I had the idea to write this post awhile ago. I wanted to write something that explained, for struggling believers and non-believers, what Christianity was really all about. Initially, I planned on putting together a lot of research that helped to prove God’s existence. I was going to attempt to give information to try and dispel some of the popular myths that attempt to stand against the Bible. I actually had a basic outline and was just simply looking for resources. However, while I was doing all this and researching what questions I needed to answer, I started to realize that isn’t what God is all about. God isn’t about facts and proof. He isn’t about information, science, history, logic or reasoning. He is about a relationship. He is about experiences. He is about love. Now, before all the non-believers start to think this is a post where I am admitting that God can’t handle the scrutiny of science, history, logic and reasoning and click the “x” in the corner; I would like to ask that you just read what I have to say with as open a heart and mind as you can muster.
I’m not saying that God can’t be found in any of those things, but rather, I don’t think you will ever be able to see Him there until you are ready. You see history is the study of what we know about the past in the attempt to learn more; science is the study of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment in an attempt to learn more. Logic and reasoning is taking what we know and using that to make intelligent and informed decisions in our lives. The problem with that, when it concerns God, is if you don’t know God, it is hard to include that in your study. We admittedly don’t know everything about history and science; however, we choose to accept theories as facts, and then act as though we have found “proof” that God doesn’t exist. We then take that even farther and assume anything we see that may point towards an all-powerful deity is just something we don’t’ understand, yet. I don’t think it is fair of me to expect people who don’t believe in God to see Him in nature. There was a time when people rejected the idea the earth was round. Everything they saw was “proof” that it was flat. However, now we know the earth is in fact round and so, all of that “proof” they observed is seen as ridiculous. Likewise, people thought that the sun revolved around the earth and they saw lots of things that aligned with that belief. If they observed anything that didn’t match their belief they just marked it as something they didn’t understand, yet.
My point is that we can only observe things through the filter of our own understanding, and that sometimes the only way to see the truth is to first prepare ourselves for it. Think about Isaac Newton: according to him an apple fell from a tree striking him in the head, which led him to the understanding of gravity. I’m sure there was much more to it than that, but still, I’m sure we can agree that Isaac Newton wasn’t the first person to see something fall from a tree, apple or otherwise. I’m sure we can also agree that he wasn’t the first person who was likely hit in the head by a falling object. However, he was the first person to recognize that there was a force pulling things to the earth. Why? Everyone else had seen the evidence, but they didn’t see the whole picture. First of all, they weren’t looking for an answer to why things fell, but secondly they weren’t prepared to see the whole picture. The people who saw falling apples didn’t wonder why or ponder what caused it; they just accepted that is how things work. Isaac Newton, wasn’t some idiot that sat under apple trees until that fateful day. He was already a well-respected mathematician and scientist. He was constantly open to new ideas and a new way of thinking about things, which is why he is now considered to be one of the most influential scientists of all time.
That being said, the only way for me to really show you what God is really about is to speak of my relationship and my experiences. I don’t intend to convince you of His existence, but rather to prepare you for your own experiences and your own personal relationship. I have felt God’s presence, I have seen God working in my life and I have recognized His voice when he spoke to me. I have experienced peace in impossible situations and been a witness to the miraculous. I’m sure this is hard to believe when you hear it, but I assure you that when I experienced them it was impossible for me to deny that it was God. If you would allow me, I would like the chance to share some of these experiences with you. Although, I need you to do this understanding while you read this, you may be inclined to come up with other explanations for what occurred, but I would like to ask that you keep an open mind and not immediately dismiss my experiences.
In the interest of time, I am not going to go into a lot of detail on each story. However, if you are so inclined, you can always read “Do Miracles Still Happen” and “Fair-Weather Faith” for a more detailed account of some of these stories, as well as a couple stories I’m not telling here. My twin boys were both born perfectly healthy despite concerns throughout the pregnancy that one of them wasn’t receiving enough nutrients and was not growing or developing like he should. I prayed for healing and on the day he was born, he was actually born 5 ounces heavier than his brother and in perfect health. After my wife’s car died leaving us with no way for both of us to get to work, we were given a car. I have been in tough situations that sent me into a tailspin of worry and fear until I prayed and suddenly, I felt calm and at peace with the knowledge God was going to take care of it. I have laid awake in bed at night unable to sleep because of the mounting stress in my life and suddenly heard God tell me that He loved me and was soon in a deep and peaceful sleep.
In fact, just recently we were in a situation where we were so tight on money that I didn’t think that we would be able to buy Christmas gifts for our boys. We had been struggling for about 4 months after losing $800 a month in income. I had used this as an excuse to stop tithing; after all you don’t give away money when you can barely afford groceries. I was stressed out and worried that my boys would wake up Christmas morning and think that Santa hadn’t come to their house. I was behind on several bills, including being two months behind on our mortgage. I was trying to figure out how I was going to keep our house, keep lights on and put groceries on the table. I was near my breaking point and was walking around stressed and angry. One day, while I was at work, out of the blue, my wife sent me a picture of what she had written in her prayer book that day. She had asked God to provide us with additional money. I looked at the text and was puzzled why she showed it to me until the next picture came. It was an envelope filled with a stack of $20’s, equaling $500. It had been given to us by her family member. My wife asked why they were giving us the money and was told that they felt like God was telling them that this is where the money needed to be. I’m not going to lie, I believe in God and I have faith that God can do anything, but I was completely shocked this had happened. The money gave us the ability to catch up on some bills, but Christmas wasn’t saved and I was still worried about it. What I was failing to realize was that God wasn’t done yet; this was just the first step on what has been an amazing journey. After receiving the money, we went to church and heard a sermon on tithing. Again, in the spirit of honesty, I didn’t want to hear it. I was struggling with money and now I’m hearing about how I need to make sure that I’m giving some of that back to God. However, while I was in that church service I felt convicted to tithe. I tithed on everything we had made that week including the $500 gift. I walked out of the church knowing that I had done what was right, but also knowing that the $80 that I had just given to the church was money that I needed to pay the bills that were due.
The very next day, a couple called my wife, who provides childcare at our home, asking if they could bring their kids to our house. My wife agreed and they came. The thing is my wife charges $40 dollars a day per kid for drop-in visits and they had two kids. God had just given us our $80 back, allowing me to pay our past due bills with the exception of our mortgage. Throughout that week as I looked for verses for the material that I was writing, I was constantly brought to verses about tithing. Thursday, I told my wife that even though I didn’t know how we were going to pay for everything and we still couldn’t buy gifts for the kids we had to start tithing. That Sunday, we tithed on what we had earned, including the $80 and again my wife received a call for a couple extra kids, which actually provided us with enough to make the house payment for the two months we owed. I wrote a check for what we owed which left us with $30 dollars in our account. The problem was we still had to eat and put gas in my car so I could go to work. I ended up having to take all but $15 out of our savings account to cover the check, but by this time I was learning to trust God to provide for us. So when Sunday came I tithed again, giving all the cash I had left to the offering plate at church. The week before Thanksgiving most of our bills were paid, the mortgage was caught up, and we had groceries for the week and were able to buy the ingredients needed for Thanksgiving dinner, but we still didn’t have money for Christmas. That week my sister gave us money and on Black Friday I was able to buy some gifts for our boys to ensure that they at least had something under the tree. Again, I tithed and I paid the cable and cell phone bill. After that came out we were able to find much of what our kids had been asking for largely discounted for Cyber Monday allowing us to, not only make sure they had gifts for Christmas, but also they were going to get the gifts they wanted that we originally thought were completely out of the question. Since then we have continued to tithe and God has continued to provide. We aren’t in a perfect position yet, but God isn’t finished yet either. Every week, we are in a better position than we were the last week, and I can relax knowing that Santa is definitely going to visit my kids this year.
I know that many people will read that story and say that people, not God, were giving us money. People that knew us and cared for us; not to mention that it is the holiday season when people seem to be in a more giving mood. They will take all that into account and conclude that God isn’t needed for that story to happen. However, I ask that you consider this; to the secular world the idea of tithing no doubt seems ridiculous. Without the knowledge of God, the idea of giving 10% of your paycheck back to a church, especially when you are already struggling, seems completely illogical. It is unreasonable to expect to improve your financial situation when you are just giving money away. However, I heard God tell me to do exactly that. I didn’t have the money to pay our bills, mortgage or get Christmas presents for our kids. In my head, I battled with the idea that if I tithe this money I can’t pay the bills and I may lose everything. However, I did what may be considered completely illogical. I did what, according to all secular reasoning, would leave me in a worse situation than I was already in, and yet as I type this my bills are paid, my mortgage is up to date, we have plenty of food, our accounts aren’t empty, and my closet is full of presents for my kids.
A lot of people have the idea that Christians ignore the reality of the world around them in order to blindly follow Jesus Christ. I don’t ignore what I have seen, heard or felt. I actually take all of that into account, but when I take my experiences into account, I am overwhelmingly convinced that God is real. In fact, the reason that there are so many Christians in the world that you can’t convince regardless of how much “evidence” you present them is because they have experienced God too many times to deny Him. Likewise, I don’t hate science or history. I don’t consider them the enemies of Christianity; actually, I love both science and history and have continued to enjoy learning more about each of these even as I live out my life as a Christian. God is the creator of all things, which makes science the study of God’s creation. God has been present throughout all of history; therefore, I don’t see how studying it can possibly be harmful to my Christian beliefs.
We all have had experiences that seemed impossible to overcome. We have all seen things happen that we couldn’t completely understand. The difference between non-believers and me is that they call it luck and coincidence, and I call it God. When we win something that seems completely improbable, despite overwhelming odds, we say that we got lucky. In the same way, when several things seem to line up to our benefit despite any logical sense of connection, we call it coincidence. Luck and coincidence, are words used to label the experiences we can’t explain. They are used to replace the need to provide a factual account. So, I would pose the question: who is really denying their own experiences to reach the conclusion of what they believe?
Logic and reasoning require us to use what we know to make informed decisions. People that don’t know God see Christians as making completely illogical decisions due to what they believe. I would submit the idea that we are actually making informed decisions based on a higher level of understanding as opposed to a lower one. If you think about people living in ancient times and how they lived: riding horses instead of cars, living off the land instead of going to the store, sending letters instead of emails and using fire and candles instead of electricity. It actually seems perfectly logical for them to have lived that way. They didn’t have the technological advances that we have today. They didn’t understand the world like we do today. The way they lived and survived was the most logical and reasonable way to do it considering the knowledge they had. However, if you were to take somebody from the 1700’s and thrust them into current society that way of living would seem completely illogical to us. We have cars so why go to work on a horse? You can go to the store to get food, so why rely on your own farming and hunting to provide food to your family? Why wait the days it takes to send mail for important messages when you can deliver it instantly through e-mail and text messages? Why light your house up with candles when you can just flip a switch? As our understanding of the world has changed, that way of living is only seen in the most remote parts of the world. It has died out with the new logic and technology. We have a better understanding of the world and how things work and so we factor that understanding into our logic and reasoning and make completely different choices today. Well the same is true for Christians today. Christianity has survived all the technological advances and all the scientific and historical discoveries. We aren’t ignoring logic, we are simply using our new enlightened understanding, which causes us to make different logical choices.
I see God throughout my study of science and history. People like to talk about the Darwinian theory of evolution to discount the creation story, but the theory of evolution has been proven wrong even by Darwin’s standard. The fossil record simply doesn’t support it. Somehow, it is still treated as though it is fact despite being labeled as a theory since the facts can’t support its validity. The chaos theory is an alternative to the Darwin theory; however, this theory is just an excuse to not explain anything since you can just say, “whatever happens, happens.” Chaos theory denies the possibility of intelligent design, but if you look at the world, it is clearly designed to support and sustain itself. In fact, the destruction of the world that we face today: pollution, global warming, animal extinction and dying plant life can all be explained by human interaction. Interesting, the only life form on earth that has the cognitive ability to deny God, is also the life form that is destroying His creation.
If you want to honestly and earnestly look into the possibility that God really does exist I would like to suggest a couple books: A Case for Christ by Lee Strobel and Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Looks at the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace. The first is a book from a former atheist journalist who set out to disprove God and was convinced of his existence. The latter is the book of a former atheist homicide detective with a specialty in solving cold cases, who set out to study the four gospels to evaluate their validity. In the end, he was convinced that the Bible and the claims of the gospels were evidentially true. I am also open to answering any questions that you may have. I know that a lot of times questions about religion are met with anger and condemnation, but I assure you, that is not at all what I am offering. I don’t want to castigate you, the reader. I simply want to help you understand the truth behind Christianity. I know that some believers also struggle with some of these questions, which may be why they lash out when they are asked. I have had questions, doubts and misunderstandings. So, I understand while standing on the outside looking in, Christianity can seem like a lot of nonsense. However, if you are truly seeking answers, I would love the chance to help you with that.
It is not an attempt at indoctrination. God isn’t interested in your forced beliefs and neither am I. I would simply like a chance to dispel certain myths and misunderstandings and offer the truth. I would like a chance to remove the blinders and offer you a chance to see things clearly. I would like to offer you a chance to experience God like I have: His overwhelming love, eternal grace, constant provision, and fierce protection. Right now, you may see the world through a filter that denies God and therefore you can’t see Him, but I would like to remove the filter and let you see the world for what it really is; the chance to really step outside of the box the secular world has placed you in.
Jeremiah 29:13: “You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart.”
