My Testimony: How I came to know the Truth

Warning: This isn't as funny as what I usually write. Some would say it is even out of character.

I grew up Catholic, which is to say my family was Catholic. I was surrounded by the religion, so there was no other option for me. I went to twelve years of Catholic school. It became meaningless as I grew older. My questions about faith went unanswered. Once, in my freshman religion class, the teacher told the class that the account of Adam & Eve in the Bible was an allegory, but not the real truth of creation (which, of course, was evolution). If the Bible was wrong about Adam & Eve, how could the rest be true? As I examined Catholicism more closely, I saw mysticism, but no substance. Our beliefs were not explained; they just simply were. But the real turning point came during the spring of 1989.

We were on a vacation when my mother started getting sick. We cut the trip short and returned home. She went through a myriad of tests, and the doctors finally came up with a diagnosis.

Cancer.

It was a tough fight. My mother held to her faith even as my doubts grew. I began to ask the age-old question. Why was God allowing my mother to suffer?

My odd choice of friends pushed me further away. One was a non-religious Jew, another a curious Satanist, the rest so intellectual as to dismiss all organized religion as mythology. (All this at a Catholic school.) With my mother suffering the effects of chemotherapy and a disease that was slowly destroying her, it was easy to follow their lead.

And so I slowly drifted away. When I joined the Navy after high school, I had to pick a religion to put on my dogtags. I shake my head today when I see my choice: NORELPREF or No Religious Preference. My mother's fight ended two years later. I had mixed feelings, devasted that my mother was gone at only 47 years old, but glad that her suffering was over. I had no idea where "she" was. The idea of Heaven seemed so quaint. Was she floating in nothingness, or reincarnated, or was she simply gone.

I had a terrible time after her death. My work suffered. I was sad, angry, and most of all, cynical toward religion. I actually began to ridicule my Christian coworkers, who gently rebuked my agnostic arguments.

My relationship with my father grew during this time. He would send me care packages with food and tapes of local radio personalities. They helped pass the time on those long ocean voyages.

In late 1994, I was overseas in Guam. I received a package from my father along with a couple of tapes. This time, however, one side of one tape had something different. Rather than bits from the Gary Burbank show, it was a half-hour sermon of a local preacher. My father was not evangelizing as such. He simply said in the letter that it was a preacher from a local church, and I might find it interesting. I thought, what the heck, and listened.

The sermon was by a man named Bob Russell. He was the pastor of a growing church in Louisville called Southeast Christian. Not Catholic, I thought, maybe it will be interesting. Agnostic though I was, religion has always piqued my curiosity.

Russell said things I had never heard before. Not taking the listener's faith for granted, he explained, as if to a child, what Christians believed. He talked about salvation as something we could never achieve by good deeds. He said that none of us were worthy to spend eternity with God. This was an interesting concept to someone who grew up with the idea that all non-Catholics went to Hell. Rather, salvation was already given to us as a free gift when Jesus, a sinless man, sacrificed himself for us.

Interesting, I thought. I had heard these things before, but never so succintly. My father continued to send me tapes of Bob Russell, and I continued to listen. In the summer of 1996, I drove home from Washington state to Louisville. I had twelve hours of Bob Russel to listen to and I listened to it all. He talked about how Jesus was a real historical figure who fufilled every prophecy of the Old Testament. He talked about how this man lived a perfect life, free of sin. He worked miracles in front of thousands of witnesses. He suffered hours of torture and then a slow, horrible death. He talked about the fact that his followers, rather than cower and hide from those who killed Jesus, began to loudly proclaim (in foreign languages, no less), that Jesus had come back to life. Why would they risk saying such a thing?

Why indeed.

The fact was that hundreds of people witnessed his death, and later saw him alive. The Jews and Romans persecuted these early Christians savagely. And yet they kept preaching. Why risk their own death, unless...

Unless they weren't lying.

But if it was the truth, then it meant that Jesus had done what he said he would do. He had sacrificed himself for us and opened the gates of Heaven. He came back to life. It must be true, I reasoned. And if that was the truth, then it must all be true, all the way back to Adam and Eve. Jesus was the Messiah promised in the Bible by Hebrew prophets hundreds of years before. We were a bunch of sinners who would always sin and fall short of the example He set for us. But because of his love and sacrifice, we could be saved simply by believing He is the Messiah.

It actually made sense rationally, but more than that, I experienced a change. It was as if a light went on; a switch flipped in my mind. Something deeper was working inside me. It was a warm, comforting sensation; a sense that I was being welcomed home after a long trip. He was speaking to my heart. The love of God wrapped around me like a warm blanket. My fears and doubts began to melt away. Jesus was alive and always had been. I had been a fool to doubt Him. I began to see life differently. I realized that God does not let bad things happen, like my mother's death. Rather, the sin of man has created a world of death and disease that we must struggle through to find the Father. Death is a small concern as long as you have faith in Christ, because it means when you die, you go to the Father. So my mother had eternal life! I knew this, because she never doubted her faith through all her hardships.

Rather than simply being sinners in the hands of an angry God, we are God's beloved children. God does not want us to fear Him; He wants us to love Him. He wants us to find Him and come home.

I look back on my life and look at how He was there for me when I needed Him. He helped me stay on the right path even as I was denying Him. He knew I would come back home. He was the unknown force in my life through my lost years in Navy keeping me out of the wrong places.

I do not fear anything now. I do not cry at funerals. Rather, I rejoice in the knowledge that someone else has gone home. I see trouble in this world. We as a people are rejecting God. Christians and their beliefs are being criticized. We are being persecuted. But it's okay, because He said this would happen, and he hasn't lied to us yet.

I write this now because one year ago (February 19th, exactly) I was baptized at Southeast Christian Church while my father and Bob Russell looked on. I'm so glad to be home.