter what I do, it's going to kill me.
If you do the work and come to the conclusion that Christianity is a conspiracy and our world is random and meaningless, or some other religion or spiritual sect is true, or it's all "the universe" (whatever that's supposed to mean), that is okay. If that’s where your heart settles, that is enough.
Although, as a pastor told me and what I witnessed firsthand, those who seek the truth end up in Jesus.
At the end of last year, I finished reading the Bible, minuscule marginalia on every page. I had a stack of books about God beside my bed with half the pages dog-eared. Church on Sunday morning had turned from recreation to routine to ritual. Yet, I was still straddling the fence. I knew there was probably no turning back or going back to the way things were before. But coming to faith still seemed far away. Surreal.
I was convinced of Christianity intellectually and I had the face the fact that it wasn't honest to pick and choose only the ideas I agree with, like the Bible is a buffet. If I only believe what I like in the gospel and reject what I don't like, it is not the gospel I believe in, but myself. Nor can I only accept the intellectual aspect of Christ because, divorced from its story and significance, it loses all meaning.
If I think religion is a "useful lie," that it isn’t true but seems useful for living a good life, so we should all deceive ourselves into believing Christ's deity, then it really is an opiate of the masses. And I still run into the painful problem that started my journey into faith: I'm still placing myself alone at the center of creation, making the world revolve around me, which proved a reliable recipe for misery. If the focus of my faith is how God can serve me, instead of how I can serve God, I'm missing the whole point. If I only believe in God because He can do something for me, I'm worshipping myself. Even then, I couldn't explain why life seems to go a whole lot better, filled with more beauty and belonging and purpose and love, if it's all a lie. That doesn't seem to be how lies work.
Whereas the truth is what makes you clear and strong. The truth is what sets you free.
Faith in God doesn’t work because it’s a convenience or cosmic coincidence. It works because it’s true. Because it aligns you with the wood grain of reality. Rather, it could not work if it was not true.
I came to a point where I realized a choice must be made, and not choosing was still a choice. I couldn't pretend as if Jesus had never lived and died. No leader of any other major religion claimed to be God.
Jesus was either a lunatic or who He says He is.
As C.S. Lewis wrote:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic… or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Or, as St. Augustine puts it: "I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden."
Christianity built the West. Jesus of Nazareth was the most influential person to have ever lived. Then comes the question: Do I think the world was transformed by the life and death of a lunatic? Does that make sense? Is that the world I live in? As a friend said, driving to church one morning, if Christ was the Son of God, that's crazy. But if He wasn't, that's even crazier.
Make no mistake, it’s crazy if it is true. That the central human story is a perfect man who suffered perfectly. That we killed Him, not in spite of His virtue but because of it. That the cross is the symbol we needed.
It doesn’t make sense, but the secular story doesn’t make sense either. The fact we’re here doesn’t make sense.
The secular narrative is that we're evolved apes on a rock hurtling through an endless void of space, a random accident and statistical impossibility, who somehow just came to consciousness, while no other animal did. If that is true, then Beethoven's Ninth is just vibrating air, a Monet is just splotches of color, our sun is just a star (a small and fairly unremarkable one at that), and falling in love with a girl is only a kind of chemical madness because her beauty and charm is purely produced by the momentary and accidental collision of atoms. If that is true, everything we experience as beautiful and meaningful is just an illusion. Real warmth and enthusiasm and joy and serious pleasure are all in hopeless disharmony with the reality of the universe we live in. And eventually, the sun will bring about the heat death of the universe, and everything will be wiped out, and the empty maw of space will remain and reign, and even the eight billion years the earth existed will be nothing compared to the oceans of time before and after. Nothing we have done, good or bad, will have made any ultimate difference because, in the end, all will be forgotten as if it had never existed.
If human life is a brief firefly speck in the night and death ends all, there is no basis for hope. There is nothing to hope for. Yet, I find myself needing hope more than I need oxygen. I find myself with deep spiritual longings, and a hunger for beauty and love, and a firm burning belief that good will prevail. I find my heart yearning for immortality, complete nonsense if we are hyper-evolved apes. And I find the narrative of cosmic meaninglessness deeply wrong and strangely offensive. Either we are all insane, or we are all creatures of God. Take your pick.
The secular narrative not only gives no reason to live well. It gives no reason to live.
But the Christian story, the story that God made a very good world, yet man fell away from Him by his own free will, but God so loved the world He sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross to pay for our sins to bring us back into His love and a relationship with Him, and in the end, good will defeat evil, all wrongs will be made right, all hearts will be mended, all tears will be wiped away, all suffering will be saturated with meaning, and Heaven and earth will be made new, is glorious. It's a glorious story.
The message of the Bible is so hopeful that I was scared to let myself believe it.
Hollywood, whether they realize it or not, tells the Hero's Journey of Jesus over and over again. We fill the theatre seats and witness how that story fractures reality and sense it is authentic and real because we feel it in our nerve endings.
I began to realize it would take more faith, more reliance on unproven assumptions, not to believe than to believe. Put simply, it took less faith to believe in Christianity than to believe in anything else. "It seems to me to take a great deal more faith to be an atheist than to be a Christian," Ellis Potter wrote, "because you have to maintain the idea that a blind, meaningless, purposeless, amoral, uncaring, directionless reality has produced human beings who are the opposite of all these characteristics."
Wouldn't it be weird if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose? If a world not forged out of the fire of love created humans who need love so badly?
I saw the Christian story made the most sense of both the beauty and brokenness of the world. The war and hate and violent cruelty, but also the warmth and care and acts of radical love. Once I accepted the mystery of God and Christ His Son, nothing else seemed a mystery. In an almost visceral way, the Christian story felt true.
I could make all the intellectual arguments in the world. I could explain how a mathematician calculated the probability that Jesus fulfilled 40 of the Old Testament prophecies, made in a span of over 1,000 years before His birth, is equivalent to selecting a single correct atom in our entire universe of atoms. Never mind that He actually fulfilled 300. Or how secular psychologists state the evidence that Jesus was mentally unstable, never mind completely insane, is approximately zero. Or the fact there is no competing narrative for the resurrection, with five hundred eyewitnesses. And after fleeing in fear when Jesus was arrested, but then swearing they saw Him resurrected, His disciples were all martyred, except for one, proclaiming Jesus Christ the Son of God to their death.
These things were not done in a corner.
But to argue proofs of religion is somewhat to miss the point of religion. It's taking an atheistic approach to contemplating the divine. While God does not demand proof, but simply asks to remain a mystery.
This, I would argue, is the biggest barrier for modern man to God: the overestimation of the intellect. “I can’t believe in anything I don’t understand,” is reasonable until restated: “If my mind, as the central locus of truth in the universe, cannot fully grasp something, it cannot be true and I refuse to consider otherwise.”
The modern world is so soaked in the drunken delirium of reason that even the devout feel they need hard evidence for their devotion.
But the worship of reason creates a false sense of certainty that makes the mind brittle and stops any real thinking from being done. It is easy to maintain this kind of intellectual rigidity. It is easy to wall off your world to only what you can understand. It takes much more effort and humility to maintain a poeticism of thought. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The most meaningful things we do in life, like getting married or having children, don't make rational sense. They don’t look good on a spreadsheet. We may not even have the words to explain our desire. These things are always leaps of faith, where we jump and build our wings on the way down. But if we're stuck at the top trying to get our heads around it, if we never leap because we’re too busy calculating the right angles or arguing the longing of our heart is "irrational," we miss out on the most meaningful things this life has to offer. There is more to acting intelligently than mere intelligence.
The most important laws we live by—laws of love, forgiveness, compassion—could not be discovered by reason, because they are unreasonable.
I read somewhere that two-thirds of Jesus' teachings are about forgiveness, but forgiveness has nothing to do with logic. Really, forgiveness is illogical. To forgive is to excuse the inexcusable. It’s only forgiveness if it’s undeserved, yet we need to forgive or we are crushed by the weight of our pain.
And if forgiveness is illogical, love is insane.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable,” C.S. Lewis wrote. “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
We are told, above all else, to love our neighbour. We are told that the highest calling in human life is to love whoever is next door. Whoever is around to be loved. And through the fires of love, we are told, there lies our salvation. Love will rearrange us.
To lack reason is to be inhuman. But to admit nothing but reason is to be disembodied. Put simply, human life cannot be ruled by reason alone, or it is not living at all.
For years, I could not believe in God because His existence is beyond my comprehension. I thought the human mind had wrapped itself around the world. I was living entirely in my head. Yet the more energy I expended trying to figure it all out, the more confused and restless and bitter I became.
Pride kept me in the prison of my mind. Pride told me if I didn't understand it, it wasn’t true. Pride told me that everything without a neat line of logic is a lie. It made my world simpler, but also much smaller.
God met me where I was: locked in the house of reasons and proofs. But faith is not purely an intellectual exercise. The mind cannot come to God. He wants our hearts.
It was a terrifying but true step away from the cold confines of reason and rationality when I accepted that I do not need to fully understand something to believe in it. I do not need sufficient proof to derive serious meaning and have it bear fruit in my life. I don't need to figure it all out. I can't and I won't. And that's okay.
Facts are useful and real, but they are not my dwelling.
Each step I take by faith and not by sight, my mind, drunk on certainty and consensus, clings to its jail cell bars, straining to explain, nails peeling away at the paint, but my heart marches on. The more I do this, the more I come alive.
Faith is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced. Religion is active. I cannot resolve the question of God in my head, I can only willingly agree to bear the mystery of God inside my heart. Sometimes this can be painful as pulling teeth, but, as far as I can tell, it’s the truth.
What matters is not knowing or possessing. What matters is whether my sense of gratitude is a fitting response to our world. Whether I am filled with awe and the rapture of being alive. Whether I keep some room in my heart for the unimaginable. Whether I am astonished.
For we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.
That's why the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. That's what it means to take life seriously: living in awareness of the terror and the beauty of creation, strangely soothed by its immensity.
Faith isn't irrational. It transcends the rational. To argue the Bible is scientific is to stoop down to a narrative level, a frame of perception, that Christianity rose above. Atheists exist at a level of consciousness where they see only the scientific and view all of reality through a rationalist lens. A rung up the ladder is to realize there are near infinite frames through which to view reality, none of which are objectively correct. But the final rung, once accepting the multiplicity of lenses, is to ask: What frame of perception, when embodied, leads to the most beautiful, useful, and good life?
The Christian answer to this questions is found in Jesus Christ. That Christianity, lived properly, results in the most beautiful people, the most beautiful families, and the most beautiful communities. That the victory of Christ is manifest in those He's enthroned.
Religious experience doesn't only transcend rationality, it transcends words. Pondering the divine breaks our brains, in the best way possible.
The very nature of God is that He is beyond our understanding. Whatever we think He is, He is so much more. If I really tried to talk about God, I'd start rambling about mystical oneness and infinity and eternity and all these labels that don't help and almost certainly hurt. Once you label something, you negate it. You stop seeing it. The moment God has nice neat lines and a black and white dictionary definition, we are no longer dealing with God but an invention of man. Joseph Campbell said the word "God" is the final barrier to the experience of God.
This is all to say: I try to be reverent, as best as I understand it. And that has made all the difference.
Faith is more like falling in love than answering a complex question. Faith, really, is a commitment to putting my heart at the centre of my life. It's rarely intuitive or easy, but only when faith is difficult does it mean something. Hope is only a virtue when things are hopeless, temperance when you are tempted to excess, and faith when you see a wall of reasons to be faithless, yet still stand firm.
And if faith is like falling in love, it is impossible without some degree of risk. Perhaps it works the same way: slowly at first, then all at once.
Sometimes people ask me about my "conversion," but that word is a relic from the rationalist's worldview. There was no full swap of beliefs, or Wednesday morning where I woke up and decided to pour gasoline on my old life and light a match. It was less of a conversion of more of a gradual inspiration, like someone breathed life into these old stories until they appeared more than just words on a page. I spent enough time reading the Bible until I realized it was true.
As to the nature of the change, I keep remembering this strange little riddle I heard in high school. If an old boat is docked in a harbour, full of rot and unfit to set sail, and a shipwright rebuilds it by replacing just one board at a time, when he's finally finished, is it an old boat or a new boat? I don't know the answer, but I do know I feel like that boat. I was rebuilt by Christ, board by board, almost imperceptible while it was occurring, until one day I looked back and realized I was no longer the same.
There are people much smarter than me who could smash holes in every intellectual argument I've made. I doubt I would fare well in a debate against Sam Harris. My only real evidence for faith is the work that God has done in my heart. That is a boat that cannot sink.
It is the one thing I cannot explain, but the one thing I know to be true. Funny how that works.
Faith has brought light into a darkness that I thought would never go away.
The confusion and heaviness, the weeks when it felt like water was filling my lungs, the conviction that I was just broken. The regret over not being someone else. The nostalgia for a future I'll never have. The search for lost time. As I've fallen into faith, most of this has just dissolved. Where it hasn't is where I'm still not faithful enough.
Coming to Christ is not being made better, like some self-help seminar. It's being made new. Through the act of daily surrender, it’s the death of the old self and the birth of a new self. It’s being given a new heart.
Faith has given me something I never could have imagined, before I had it. It's like I had the word "life," and then Christ came along and called me into it.
For instance, most of my life I was sick with envy. I had my heart set on things that cannot be shared. But Christ, as a figure to imitate, inverts everything. Instead of being strong, He is weak. Instead of being effortlessly happy, He weeps. Instead of being adored by the masses, He is crucified by the mob. Instead of ignoring the emails of his followers, He washes their feet. People were expecting a warrior, but instead got a Messiah who suffered and, in compassion, we turn to Christ. His pain evokes the humanity within our heart. His suffering becomes our salvation. This somehow makes Him the only role model worth having. The only figure I can strive to imitate, without it eating me alive.
No matter how hard I tried, or how many Michael Singer books I read, I could never trust “the flow of life” or surrender to “the universe”. It was too abstract and unsupported. It wasn’t until I had faith in a God who loved me and wanted what is best that I could truly trust in the outcome, even when it didn’t make sense or didn't seem fair, and focus on my actions and obedience. Only when my eyes are fixed on God can I let tomorrow take care of itself. Only then, daily duties and daily bread and a second coffee after lunch are among the sweetest things in life.
Faith is a reminder that we are rarely changed by acquiring new facts, but we are broken and remade by acquiring new loves.
It is not as though I’m good or virtue is easy. There is evil in my heart that I fight against every day. Since coming to faith, I’m only more painfully aware of my selfishness, my lust, my pride, and all the ways I fail to put others first. Those things won’t ever go away. My job is to wrestle with them until I die. To stay awake.
When I feel content with how well I’m doing and with what a good guy I am is when the danger is greatest. The minute I think I'm humble, I’m proud.
Faith also doesn't mean that I am happier, although I would say that I am. I don't go to God to make me happy. On earth, Jesus had moments of mirth, but was also deeply moved by grief and sorrow. In the gospels, more than any other emotion, He is distraught. Christ’s promise isn't happiness, which is fleeting and fragile, but meaning and purpose, which turns out to be much better, and something we can choose to create. Whenever my life doesn’t feel meaningful, it’s because I’m not taking on enough responsibility.
We want life to be about happiness, but the paradox is, if we make being happy our sole focus, the less happy we become. The more we squeeze, the more it slips away. But if we aim at meaning and purpose, we get meaning and purpose, and sometimes happiness thrown in.
Humans, in general, are terrible judges of what actually makes us happy.
If you want to be fully free, you will be fully lonely. But if you want to be happy, you must be tied. Real happiness comes from the fulfilment of duty; it is correlated with effort. It's like that old poem says: "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy."
That was part of Jesus’ message in the sermon on the mount: if you fulfill your daily obligations, you don’t need to worry about the future.
The Christian faith is the explanation of why we suffer, not the escape from it. In a world where we have free will, the only world where true beauty and goodness can exist, suffering must exist. But through Christ, I learn how to be worthy of my sufferings. I learn how to suffer like Him.
I’ve always thought that was one of the most important characteristics of being a good person: being able to process the pain of life without spitting it back out on other people.
The more I try to avoid suffering, the more I suffer. The more afraid I am of being hurt, the more fragile I become as every small thing becomes a threat. But Christ heading to the cross is the ultimate example of the voluntary acceptance of suffering, which, paradoxically, is how you transcend it. When you accept the unavoidable, you rise above it. That is how death is defeated.
“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely," Heidegger wrote, "I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.”
Through going to the cross as a voluntary act, life is renewed. Through letting all the parts of me that need to die burn away, I survive. And by remembering the certainty of death, I am called to live in a way where my absence brings no pleasure to the world. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
At every moment of the day, I choose to close my heart or to open it. Being a Christian is choosing to let my heart break open. To open, open so much it hurts, then open some more, and never close again to the world.
I am always pushed to make my heart bigger.
No, I don't want to drown in bubbles of bliss. I want to feel it all, the highs and the lows, the joy and the sadness, every emotion this human experience has to offer. The times I am closest to my faith are when I am repentant and sorrowful. The moments I feel God’s presence most are my moments of despair and weakness and vulnerability.
I can't explain why bad things happen to good people. There is an element of fate and chance in life where you can do all the right things, but still struggle. You can make the sacrifices and sometimes they aren't accepted. I don't know why the same God that produced Roger Federer also produces sick children who don't make it to their seventh birthday. I think any attempt at explaining it would be grotesque.
There are many whose belief in God is too simple and shallow and crumbles when they slam into a wall of adversity. Like Job’s friends, many think that if bad things happen to you, it must be your fault; God must be angry with you. But the notion that if you live a good life, things will go well for you is wrong. Jesus was sinless. Yet his time on earth was marred by poverty, rejection, hatred, and a death so painful we had to invent a new word to describe it: excruciating.
In my life, there are still things I am waiting on God for. There are still things that don't make sense. I struggle to see how all of what has happened is good. But I do trust that it is good, in an ultimate and final sense. I do trust that if I could see eternity, I would receive both the sweet and the bitter equally from His hand. And I do trust that everything will be made beautiful in its time.
“Until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man,” Dumas wrote, “all human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope’”.
Besides, it shouldn't make sense to me. I don't see the bigger picture, the beginnings and ends of things. I don't know how grass grows or how my knees work; I can't expect to know how all of eternity is managed.
Given the choice between a random, senseless universe and a very good world where a Creator, in His infinite abyss of contemplation, is preparing some mysterious good beyond my comprehension, I will choose the latter. Every. Time.
Christians must believe this is a white world with black spots, not a black world with white spots. Evil is a small and passing thing; a deformity, not a default. There is light and beauty in the world, and the darkness will not overcome it.
I sense that play out within. Despite how hard the world pushes me, I find in my heart, there is something stronger, something hopeful and higher, that pushes right back. Despite how badly I've been hurt, I find a place in my soul where I've never been wounded. Deep down there is joy and the joy burns out the pain. There is so much meaning, the suffering becomes somewhat irrelevant.
And if I take Christ at His word, which takes faith, many days more faith than I feel, death is not the end. It took me some time to not revolt against that idea as totally wrong and deluded, but rather lean into the instinctive response of my being; how every cell sings.
Maybe it’s the hardest death narrative to believe, but it’s also the only death narrative that’s satisfying. Every human instinctively knows that death is not only sad, it’s wrong. And becoming fertilizer for a plant in the circle of life, or a dewdrop that melts back into an ocean of consciousness, is almost insulting. Because what we want is not life after death, but love after death. Love can only exist if we retain a personal self.
To say I've found an answer does not mean work is done. Rather, much like confessing to a pretty girl that you are in love, the work has just begun.
I also think it's the answer. To dilute my words by saying it's "my truth" or that it "works for me" is to succumb to a post-modern narrative that insists there is no such thing as objective truth. That everyone can walk around as lords of their own skull-sized kingdom with "their truth" as long as it doesn't offend anyone else's truth. Post-modernism insists that truth is only subjective; a statement which, ironically, is an objective truth.
The Bible can be bitter to the modern palate because it states there is a right way to live and there is a wrong way to live and nowadays we never dare to say one person's interpretation of reality is true or good and another's is false or bad, because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief. But tolerance doesn't mean not having beliefs. Tolerance means still choosing to love people, even if they disagree with you.
It can be frightening to have convictions. It can be scary to stand for something. But if you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything. In an old story, Satan greets people in Hell with: “You’ll find that there’s no right or wrong here—just what works for you.”
If you think men who care are dangerous, wait until you see what men who do not care are capable of.
It takes courage to stand for a truth unaccepted in our times. The punishment is usually crucifixion. But, as a friend once said, all men are crucified, you only get to decide what you will be crucified for. In other words, you’re going to pay a price for everything you do and everything you don’t do. There is a price to telling the truth, just as there is a price to telling a lie. You only get to choose your punishment, and hope it’s not something greater than you can bear.
In our modern world, when knowing what is true can feel so complicated and confusing, when everyone on Instagram proclaims to have the secret formula you simply must know, when the flood of information feels like being sucked sixty feet under the sea and blinded by the sun all at once, and the bounds of your brain are about to burst, Jesus calls through the noise, "Follow me". Christ says He is the way and the truth and the life. That He has a way to live and if you follow it, you will have life to its fullest. That is His promise.
If Jesus is the Son of God, His teachings are divine insights I can live by with confidence. He is the rock on which I can build my house; the rock I can depend on when the storm comes.
Christianity, as an operating system for life, works. It works so well, you'd think God designed it. And because it calls us to orient around love and service to others, my faith doesn’t just lift me up, but everyone I interact with. As I’ve leaned more into my faith, life has only become more miraculous. Or maybe I’m just more attentive to all the miracles. Is there a difference?
The Bible has the key to a beautiful life. If I fail, it is not because I don't know the truth, but because I am unable to follow it. "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting," G.K. Chesterton wrote. "It has been found difficult and left untried."
Having faith is actually much harder than not having faith. Yet, the difficulty is holy. The difficulty is why I trust it.
All of this religion distills down to love, hope, and faith, in that order.
Love, as anyone with a pulse knows, is difficult. It’s exhausting. But Jesus says to love, even though we pay the price for it. That love is still worth it. That love itself is pain, but it is the pain of being truly alive.
As an atheist, I thought Christians were blind believers, clutching onto their convictions with false confidence. But as a Christian, that's not how I experience faith at all. Faith is not belief exactly because belief implies certainty. Faith is not about certainty, but rather a yearning for something beautiful I can sense, but never fully grasp. Faith, really, is desire itself.
Viewed in this way, a Christian does not live on the continuum between belief and doubt, but between intensity and apathy. As with breathing, the question one must always ask is: Am I doing it, now?
Faith is about the wrestling, the wondering, the continual motion toward God. It’s holding space in my heart for the tension that never goes away. It’s thinking I’m surrendered and then realizing I really wasn’t. There is no arrival or completion or satisfaction. There is only the striving. The endless and burning desire to move toward God, who is infinite.
He who thinks he has finished has already fallen back.
Faith is scary at times because I am not seeing, not controlling, not totally understanding. I don't have it all figured out. I can't get my head around it. I am surrendering the need to know precisely what is happening or exactly where this is all going. I am walking and trusting God to provide strength and stability in the overflow of life. As a friend said to me a few weeks back, "You cannot always know how God is working in your life, but you can trust that He is".
I'm nowhere near as mature in my faith as I want to be. I have days when this whole thing feels crazy and surreal and I want to close my eyes and click my heels back to my childhood bedroom when everything was safe and nothing really mattered. Days when the religious words people speak seem fake and made-up, even manipulative, and the good deeds seem performative instead of pious.
In my weaker and more vulnerable moments, I don't want to believe. I don't want my choices to matter. I don’t want life to be this real. Part of my wrestling with God is that I don’t always want to wrestle with God. I just want to figure it out and be done.
Yet every time I stumble, it's because I am letting my head step on my heart. When my faith feels dry, it’s because I’m trying to do it all myself, instead of coming to God for grace.
Even when I struggle to believe in Jesus, I believe in His works. I believe in the healing I have seen in others. I believe in the beautiful families I’ve spent time with. And I know how my own life has been changed, in a way as surprising and mysterious and unexplainable as the experience of waking up out of a deep sleep.
There is no knowing for a fact. But the love of Christ surpasses all knowledge.
It was huge for my faith when I heard other Christians admit doubt. Even pastors see a man cast off his crutches and their first instinct is that he's faking it. Even lifelong believers are awake in the middle of the night worrying, "But what if I'm wrong?" Tim Keller said that in his lowest moments, death scared him. I realized I didn't need bulletproof confidence to have faith. I just needed the desire.
And I still have questions that I don't have good answers to. Why did God ask Abraham to murder his son? What did Jesus mean when he said, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword?” How can Christ be both fully man and fully God? If Satan is real, what does that mean for how I live?
But God doesn't want us to stop thinking or abandon reason. He wants us to ask hard questions and test everything for ourselves. Not asking hard questions means my faith is weak. It means I don't trust that God has the answers and can guide me through the crisis and confusion.
The Bible seems to suggest that God wants us to wrestle with Him. Not repeat the same empty platitudes or sweep our doubts under the carpet, but lay our moments of spiritual despair at His feet.
In my journey, doubt becomes a door to discovery. Doubt urges me upward, to a higher understanding of my faith.
Even on mornings when I am fragile, I remember God is not. Even on days I don’t feel faithful, I stick to the actions and trust that feelings will follow. And even through the weeks of waiting for the dryness to catch fire, what is clear is more important than what isn't. The victory of Christ, seeking to have Him enthroned in our hearts, that we can experience the kingdom of Heaven now.
And I am affirmed in my faith by the intellectual giants who walk before me. Men and women across the ages who thought about these things down to their ends and out to their edges and their faith held fast. Augustine and Austen, Dante and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tolkien, Milton and Merton, and many more. G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis were especially impactful for me, if you couldn't tell by how many times I've quoted them.
Faith is a lifelong journey. A slow and steady pilgrimage. Some of it is moving and uplifting, but most of it is mundane, hard work. Most of it is Monday to Saturday.
The love of God is a long conversation that takes place in my heart.
A lot of other hard to explain things happened. I could tell you the story of how I met a 74-year old pastor at a hostel in Salzburg who told me about the twenty-four miracles he's experienced. Or, in the last breakout room of an online writing course, how I met a man who, two years later, pointed me toward C.S. Lewis and Tim Keller when I said I was sick of all the talk of finding purpose. Even last summer, I chose a random Workaway living at an off-grid property in Newfoundland, hosted by a fellow who, to my surprise, was a Catholic monk in his 20s and then got a PhD in philosophy and theology and became a professor.
For years, as I was working through all of this stuff, slowly and painfully coming to all these conclusions, yet still confused as could be, some people looked at me as a lost sheep. Like they had it all figured out, while I was flailing but ultimately failing to answer even the most basic of life’s questions. It made me angry. Until I realized I was a lost sheep. And then I was found.
That's where I am today, four years from when I read that first essay about Christianity in my dark and damp university basement apartment.
I pray first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I bring my requests to God, telling Him how I see things and what I want, knowing I don't see everything clearly. I bring my brokenness to Christ, admitting it's a mess, and ask for His help. I pray for family, friends, sometimes strangers, and, on my best days, a few enemies. Mostly, I say thank you.
Every day, I read the Bible. I try to keep my sins in sight. My hand open, my heart tender, and my steps surrendered. I aspire to be the light of Christ, wherever I go.
And I attend church on Sunday. A living church, rooted in scripture, filled with a community of people I've fallen in love with. If you'd like to come sometime, I'd love to take you.
All of this is beautiful and complicated. I don’t fully understand it, but I no longer need to. Instead, I embody it and watch magic unfold in my life as a result.
I sought God and He answered.
That is why I am a Christian again.
With all my heart,
“I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”
— Psalm 118:5
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Beautiful, Tommy. Deeply touched and humbled by your insights. Thorough, kind, thoughtful, dogmatically complete. A mystery laid bare by the sheer weight of your heart’s purpose. So humbly proud to call you my son. Love Dad
I could sense you getting closer and closer to this point as I followed your writing since your time in Thailand... but glad that you've made a faith decision brother. It only gets harder, more demanding, more awful, more wonderful from here. And we are shoulder to shoulder as we walk.