The Story of a Young Man

Chapter 1: Phoniness and Pretense
I was born and raised in the moderate-sized town of Grand Forks, North
Dakota. Up through my high school graduation in 1969, my family and I
attended church every week, and if anybody had asked, I would have
said I was a Christian. During my junior year of high school, I even
tried to start a chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes at my
high school, but for reasons I can't completely remember, this never
went anywhere. But looking back on this now, I realize I wasn't a
Christian in terms of various basic points – I vaguely agreed with the
ideas that God existed, that Jesus was a special person who apparently
was both God and man, that the Bible was some sort of record and guide
– but it was all more a kind of vague, nonspecific background to what
church was – a weekly get-together, with concern for doing right, for
helping others, and for acknowledging this vague God.

Looking back on my church attendance, I don't recall ever hearing the
Gospel laid out clearly – despite lots of sermons, open Bibles,
readings from Scripture, and congregational prayer. When I was
confirmed in junior high school, I had this nagging awareness that I
didn't really know what becoming a member of the church or what being
a Christian was supposed to be. I didn't know the Bible, I didn't read
it, I didn't really know who God was, and I didn't know much about
Christianity. At the end of the confirmation process, we were each
assigned to meet one-on-one with a church elder. This made me nervous,
because I was sure the elder would ask me questions about my faith,
which would expose the fact that I knew so little. This wasn't even an
issue of whether I believed – it was the fact that I knew so little
about being a Christian and so I was incapable of explaining the
Bible, much less defending it. So when the meeting time came, the
elder simply said to me, "Now I'm not going to have you recite in
order the books of the New Testament because I know you know that..."
– although I didn't – "...so I just want to welcome you to the church
and ..." I remember thinking, even as a naive, ignorant 8th grader,
"What kind of phoniness is this? Why ask me to recite the order of the
books of the New Testament? What does knowing the order of those books
have to do with being a Christian? But why aren't you asking me the
order of the books in New Testament? If I'm supposed to know that,
then why aren't you holding me accountable for that? But isn't
determining for your sake and mine whether or not I'm even a Christian
far more important than the order of some books?" At some deep
reactive level that I couldn't even articulate for years and years, I
had a sort of subconscious gut sense that there was something
seriously phony going on here. I wanted to say, "Wait a minute... Are
you not asking me anything meaningful… because you're afraid that
you're going to find out that I know hardly anything about being a
Christian? Are you not asking because perhaps you yourself don't even
know what being a Christian is? This is phony. Is this how adults act?
Is this how Christians act? Is this what Christians believe? Is this
what Christianity is? So being a Christian is just pretending?"

This was extremely disappointing to me. I was longing for something
firm to build my life on, and here this elder wimped out by not
passing on to me anything of lasting value. Perhaps this elder didn't
know the gospel either. For whatever reason, I got the impression that
what you believed wasn't as important as that you believed – believed
something, or believed in something – never mind whether it was true
or not. The believing itself was apparently what was important, not
what you believed in. The believing per se was apparently what faith
was, even if you were believing in something that is false or phony.
But I knew from high school mathematics that lots of consistent things
could follow from a premise that was false, so I was suspicious and
disappointed. Was this what Christianity and the Bible were? –
believing something whether or not it was actually true? Believing
something even if it were flat out false and fictitious? This was my
first encounter with relativism: that even if something were
objectively, historically, scientifically, logically false, it could
still "be true for you." The problem was that this never made sense to
me. I was pretty demanding in my search for truth, even in junior high
and high school. I wanted to know what was objectively true, and then
I would build my life upon that. In retrospect, Christianity and the
Bible at that time were beginning to seem weak candidates to me,
although I should add that I was not at that age consciously aware of
or able to articulate much of what I've just described. But it was
there, deep inside of me – percolating, waiting to emerge, waiting to
be tested.


Chapter 2: Beginning the Descent
So when I went off to college in the fall of 1969, I had no anchor, no
foundation, no grounding to prepare me for what lay ahead.
Unfortunately, what was coming down the pike at full speed was the
turbulence and turmoil of the counterculture movement of the 1960's
that was questioning everything. At college, I met professors who
argued convincingly that God didn't exist. I made friends and met peers
who claimed that the Bible was wrong and old-fashioned and that truth
was whatever we made it out to be for ourselves. I read books that
pointed out the phoniness of certain parts of society – of marriages,
of churches, of government. It reminded my of my confirmation meeting
with the elder who was rubber stamping the pretense that I was a
Christian and who was also apparently just pretending that
Christianity was true, as opposed to being convinced that it was true.

After a semester of college classes and lots of conversations about
life and meaning, I had been intellectually exposed to other
religions, such as atheism, existential materialism, Hinduism,
Buddhism, and pantheism, including "new" ideas regarding
reincarnation, relative morality, the implications of
particles-to-people evolution, and even the nature of God (if God
existed). Out of sheer intellectual fairness, I realized that I should
really take another look at the Bible. So I decided to take a course
from the Religion Department on the Bible, and I registered for a
class on Old Testament history. Both from the professor's lectures and
in all the readings we had, the one consistent theme was skepticism –
Isaiah himself probably didn't write this, we're not really sure if
Jesus said that, Moses may not have even known how to write, etc.

Little did I know that I was encountering not historical Christianity
in this class – but modern liberal Christianity. Of course, the
skepticism I encountered with this professor was a very warm,
personable skepticism. He was a kind, encouraging, and friendly older
gentleman. His warm, patient but firm skepticism was about whether the
Bible itself could be trusted, about who exactly Jesus was (other than
a great teacher), and about whether "God" really existed. But there
was one thing he never seemed skeptical about: his own skepticism. So
his questioning never spilled over to its logical conclusion, which
many of my generation reached (not always consciously!): the
philosopher's famous adage, "If God doesn't exist, then everything is
permissible." If God doesn't exist, then there is no compelling
rationale for being warm and kind, except for personal preference. If
God doesn't exist, then nothing has any lasting, transcendent, eternal
value. Moreover, in this class we were never exposed to authors or
scholars who presented evidence or arguments that the Bible could be
trusted. So in the naiveté of my early college perspective, I reached
the barely self-conscious conclusion that there simply was no
historical, philosophical, evidentiary, scientific, or logical support
at all for the position that the Bible was true.

One day I reached a turning point in class. We had been reading from
the book of Exodus about how the Israelites escaped from Egypt. There
really is a verse in the Bible (Exodus 14:21) which states that God
sent a strong east wind to blow back the waters, allowing the
Israelites to escape by this parting of the Red Sea. The professor
commented that was probably best explained by the strong wind exposing
a sand bar in the waters, which allowed the Hebrews – who were all
traveling on foot – to cross, while the Egyptians in their heavy
chariots would have gotten bogged down in the wet sand. At some point,
the professor continued, the wind stopped after the people of Israel
had crossed, and the waters surged back over the Egyptians, drowning
them in their cumbersome battle armor and weighty chariots.

Then the professor went on to say that this parting of the waters may
have been merely and only a happy coincidence of nature for the
Israelites. But whether it really was God himself parting the waters
or just a happy naturalistic coincidence, the professor said – and I
remember his exact words – "The important thing was that the
Israelites believed it was the finger of God." The most important
aspect of this incident, according to this college teacher, was not
whether God really existed, or whether this really was an act of THE
transcendent Creator God of the entire universe – the vital thing was
that the Hebrews believed this was an act of God. The Hebrews believed
this was God… even if it really wasn't, was the silent implication.
The important thing here wasn't objective reality – the vital issue
was what you believed in your mind, according to this learned
instructor.

To this day, I still remember the exact words of my reaction. I said
to myself, "That's bunk. If that's all that this Bible is – a bunch of
auto-suggestive, psychological tricks in which you assume or pretend
to be true things that very well may not be true at all – then I'm not
interested." As I walked out of class that day, I remember thinking,
"Well, cross Christianity off my list." Of course, I had no idea for
another 6-8 years that what I was rejecting was not Jesus himself, or
Biblical Christianity, or historic Christianity – I was rejecting a
watered-down, liberal, pretend version of Christianity. I was
rejecting the scholarly, academic equivalent of the same phony junior
high school experience I had, in which people find some sort of
"spiritual" significance in things that probably weren't really true
in the first place.

So for this naive college sophomore, I thought that I had examined the
Bible and found it wanting. I had reached a crossroads, and with
increased intellectual confidence and a bit of disappointment, I
turned away from the Bible and started down this new road of having to
figure everything out myself, apart from God – this God who apparently
didn't exist, or was not capable of or not interested in communicating
with me. It was years before I was able to see how steep this downward
path was about to go.


Chapter 3: The Descent Brightens
During my first several years of college, I had begun dabbling in
casual drug use and in eastern religions and atheistic philosophies.
After all, there was no reason not to do drugs – there was no God, so
why not? At the time, I didn't know I was personally living out the
philosopher's adage that if God doesn't exist, then everything is
permissible. I had read about expanding the mind with hallucinogenic
drugs like LSD and even "casual" drugs like marijuana. In those heady,
confident days of the counterculture, many drug users innocently (and
naively) saw their drug use not so much as the mere seeking of
pleasure or fun or escape but as a significant part of a serious
philosophical search for truth. I had friends who had taken LSD and,
as the gurus and shamans had also reported, some of them had found LSD
to be a religious experience. Some of my friends even claimed that
they "had seen God" while tripping on LSD.

So over the time from about 1970 to 1974, I gradually had become a
long-haired, dope-smoking, acid-dropping, draft-dodging, radical
leftist hippie – and for much of that period, I was also a happy
pagan. Convinced that God didn't exist, that the Bible was simply
mistaken on basic issues, that Jesus couldn't possibly be who he
claimed to be, I happily entertained other religious views such as
reincarnation, Buddhism, cosmic humanism, and atheism. In other words,
I was New Age before the term New Age was even being used.

Along with this immersion into the drug culture, I was exposed to intelligent-sounding defenses of eastern religions and atheism. The two factors of the drug culture and these new religious ideas combined to take me further and further away from Christianity and any belief in God. Even at the time, while I was excited about the limitless possibilities in front of me (since God didn't exist), there was also some minor disappointment. Way in the back of my mind, I still thought Jesus was who he said he was – the son of the Creator God who had became a man, had taken on human flesh, had risen bodily from the dead and thereby conquered death, and was coming back again one day. But since there didn't seem to be any credible intellectual reasons to believe this, I simply began to let those ideas of Jesus and God slip to the same corner of my mind where I held warm memories of Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and all the magic of early childhood. What I had to do now was move down the path of life and embrace adulthood. This was the path to enlightenment. Apparently.


Chapter 4: The Brightening Demands Reflection
In the background of all this, I intellectually wrestled – very
quietly and almost entirely on my own – with the apparently correct
philosophical conclusion that in the grand scheme of things, I myself
had no particular value as an individual. Even though I may have been
a unique, one-of-a-kind collection of molecules, that uniqueness did
not necessarily carry with it any intrinsic value. Of course, there
was value that I myself might assign to something or someone, or that
someone else might assign to me. But I kept bumping up against an
amoral barrier: logically, if God didn't exist and particles-to-people
evolution was true, then there was nothing in this physical universe
that made me (or anyone) have any intrinsic, transcendent, inherent,
unchanging, eternal, objective value. According to what I thought was
true, since there was no Creator, then particles-to-people evolution was a
blind process based on chance and necessity, completely amoral and
lacking any kind of universal morality or purpose. Joni Mitchell
captured this implication in her song Woodstock:

We are stardust (billion year old carbon)
We are golden (caught in the devil's bargain)
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

Particles-to-people evolution was true – we were just collections of
stardust atoms, caught in this world of confusion. It wasn't that we
were rejecting God. It was that God didn't exist. How can you reject
something that doesn't exist? So it was up to us to save ourselves.
There was nothing really wrong with us except ignorance. We weren't
sinful – we were golden. It was up to us to get ourselves back to the
garden of peaceful, harmonious existence. Nobody else could do this
for us. The universe was devoid of deity. The house not only had no
builder; it also had only miniscule inhabitants like us puny humans
and maybe some other races of aliens somewhere else. We were alone in
a cosmos that belonged to no Creator, no God. In other words, "there
was no one home in the universe."

So, I concluded, I was merely the product of a chance collection of
atoms and molecules that would one day stop functioning and merge like
a water droplet back into oneness with the ocean of the universe. This
particular product of chance evolution called "Bob Hazen" was no
different and no more valuable than any other product of this mindless
process of matter-plus-energy-plus-time-plus-chance. So I accepted the
starting point that matter, energy, time, and chance are the only
factors – the only factors – in the equation of existence and life.
From that premise, I realized that concepts like "value" and
"morality" may be helpful conventions and nice ideas – but they were
not an intrinsic part of ultimate reality. I concluded that we
apparently live in an ultimately amoral universe – a cosmos that is
utterly indifferent to our quaint notions of right and wrong. Even
though we might choose to live by certain "moral" principles, they too
were merely products of chemical reactions inside our minds and didn't
hold any transcendent significance.

In effect, I had started to agree with poet Sara Teasdale's view of
humans in her poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" about the aftermath of
nuclear war:

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

As beautiful as nature and the cosmos was, with flowers and mountains
and stars and sunsets, I concluded that apparently humanity in general
and I myself in particular had no lasting, special value in the grand
scheme of cosmic existence. Eastern religions promoted the apparent
factuality of particles-to-people evolution as the basis for the unity
of all of existence – that I was one with the stars and the clouds and
the birds and the animals and the rest of humanity. Initially, this
perspective was positive – I belonged to the universe. I was a part of
all of life itself. There was a certain sense of satisfaction from the
unity of that outlook.


Chapter 5: The Cracks Start Appearing
But after this initial positive blush, what began seeping into my
consciousness was the logically correct conclusion: if I was one with
everything else – in a universe that existed apparently only because
of blind, amoral particles-to-people evolution – then I also had no
more value than a tree, or a fish, or a clump of grass, or a mound of
dirt. In fact, value itself was an illusion – and so was that sense of
satisfaction at being "a child of the universe, no less than the trees
and the stars." Both value and satisfaction were merely and only a
human convention, resulting from some sort of collective social
agreement based on chemical reactions going on inside our heads. The
only difference between me and a clump of grass or an animal was that
I as a human was more complex than all those other things. But I
myself had no more intrinsic, eternal, transcendent value than a pile
of dung or a dead sparrow or an ocean wave. This conclusion was
inescapable, for the simple fact was that there apparently were no
intrinsic, eternal, transcendent values at all.

This apparently factual conclusion was summarized in a brief but
profound poem, written by the poet Paul Goodman, which I encountered
in 1971 while I was on my obligatory trip to California, the Mecca of
the counterculture. I happened upon this poem while spending an
afternoon killing some time in a local library of a small town south
of the San Francisco metropolitan area. Of all the libraries I could
have visited, of all the books I could have opened, of all the poems I
could have come across, this is the one that I found on a shelf in the
library of a sleepy California town. It immediately grabbed my
attention, and I memorized it with little effort. The poem
encapsulated the entirety of my philosophy at this time – a philosophy
that I was convinced was objective truth:

The crashing waters
of the same falls,
the falling leaves
of the same forest,
the leaping voyage,
home at last,
the red salmon
spawn
and faint
and fade.

This poem summarized what I had come to believe was the whole process
of existence. Like salmon, we are driven for inexplicable reasons to
achieve certain goals that appear to be transcendent and lasting. But
in the end, we merely and only spawn and faint and fade. We die like the
salmon, perpetuating the endless cycle of life, birth, and death, with the
entire process of life itself utterly devoid of any objective, lasting,
transcendent, ultimate value. We leap and drive and fight, only to spawn
and faint and fade – nothing more.

For several years I had been able to live happily with this
philosophical notion. But even while living happily with this
philosophy, this overarching idea of ultimate meaningless was a
nagging and disappointing backdrop to all of my own experiences. It
clouded my enjoyment of the good and beautiful things in life. The
exquisite beauty of romantic love, the beauty of a sunset or painting,
the delicious taste of certain foods, the sweet smiles of children,
the personal warmth of close friends, the kindness of a stranger, the
love of family – in the grand scheme of what I thought was truth, all
of these things ultimately had no lasting value. Every one of them was
ultimately meaningless. Each of them would inevitably spawn and faint
and fade like the salmon.

The anguish of this philosophical position was that while the good
things in life were so very, very beautiful, they also were apparently
just ultimately purposeless, lacking any lasting value. Every thing of
beauty, every act of goodness had a permanent tinge of sadness and
even tragedy. I had this deep awareness of both the inevitable demise
and the ultimate insignificance of every positive virtue of life. I
remember listening to the wonderful strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D
Major, surely the most beautiful piece of music ever written. As I
would listen to Pachelbel's Canon, I was deeply moved by how achingly
beautiful this music was. But as I listened and enjoyed, I was also
aware of how my philosophy interpreted this entire experience.
Enjoying this beautiful music was merely the physical excitation of
air molecules vibrating in my eardrums, creating certain chemical
reactions inside my head, which my mind interpreted as "beauty" and
"pleasure." But the overarching view of the apparent truth of
particles-to-people evolution meant that there was no Creator God.
This universal acid of the unguided process of chance interactions of
matter and energy over eons and eons of time had corroded and gutted
the hope that there was anything of lasting positive value in me, in
life itself, or in anything.

So for how marvelous this piece of music was – it meant nothing. It
had no lasting significance. It was just one more product of mindless
evolution that merely appeared to have meaning. That the composer
Pachelbel could create such apparent beauty also meant nothing.
Moreover, even my sheer enjoyment of this music meant nothing. And
finally, the fact that all of this meant nothing – was something that
itself meant nothing. So in listening to the sweeping, moving grandeur
of Canon in D Major, I would weep for the sadness of how all this
beauty meant nothing – and weep again, realizing that even my weeping
meant nothing.


Chapter 6: The End Point Seen from a Distance
So I had become convinced of this truth of ultimate meaninglessness.
In facing what I believed was true, I thought I was being brave and
courageous – some sort of cosmic underdog, a noble fighter reaching
for meaning in a cold, indifferent, and machine-like universe that had
no intrinsic or transcendent meaning at all. Is it any wonder that so
many thinkers of my generation described themselves as alienated? We
were alienated in the most fundamental sense from the universe itself,
for we acted and lived as if meaning and purpose and truth and love
were real – when in reality, according to what we thought was true,
the evolutionary universe was utterly indifferent to these pretensions
of emotions, purpose, and meaning. A deeper alienation is hardly
possible. The phrase "rage against the machine" went far deeper than a
response merely to certain impersonalizing effects of technology,
culture, and society. This rage was a rage against reality itself, for
while so many people wanted to live lives of purpose and meaning and
value, the facts of science told us that the universe was coldly
uncaring about such lofty aspirations. In this cosmic sense – as a
popular book title from that era summarized – each one of us indeed
was a "stranger in a strange land."

Somehow I managed to live with this schizophrenic philosophy for quite
some time. The schizophrenia was not just an aspect of culture or a
sign of the times. It was a fundamental contradiction. And this is
what Ibsen's "lie" was: we live as if life had meaning, when life had
no meaning at all; we live as if non-material things like love and
hope and eternity are real, when they really are just passing
illusions of chemical reactions going on inside our heads. I myself
found love – in novels, in friendships, in romance. Yet always lurking
in the background shadows was the never-ending whisper that all these
noble aspirations were just ultimately false pretensions.

Then in June 1974, I graduated from Macalester College. I was more or
less a happy pagan – but a happy pagan who was starting to experience
personally the logical, inevitable outcome of the philosophy I had
embraced. Here I was bravely facing the ultimate truths of life,
carrying on stoically in enjoying the good things of life, in spite of
the overarching blanket of philosophical meaninglessness.

It was at this time that my life began to fall apart.



Chapter 7: Crashing and Burning on This Distant Shore
In June of 1974, I was now done with college, which was difficult,
since I didn't have any idea of what to do with myself or my life
outside the campus. Life as a whole seemed pointless, even though I
still thoroughly enjoyed things along the way. My last semester of
college had been spent in Europe, vagabonding through the continent
with friends, studying in London, England, and in Florence, Italy. My
return to American life in Minnesota was a culture shock, plus I
didn't have a place to stay, plus I didn't have a job, plus I didn't
know where I was going with my life. But at least I had my girlfriend,
plus I had a best friend with whom I had been through thick and thin
since 1970. Also, in September, I joined a small weekly men's secular
support group and I was becoming acquainted with a handful of
interesting guys. Even though existence seemed meaningless, I had the
idea that perhaps with some help from these three different sources –
my girlfriend, my best friend, and my men's group – I might be able to
figure out about what to do with my own life.

Then in late October 1974, my two-year-long relationship with my
girlfriend deteriorated to a final traumatic separation. At the time,
I thought I was going to spend my life with this woman, so this
breakup was extremely and heartbreakingly painful. I was devastated
and could barely cope with the pain, rejection, and failure that I
felt.

In my grief, I naturally turned to my best friend. We had forged a
deep friendship over the previous four years. Moreover, he and I had
some experience with what I was going through: a year earlier, his
wife had left him. He was deeply hurt by this, understandably so.
During those ensuing months that previous fall, I went out of my way
to be there for my friend – helping care for his toddler daughter,
sharing meals together, talking and listening long into the nights –
just being there, being available, being a friend, as he processed the
painful demise of his own marriage.

So the devastating emotional pain from the ashes and ruins of my love
life was tempered every so slightly by knowing that I had an intensely
deep friendship I could turn to. My friend would surely be there for
me, just like I was there for him a year earlier. And I could also
turn to the guys in my men's group, too.

But two very unexpected developments were about to unfold. At the very
next meeting of our men's group, the leader said, in a uniquely worded
manner, "I feel a need to put closure on this group." I remember
realizing immediately that this was just a fancy way to say, "I don't
want to do this anymore." Much to my surprise, all the rest of the
guys around the room nodded in agreement. What I thought was going to
be a source of support for me vanished in an evening. The group
dissolved before my eyes. That was our last meeting, and I hardly saw
any of them again in any meaningful way.

Then things with my best friend went sour. Our friendship fell apart
in the next few weeks. As I turned to my buddy after the painful
crash-and-burn of my love life, I was expecting to find empathy,
encouragement, understanding, acceptance – the kinds of support one
expects of a close friend. Instead, I was blindsided by what I kept
finding: criticism, impatience, harshness, and emotional distance.
Despite my having been there for him when his wife left him a year
earlier, he simply wasn't there for me, and I never understood exactly
why. I'm sure that I myself was not the easiest person to be around
during this time – hurt, bewildered, and lost, and surely needy and
self-absorbed as well.

But whatever the dynamics were at that time, I kept coming back to the
bottom line: when his marriage was falling apart, I was there for him,
and even he had acknowledged that. When my life was falling apart, he
mostly criticized me. Several mutual acquaintances even asked me,
"You were there for him – why isn't he there for you?" It was a
baffling and unexpected twist - and one more deep wound at what felt
like the very core of my being. It was also the first occasion in
which I realized that there are times when a person's actions carry
far more weight than any subsequent words. After a while, I came to
realize that I simply couldn't trust him any more. Something had died.
In the ensuing months and over the following several years, we'd see
each other from time to time, but our friendship was never the same.

In the space of a few weeks, I had lost the two people in the world
that I loved most. The transition from happy pagan to miserable pagan
had begun.


Chapter 8: Alone in the Universe
So as the year of 1974 came to a close, I felt completely abandoned
and personally rejected from the loss of my two deepest relationships.
The resulting emotional turmoil combined itself with the philosophical
alienation and loneliness of cosmic existential meaninglessness to
leave me at a personal and practical dead end of despair. Feeling so
rejected twice over was a trauma of overwhelming devastation, and I
felt like a total failure in my own life. I saw the ugliness of my own
selfishness, self-centeredness, and thoughtlessness, and I detested my
jealousies, resentments, and insecurities – each of which had
contributed to the failure of my love life.

What was worse, I just couldn't seem to do anything about all my
character flaws. Repeatedly, I would resolve to stop being so insecure
and resentful. Then without any apparent conscious decision on my
part, my insecurities and resentments would leap out. So I'd try even
harder to not be insecure; I'd resolve not to be resentful. Usually
far sooner than later, my insecurities and resentments would pop up
again – and again and again. I was both frustrated and baffled. Why
couldn't I change myself?

Then my thoughts took a further downward turn. Okay, so I couldn't
find within me the capability of changing myself in any substantial
way. Okay, so my own two best friends had rejected me and given up on
me. Okay, so if they had gotten that close to me and then turned away,
who was I to try to fix myself on my own, all by myself? Who was I to
even say they were wrong? I hated myself for all the ugly things I saw
inside me, and I felt trapped within my own being, unable to extricate
myself from the pit of my own personal shortcomings. There were weeks
and months of devastating pain, gut-wrenching heartache, much
loneliness, many tears, increasingly suffocating misery, and greater
and greater despair. Many mornings I awoke from sleep already in
tears, bleeding profusely from the wounds of the personal pain I was
going through.

Convinced that life had no meaning – and yet not liking that apparent
truth – I was at a very black period of my life. I remember doing
everything alone during that time – going to work alone, coming home
alone, living alone, shopping alone, doing laundry alone, going to
movies alone, spending weekends alone. I had a few other friends, but
there was nobody I could bring myself to talk with and pour out my
heart to about the deep and traumatic personal heartache I was having.
Several friends like Dan and Phil would have been more than willing to
hear me out. They knew the broad outline of what I was going through
with the loss of my girlfriend. But it took me years to realize that I
was so fearful then of any more rejection that I simply couldn't trust
myself to tell anyone about the emotional turmoil and despair I was
experiencing. So I never poured my heart out to Dan, or Phil, or
anybody then. My heart was broken, and the two people I loved most in
the world had left me. How could I trust any other human being with
what I was feeling?

In addition to not being able to talk with anyone about the personal
dead end I found myself in, it never occurred to me to discuss the
philosophical dead end I was at. I was convinced that what I believed
was simply true – as true as water being wet or gravity working. How
could one complain about the truth of reality? Existential
meaninglessness was a fact, I had concluded. People that I knew and
saw who were living as if life had purpose and meaning – they were
simply mistaken. Although they were clearly happier than I was, I was
convinced that I could not turn my back on this truth I had discovered
– the apparent truth that life was meaningless. This dark, black place
I was at was something I would simply have to deal with, in some way,
even though ultimately this darkness all around me also had no
ultimate meaning either. It just was. I had to cope.

In some ways, I did muddle through with some coping mechanisms. Dan
and Phil and some other new acquaintances joined me at my apartment to
watch the Vikings lose the Super Bowl, and the group of us spent several
weekends cross country skiing at Dan's cabin north of the Twin
Cities. Even these warm times were difficult; every moment that even
approached happiness ran smack into how heartbroken and devastated I
was. It felt impossible to get beyond my own pain. On top of this,
these warm times for me still always stood in stark contrast to two
dynamics pressing on me, one conscious and the other barely so. On a
conscious level, I couldn't bring myself to talk through the
heartbreak I was going through over the breakup of my love life and
the loss of my best friend. On a deeper and less aware level, I wasn't
able to even articulate the profound philosophical hopelessness that I
was experiencing.


Chapter 9: The Darkness Closes In
After weeks and weeks of this personal and philosophical anguish and
despair, I began to reason logically that if life were meaningless,
and if all that I was experiencing was unhappiness and pain, then why
go on? Why not just die and get it over with? Why not just kill myself
and end this meaningless misery – and this miserable meaninglessness?
So suicide started to perch in the back of my mind as an option for
dealing with the misery I found myself in.

Then early in the winter of 1974-75, I had a phone conversation with
my former best friend. This was only about a handful or two of weeks
after my girlfriend and I had separated, and my broken heart was still
bleeding profusely. In spite of the dramatic deterioration of the
friendship with my buddy, I was desperate enough to still try to find
some sort of comfort, or assurance, or counsel with him. But that
evening was a dark night. My friend again spoke bluntly over the phone
of how self-centered he thought I was. He said that it was hard for
him to be around me, even saying at one point something more or less
to the effect, "I think I understand why she left you."

Hanging up the phone, I was stunned – and devastated all over again.
For some reason, I had hoped to salvage something from the remnants of
this long and deep friendship, but I couldn't find any solace or
support from my buddy at all. My head was hanging low as I stood in my
kitchen, staring blankly at the floor, numbly processing everything. I
remember thinking, "What's the use? Why go on? Why bother?" That
night, I decided to stay home from work the next day and kill myself.
So the following morning, I began my suicide attempt, complete with
suicide note.

But even in that dark, desperate hour, one of the things that kept me
from killing myself was the thought of how it would impact my younger
sister Polly. She and I had become very close during college. She was
in Germany at that time for a year of study. If I killed myself then,
I realized that she would probably have to come back for the funeral.
Even in the darkening midst of the self-absorption of my own anguish,
I remember thinking that my killing myself would mess up her
Christmas. She'd have to come home for the funeral, which would
complicate her studies in Europe. So in the end, I pulled back from
the precipice of death, in part because of my sister and in part
because I realized I didn't feel strongly enough about ending my own
life anyway. Some thirty years later, I asked Polly if my killing
myself in December 1974 would have "messed up her Christmas." She
replied, "Messed up my Christmas? – Bob, it would have messed up my
life. I'd still be crying about it today." For anyone who is thinking
about committing suicide: my own deep but temporary misery of 1974-75
had made me so shortsighted that I could only see that killing myself
would mess up my sister's Christmas. I was incapable of thinking ahead
more than just a few short weeks. I couldn't see ahead in months and
years and decades to the devastation that my own suicide would have
had on those admittedly few people in my life who still loved me.
Misery and grief had blinded me into such an emotional nearsightedness
that I was incapable of seeing beyond my own condition.

So after pulling back from suicide, I realized that I simply had to do
something - something just had to happen to change me. My life could
not go on like this. If something didn't change soon, I'd be dead
before long, as I realized I wouldn't always be able to hold off the
whispering call of suicide.


Chapter 10: Renewed Searching to Another Dead End
So a few days or weeks later, I wrote out on a scrap of paper a list
of everything I could think of that could change me. The first three
options were suicide, therapy, and Transcendental Meditation. Much to
my own surprise, I realized that in honesty and fairness, I also had
to consider a fourth option. I found myself adding "Jesus and the Holy
Spirit" to the list.

Then I started evaluating each option on my list, complete with the
pluses and minuses of each option, in two-column form on this scrap of
paper. Suicide still appealed to me, but in sheer and sober honesty in
the aftermath of my own suicide attempt, I sat back and thought
through this option more carefully. On the plus side, one advantage of
suicide seemed to be the both the immediacy and the finality of it all
– just get all this anguish over with now and be released permanently
from this heartache and despair. It wasn't so much that I wanted to
die, but if this misery, loneliness, and pain were almost all that my
life had come to, then why go on? On the down side, however, I
reasoned that if reincarnation were true, then suicide didn't solve
anything at all – it merely threw me and my condition into the next
life as a slug or a worm or another miserable human wretch. But there
was another down side to suicide. While I still didn't think the Bible
was true, at the same time, I realized that I couldn't be absolutely
sure of that. Moreover, if I was wrong and the Bible was true, then
suicide would make things far worse, because I would go to hell. So in
an act of sheer, logical will, with a mixture of relief and a bit of
disappointment, I crossed option number one of suicide off the list.

The next option of therapy was not realistic, because the only therapy
I thought might help would have cost me about a year's salary at that
time. For a recent college graduate in the days before easy credit
cards, this particular therapy was an option that I simply couldn't
afford. So I crossed option number two of therapy off the list.

The third possibility was Transcendental Meditation (TM). TM is an
eastern religious program in which the TM trainer imparts a short,
one- or two-syllable word called a mantra. This mantra was supposedly
a meaningless sound, uniquely designed for each initiate, and focusing
upon this mantra was supposed to bring you peace as you meditated upon
and silently repeated this meaningless special word over and over
again. But as I thought about TM and their fee of about two days'
wages, I realized I was suspicious of anyone who charged money for
what they claimed was truth. So I crossed option number three of TM
off my list. Several years later, my suspicions of TM were confirmed.
I read some semi-scholarly critiques of TM and learned that every
"meaningless" mantra that TM gave their initiates was actually the
name of a Hindu god. So meditating upon this mantra was in fact
repetitively calling upon a spirit being. TM was not what it had
claimed to be.

So the only option remaining on my list was this Jesus and the Holy
Spirit. Despite my previous rejection of God and the Bible, deep down
I actually had always thought that Jesus was who he claimed to be –
but I had never seen or heard any solid, credible, objectively
verifiable reasons for believing that. No Christian in my entire life
had ever said anything about there being some objectivity to the Bible
and Christian faith. Based on the courses and professors I had taken,
the books, magazines, and articles I had read, and the friends,
movies, and subculture with which I had lived, all that I had ever
heard, read, and seen led me to the conclusion that the Bible was full
of errors and couldn't be trusted, that particles-to-people evolution
had proven that God was at best unnecessary and at worst non-existent,
and that Christianity's claim of Jesus being the only way to "God" was
bigoted and irrational. So these intellectual reasons for rejecting
God combined with my own sinfulness to lead me confidently away from
Christ.

But by this time of my life, late January of 1975, I was at the end of
my rope. Even if I couldn't intellectually believe the Bible and the
claims of Christ, I essentially said to myself, "What have I got to
lose by trying Jesus now? Even if Christians are wrong, at least
they're happy – and perhaps I can find some happiness and some relief
from all this pain. And just maybe I'll find that Christianity is
true."

Several years earlier, in 1972, I had read the book The Cross and the
Switchblade, about a young minister's work with gangs of New York City
in the 1950's, in which gang members, addicts, thieves, and killers
had had life-altering encounters with Jesus Christ that had
dramatically and powerfully changed them for the better – sometimes
overnight. One passage in the book that stood out was the minister's
practice of "laying a fleece before the Lord" in order to obtain God's
guidance. This phrase was based on the Bible passage in the book of
Judges in which Gideon lays the fleece of a sheep's skin on the grass
overnight and twice asks God to guide him by whether the morning dew
appears on the fleece or on the grass. The first morning, there was
dew on the fleece but none on the grass. The second morning was the
opposite – there was dew on the grass but none on the fleece. I have
since learned in studying the topic of Biblical guidance in general
and the Gideon passage in particular that "laying a fleece" is not a
reliable form of guidance. But in the dark desperation of that bleak
winter, I was a severely wounded and bleeding combatant in a foxhole,
and God must have taken that into account.

So I opened up the yellow pages of the phone book to the section on
"Churches." Then I closed my eyes, put my finger down on the page, and
called the phone number of the church my finger landed on. A minister
answered the phone, and I asked him if he knew anything about this
"Jesus and the Holy Spirit stuff" like in the book The Cross and the
Switchblade. To my surprise, he said he didn't. But to his credit, he
had the integrity to refer me to someone he thought would know – a
minister at another church named Dick Blank. So I called Dick and we
talked for a few minutes on the phone. He invited me to a prayer
meeting at his church on Thursday night and arranged to have someone
pick me up.

In going to the prayer meeting, I expected since these were Christians
and since I was obviously someone who wasn't, that I would meet some
friendly interest and genuine warmth on the part of these people.
After all, Christians are supposed to be kind to strangers, right? I
was mistaken. Nobody showed any interest in me. Nobody asked me
anything beyond perhaps my name. Nobody made any effort to get to know
me. Despite this, I went back the next week, but it was the same
collective disinterest, indifference, and distance. Perhaps I was so
fierce-looking with my long hair and beard that I unwittingly
intimidated people from approaching me. Maybe I was so needy that I
scared people off.

But what I came away with from those prayer meetings was, "Those
Christians don't care at all about me." When I got home from that
second prayer meeting, I remember thinking, "Well, if that's
Christianity, I'm not interested" – and so for the second time in my
life, I crossed Christianity off my list.

Now I really wasn't sure what I was going to do. There were no more
options on my list. Apparently, I'd come to another dead end in my
life.


Chapter 11: An Unexpected Turn
But a few days later Dick called me back again. My first thought was,
"Stop bugging me, preacher." But he went on about wanting to see me
again and wanting to talk, and somehow out of nowhere, I had the
completely unexpected thought, "Why not? What have I got to lose?" So
we agreed to meet at my apartment near the Governor's Mansion in St.
Paul.

By the time we met on that snowy Tuesday night in February 1975, I had
decided to be completely honest with this minister, and I told him all
the things I wasn't very sure about: whether Jesus really was God, how
Christ could be the only way to God, if the Bible really was true,
whether Satan was real, what was wrong with other religions, and so
forth. Candidly, I told him that I wasn't at all interested in being a
Christian – I just knew that I was miserable and that I had to change,
and that if I didn't change soon, I was going to be dead before long.
He replied, "That's okay – if you're sincere about inviting Jesus into
your life, then he'll honor that and come into your life, and he'll
also show you the answers to all the questions you have."

Once again, I had an unexpected thought: "Why not? What have I got to
lose?" Much to his surprise – and to my own surprise as well – I
turned to him and said, "Okay, right here, right now, I invite Jesus
Christ into my life." Then I had another unexpected thought that came
out of nowhere: I added immediately, as my own laying of a fleece,
"And if this is real, then I want my friends from Iowa to call me…
before the weekend." It was a Tuesday night, and I figured that I was
being pretty generous to "God" by giving him three days to answer this
prayer.

My friends from Iowa were my hometown minister and his wife, John and
Susie Shew, from Grand Forks, North Dakota, who had moved to Iowa when
I went away to college. They had become a second family to me,
welcoming me with warmth and open arms as I hitchhiked down to their
Cedar Rapids home 3-4 times a year for the previous five years. During
all my college years of philosophical wanderings, they were a
steadying influence in loving, accepting, and affirming me. I remember
realizing that John and Susie lived as Christians what they believed
as Christians, and their consistency and love was the one reason over
these years that I was always reluctant to completely reject
Christianity and the Bible. But I knew the fleece I was about to lay
down – for them to call me by telephone – was a safe fleece, because
in all those previous five years of my traveling to Iowa to visit
them, John and Susie had not even once ever telephoned me. They were
busy running their church and raising four kids. On top of that, the
minister who was with me that snowy night in February 1975 in St. Paul
knew little about my personal background, he didn't know the names of
my friends in Iowa, and he didn't know where in Iowa they were.

What I meant by saying "...if this is real..." was that I wanted to be
sure that "God" was an independent, self-existent entity – not merely
a type of "higher self" or some sort of psychological, auto-suggestive
trick I was playing in my own mind. Recalling the religion class in
college, I didn't want whatever happened to be merely and only my own
"just believing it" in my heart – I wanted objective, independent
truth that was distinct and separate from me and my situation. I
reasoned that if Jesus really was the Creator of the universe and the
overcomer of death – as I knew the Bible claimed – then he could also
arrange to have my friends call me. Years later, Dick told me that he
swallowed really hard when he heard me say that. It was Tuesday night,
and I figured giving God till the weekend was pretty big of me.

Well, Susie did call me. The next morning. At work. I was absolutely
blown away. My prayer had been answered – I was stunned, ecstatic, and
thrilled, and I disbelieved for joy. God existed!? Jesus was real!?
God answers prayer!? God cares about me?! As I stammered and babbled
incoherently through those first few moments of complete shock on the
phone with Susie, she realized that something strange was happening on
my end. So she asked me what was going on. She had no idea what had
occurred with me the previous night – she was merely calling because
she had been thinking of me. So I explained briefly about my decision
for Christ and about my fleece. She was equally amazed, as she was
completely unaware of anything on my end at all.

But my fleece had been in the plural: for my friends from Iowa to call
me. Later in the day, while I was out of the building for lunch, John
called me, again at work, without having spoken with Susie. While he
wasn't able to speak with me by phone that day, I realized later that
my prayer had been that my friends – plural! – from Iowa would call –
and God had answered the prayer – both of them had called, even though
I only spoke with one of them.

So I had this dramatic answered prayer, that February of 1975. But
what did it mean? It seemed like I was on to something – or that
Someone was on to me – but all I knew was that something dramatic had
happened. I had heard and read about people who had had dramatic
experiences in other religions, and I wasn't quite sure what this
dramatic answered prayer meant. So for the next year and a half, I had
a lot of basic questions about what I was getting into – normal
questions about the Bible (could it be trusted?); about Jesus (why did
Jesus have to be the only way to God?); about other religions (what
about other people who had also had dramatic conversion experiences in
a different religion?); about the apparent scientific truth of
particles-to-people evolution (didn't that contradict the Bible's flow
of history?); and so forth. So I would ask these questions, but I was
consistently told by the Christians whom I had met that winter that I
was asking too many questions and that I had to "just have faith."

Fortunately, I found this answer completely unsatisfying, as I
reasoned that if God objectively existed, if God was the creator of
everything in the universe from stars to humans to subatomic
particles, and if God had communicated to the human race in the record
of the Bible, then all of that should hold up to scrutiny. At that
time, I didn't know that there were Christian authors, writers, and
thinkers who addressed the questions I was asking. Unfortunately, it
took a while before I started to get serious about God and realize
that I needed to carefully check out this Christianity – to give
myself a chance to know God better and at least give God more of a
chance to change me and to do what he wanted with my life.



Chapter 12: Hearty Food for a Starving Man
In September 1976 – a year and a half after my conversion – I came
across a church that addressed the questions that were still at the
forefront of my thinking. Hearing my questions being intelligently
addressed was tremendously helpful and encouraging. I realized it was
okay to ask the questions I was asking. Furthermore, I also discovered
some of the great defenders of the faith – C.S. Lewis, John Stott,
Paul Little, Francis Schaeffer, Henry Morris, Brooks Alexander and the
Spiritual Counterfeits Project, Os Guinness, and many others. For that
previous year and a half, for lack of knowledge, I had had to wrestle
with my own questions all by myself. I was fearful that there weren't
solid, objective answers, and I was afraid that I myself – and each of
us – simply had to live within the realm of subjective personal
beliefs. But now explanations and truths that I found in these authors
were like food to a man dying of hunger. I inhaled these books.
Moreover, I was happily stunned by what I found. There was objective
evidence that the Bible really was simply true? – historically true,
philosophically true, scientifically true? I could simply believe it
and trust it? There were scholarly reasons to believe that Jesus
really was who he said he was? There were intelligent arguments that
God really exists whether I believe it or not? There was scientific
evidence that particles-to-people evolution theory is not as sound as
most people think it is? There are solid historical, scientific,
documentary, scholarly reasons for believing the Bible and creation
and the resurrection? So I was not a product of mindless interactions
of matter and energy over eons of time? – I was a person made in the
image of the infinite-personal Creator of the universe? This Creator
valued me so much that he came to earth to die on a cross – even for
me? So trees and rocks and reality itself were not, as eastern
religions said, merely things for which I had to see beyond and
transcend all dualities to discern what the tree or an emotion or a
person "really" was? Reality was the real creation of this real
Creator God who really existed? Reality was not just the vivid
dreamlike state that Buddhism claimed?

This was not just good news – this was great news – this was
stupendous news. I felt so very relieved – relieved of the burden of
figuring everything out – all of reality, all by myself. Things around
me were real, because they were made by this Creator God who
objectively existed whether I knew it or not. I myself had value
because I was made in the image of this Creator who was both infinite
and personal. Moreover, for wretched little me – who for so long had
felt so rejected and scorned and insignificant – something deeply
profound was starting to seep into my consciousness: while I may have
become unimportant to certain people in my life who had wounded me, I
was still of great value to God. God loved me, God valued me – even
me. Jesus Christ died on the cross for me because he valued me so
highly. I had value – objective, eternal, real value to the one thing
– the only thing – that was more real and more eternal than anything
else: this infinite-personal Creator God.

So I started attending a church where the minister really understood
how the Bible spoke to this generation of mine that was so influenced
by the counterculture of eastern religions, skepticism, atheism, and
drugs. He understood the saying, "The heart cannot rejoice in what the
mind cannot accept." The next 2-3 years were times of tremendous
grounding for me – getting grounded in the truth of the Bible. I began
to examine Scripture seriously and immerse myself in God's word –
memorizing it, meditating on it, reading it, studying it. Also, I read
everything I could find on science, comparative religions, philosophy,
culture, history, psychology – to clear my thinking to the point where
my mind could intellectually believe what my heart wanted so
desperately to accept: that there was a Creator who made both the
cosmos and me, that this Creator was a personal being rather than some
impersonal energy force; that the infinite had become finite – that
God had become a human being; that he had taken on human form and
lived on earth; that sin was more than just guilt feelings but was
real and important; that Jesus had died on a cross to pay the penalty
for my sins; that God called me by name and wanted to guide me daily;
and that the God-become-man Jesus was coming back again one day in
space-time history.


Chapter 13: My Life Starts Over
This was also a time of healing for me – making new friendships;
getting painful memories healed; forgiving those who had wronged me;
cleaning out my mind from the strains of irrational, illogical, and
deceptive thinking induced by drug use and eastern religions; finding
acceptance, wisdom, affirmation, conviction, meaning, and purpose in
Christ himself.

As my walk after Christ continued, in late fall of 1976, I heard a
speaker address three things that in retrospect really helped me get
healthier: forgiving those who had wronged me; asking forgiveness from
those I had wronged; and memorizing and meditating on Scripture.

Memorizing Scripture, the speaker said, was like taking vitamins.
These Bible passages were the very thoughts of God himself – the
life-giving thoughts of the Creator God. In memorizing Bible passages,
I realized that I was training my mind to think like God's mind –
internalizing God's perspective, God's wisdom, God's insights which
were written for humanity about life and purpose and relationships and
conflict and sin and redemption. Meditating on these passages was
simply focusing and redirecting my mind and my attention to dwell on
the meaning and application of these truths. Meditating on Scripture,
I soon realized, meant I was studying and focusing and mulling over
the Owner's Manual of life itself. I was thinking God's thoughts after
him.

Then there was the issue of forgiving others. The speaker recommended
making a list of every single person who had done me harm and every
single situation in which I had been hurt, criticized, rejected, made
fun of, or laughed at – and then one by one, telling God that I
forgave them. Although this was a daunting task for me – I knew my
list would be long – I also immediately sensed that this was the way
to go. So I began to write my list.

As I did so, I was surprised at not only how much resentment I had but
also the sheer number of individuals against whom I still held some
form of grudge, whether small or large. There were literally dozens
and scores of grudges, filling several pages in my notebook. While I
knew I had already forgiven my ex-girlfriend – that was the big one –
I still found grudges strewn throughout the course of my life – both
large and small, both major and understandable, as well as minor and
surprising: my dad who was so verbally abusive and critical to me; the
childhood friend when I was 5 who thoughtlessly broke my favorite toy;
the teacher who humiliated me in front of the whole music class one
day when my adolescent voice was changing and cracking; my older
brother's friends who made fun of me; the many cruel things that
peers, siblings, parents, teachers, and coaches had said or done that
had cut and hurt. Line after line in my notebook became filled with
this delineation of my own emotional record-keeping system.

So I began to forgive. One by one, I began to forgive them all, in the
privacy of my own room, in the quiet of my own heart, often on bended
knee, always talking to God about the process. "Lord, I don't deserve
your forgiveness for the wrongs I did to you, and in the same way,
this person who hurt me doesn't deserve forgiveness either. But if
your forgiving me was undeserved, then my forgiving this person is
also undeserved. They don't deserve forgiveness, that's true. But I
choose to forgive this person, to no longer hold it against this
person." Time after time, I prayed words like this, going through my
list one name at a time, one incident at a time, crossing them off one
at a time. It took a while.

Like going in to get a toothache fixed, this was something that was
painful beforehand, and the fixing had its own new pain – but, wow,
did it feel better afterwards. Some things were easy to forgive, while
a few very painful things were much more difficult. But as I did that
fearless and searching inventory, I found release, and peace, and
freedom. Like after having a toothache fixed, I was shocked to find
that so much of the pain was simply gone – some sooner, some later as
time went on. So many resentments, so much bitterness, so many grudges
were simply and marvelously gone. They were gone because I made a
decision to forgive – a decision of my will to no longer hold a
grudge. As a Christian teacher had written somewhere, I came to grips
with the reality of forgiving someone else: that I could say to God in
the privacy of my own thoughts, "God, even though this person clearly
did harm to me, I forgive him – and to the extent that if I stood next
to you in your judgment seat and you were to turn to me and ask if
this offense should be held against this person, I would say, 'No –
while there may be things outside of my control that others might
hold, I don't hold this offense against this person anymore.'"

For many situations, the release and freedom I felt was immediate. For
other situations, and for certain people, it took a while for my
emotions – how I felt in my heart – to come into alignment with what I
had decided in my will. But this freedom was freeing and so very, very
relieving. I began to get free from the weighty burden of
unforgiveness in my own heart. I found myself less focused on the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that had burned and scarred me
throughout my life. In turn, this meant that I was beginning to focus
more on the present and the future. It also meant that I had started
to turn my focus away from the scars and wounds of my life and onto
the blessings I had. I began to appreciate more deeply what I did have
- a great mom, a loving sister, a brother with whom I had so many
things in common, some good friends, good health, a good mind, and the
countless daily blessings of beauty and simple pleasures.

The third major thing I realized I needed to address was to ask
forgiveness of those whom I had wronged. This list was also a long
one. In making this list, I was also surprised at exactly how long it
was. So I set myself the work of making amends – to my mom, my sister,
and my brother for things I had said and done; to old friends and
roommates; and even to a previous girlfriend from my freshman year of
college. This went well, and like forgiving others, it was also so
cleansing and relieving to admit my wrongdoings to those I had wronged
and ask their forgiveness.


Chapter 14: The Hardest Thing Becomes the Most Helpful Thing
But from the start of this third process, I instantly knew the most
difficult thing of all – and probably the most important as well – was
to go back to my old flame and ask her forgiveness for the wrongs I
had committed in our relationship. When God first convinced me deep in
my heart that I needed to do this, I objected. I had suffered the far
greater harm, I protested. In addition, I didn't want the humiliation
that would come with admitting to her my own wrongdoings. In fact, I
had even forgiven my old flame already. So I even tried to bargain
with God – "Lord, I've forgiven her already – isn't that enough?"

But I knew my forgiving her wasn't the same thing as my asking her for
forgiveness, and so I continued to fight God on this issue. I simply
dug in my heels and refused to do anything about it. For the next year
and a half, I resisted and resisted, even saying once to God in all
sincerity, "Lord, I will do anything other than this. I would even
rather spend ten years in a Siberian gulag instead of asking her for
forgiveness." But God was patient with me, and during that year and a
half, other things were going on, too. I was finding rewarding
friendships with other Christians. I had started memorizing and
meditating on passages from the Bible. God's Word – the Bible – was
starting to transform me – my mind, my thinking, my heart, my
attitude. I was learning to own up immediately to mistakes I made and
to things I did wrong. I was learning how to ask forgiveness and keep
short lists. I saw fellow believers come to me to ask me for
forgiveness for unkind remarks or thoughtless actions on their part.

Then one morning, in January 1978, it just hit me that I was ready to
do this – to see my old flame and ask her forgiveness for things that
I had done wrong. So I made out my list of all the wrongs I had
committed in our relationship. Of course, I can't remember all of them
now, nor would I want to. But I wrote down everything I could think of
– great and small, embarrassing and understandable, known to her or
others and unknown to anyone but me – because I wanted to come
completely clean, and I for sure didn't want to go back a second time
for something I left off my list. I wasn't expecting her to do the
same in return; I was doing this to take care of my own conscience –
nobody else's. From my study of the issue of forgiveness, I also knew
there was one thing for me not to bring up: that I had already
forgiven her. Unrequested, unsolicited forgiveness is often not well
received.

So I contacted her and made arrangements to meet at a local
restaurant. As I prepared myself for our meeting, I was still nervous.
Immediately before leaving for our meeting, I was on my knees in my
room in the dark of the early winter evening, praying for help and
strength to do what I knew I had to do. I remember telling Jesus,
"Lord, if you can get me through this, I know I will never be afraid
of anything again, for this is the one thing I fear most in my life."
As I prayed, suddenly a Bible verse that I had memorized came flooding
into my mind and into my entire being. It felt like the whole room
was suddenly filled with light and life and warmth – and a presence –
the presence of something far stronger than me. The words of Isaiah
41:10 came pouring into my mind: "Fear not, for I am with you. Be not
dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I
will uphold you, with my victorious right hand." These were not just
words in my memory – this was the presence and power of the
infinite-personal God, speaking to me vividly and powerfully through
the vehicle of this memorized Bible passage. But this wasn't just my
mind shouting something really loud – this was something from beyond.
I was ready now – ready now to do what was the most difficult and
fearful thing I had ever done in my life.

We met at the restaurant. I explained to her that God had convinced me
that I needed to make amends to people I had wronged by admitting my
wrongdoings and asking for forgiveness. Her first response was to say
that she didn't think she had the power to forgive. I had anticipated
this (I had really done a lot of study on forgiveness!), and so I
explained, "Look, I know can't turn back the clock and un-do the wrong
things I did and said back then. I also know there's nothing I can
ever do today to un-do those wrong things. What I'm saying is this: I
want to simply admit that the wrong things I did really were wrong,
then tell you I'm sorry, and then ask you not to hold those things
against me. That's what forgiveness is. Can you do that?" She said
yes, and so I got out my list and began.

A famous evangelist once said that our sins were committed one by one,
and they need to be confessed one by one whenever possible. So I
admitted to her each of my sins against her, one by one. Then I asked,
"Will you forgive me?" With some understandable leeriness (why was
this guy really doing this?), she nodded and said yes. I continued
through my list, mentioning not merely the obvious wrongdoings she
knew of but also other things she was not aware of. When I was done,
she asked me if I expected her to do the same thing in return. I had
anticipated this also, and I simply said, "I came here to take care of
my stuff." So our meeting was over, and as I made my way home that
night, I realized how free I felt – free of the weight of my guilty
conscience, free of not being able to look someone straight in the
eye, free from the burden of avoiding what I knew I ought to do, free
from fighting God. It was so refreshing to own up to my own
wrongdoings. Although there had been an initial few moments of
embarrassment as I began my confession, that had soon been replaced by
relief and freedom. The broken bone had been set. The abscessed tooth
had been pulled. The boil had been lanced. I had done what was
supposed to be done, and now it was over. The most difficult thing I
had ever done turned out to be the most helpful thing I had ever done.
Since that day, I haven't spoken with or heard from her at all. It was
so nice to get on with my life with no dangling complications or
lingering guilt pricking at my conscience.



Chapter 15: Existence Becomes Life
So I continued immersing myself in Scripture – memorizing helpful
verses, studying various books of the Bible, reading through
Scripture, and becoming familiar with Bible history. One passage that
stunned me was Isaiah 53 – the suffering servant passage. Written 700
years before Christ, the passage nonetheless describes in detail
various aspects of the life and death of Jesus, including verses that
were so personally meaningful to me. Isaiah 53:6 says, "All we like
sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and
the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." It was true – all of
us have gone astray – I myself went astray from God, turning to my own
way. Yet here in Isaiah, this document written some 2,700 years before
my own birth, was a description both of my own condition – "gone
astray" – and of God's remedy – his laying my own iniquity onto Jesus.
I was simply stunned and fascinated by this passage – both its
historical significance as well as its personal application to my own
situation. This was also the first lengthy passage of Scripture I
memorized, for I read it so many times, that I memorized it almost
without even realizing it.

As I began to understand the Bible, I began to realize something of
immense importance: that what I was finding to be true about God and
the Bible and Jesus Christ did not rest on this admittedly very
dramatic conversion experience that I had in 1975. Those February
morning phone calls from my friends in Iowa were not what convinced me
that the Bible is true, that Jesus is who he claimed to be, that God
does exist, that miracles do happen. Those February morning phone
calls were a shot across my bow, a tap on my shoulder, a flash of
light in the darkness, a sign post along a path in the wilderness. In
the fog of the overcast darkness of my life at that time, those phone
calls were the sun in all its brightness breaking through an opening –
no, making an opening – in the overcast cloud cover.

But after that dramatic flash of light, the clouds quickly closed up
again, and I was left in the dreary darkness once more – until I began
to not so much simply read the Bible as study the Bible. In studying
the Bible, I began to see its truth. In reading the great defenders of
the faith, I began to understand more – about comparative religions,
about science and the scientific evidence against particles-to-people
evolution, about the danger of drug use and eastern religions, about
why Jesus truly is the only way to the Father. In prayer and faith, in
confession and repentance, in study and discussion, I began to see the
wisdom and life-changing power of the Gospel. I began to see that the
Bible was objectively true, whether I believed it or not. My own
believing did not make the Bible true. My own dramatic conversion
experience did not make what I believed true. It was true before I
believed it, it will be true whether or not I believe it, and it was
true whether those February phone calls had come or not. The phone
calls were real and dramatic, yes – but they were simply
attention-getters. God got my attention with those phone calls, but my
attention was eventually directed to the wealth of material –
documents, critiques, authors, defenses, explanations, lines of
reasoning, and other forms of analysis and arguments – that convinced
me that the Bible was true. And if the Bible was true, then God was
real, and Jesus was who he claimed he was. What had happened to me in
February 1975 was not just a subjective religious experience – it was
the tip of the iceberg – the tip of infinity – of this objective,
universal truth of the infinite-personal Creator God.

The subsequent years have not always been easy. But they have been
much brighter and lighter than those months and years of dark despair.
I still stumble, I still sin – yet I now keep coming back to God based
on his invitation to me and to each person: "Come to me, all who labor
and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest," as Jesus said in
Matthew 11:28.

In retrospect, I can now see part of what was going on in 1974 for me.
Convinced then that a Creator God simply did not exist, I had
experientially arrived at certain conclusions: if God didn't exist,
then this implied that everything good about life meant nothing
whatsoever in any transcendent eternal sense, and that the individual
as well as the cosmos had no intrinsic value at all. I had in 1974
arrived experientially at the philosopher's conclusion: that the only
honest philosophical question was whether or not to commit suicide –
if God didn't exist. So looking back on the bleak darkness of the
years leading up to the fall of 1974 and winter of 1975, I could see
now that God took everything away from me – friends, love, and even
meaning itself – so that I would have nowhere to turn but, eventually,
to him. I have seen where a universe without a Creator leads – to
meaninglessness, despair, and death. But I also have the fortune of
being a man that Jesus Christ pulled back from the edge of the abyss –
and being now a man that Jesus Christ put back together: healing my
emotions, bringing forgiveness to my heart, clearing my mind with his
truth, and setting my feet upon his path – his path of life – of life
itself in all its fullness. So here I am, saved for a purpose. How
great God is.

But I urge anyone reading this to realize that you don't have to go
through the trauma that I experienced. There is a God – an infinite,
personal Creator who made the stars and the earth and each one of us –
and you. This infinite, personal Creator loves you and wants you to
know his love for you. You don't have to wander in the darkness like I
did. This infinite, personal Creator became a human being in
space-time history, and he died on a cross in order to pay the price
of bringing all of humanity – and you – back to him. The familiar
verse of John 3:16 – "For God so loved the world, he sent his one and
only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have
eternal life" – is far more than a nice idea or a soothing comfort. It
is a profound claim about the nature of ultimate reality.

Ultimate reality – the origin of the universe – the farthest thing
back in time – the uncaused Cause for which I searched so much of my
life – turned out to be far different than I had originally expected.
Ultimate reality is not just matter and energy, nor is it a
philosophical system or a set of propositions, nor is it a fog of
vagueness and uncertainty – that cloud of unknowing, as Zen calls it.
Ultimate reality is this living, infinite-personal good being who is
the Creator of all of reality, both physical and unseen, and who is
intimately involved with – and yet distinct from – the created order
that he sustains moment by moment. Ultimate reality is a Who, not a
what, and as it turned out, it wasn't so much that I had found
Ultimate Reality, but that Ultimate Reality had found me. This Who,
this Person, this Jesus had come after me. I once was lost, but now
I'd been found.

This good news of John 3:16 is based upon the bad news that we
individually and collectively have profound moral shortcomings, as
witnessed by wars, lies, pain, betrayal, petty attitudes, resentments,
and other moral imperfections both great and small. This bad news is
something we ratify every day of our lives in our own falling short of
what we know we ought to do and ought to be. But this bad news is
itself based upon a previous good news – that a living,
infinite-personal Creator-God exists – one who created the stars and
the atoms and you and me – one who knows each one of us and calls us
by name – one who has not left us on our own but has entered the stage
of human tragedy and pain – one who has come not in spite of you and
me but has come precisely because of his love for you and me.

If you are not reconciled to your Creator, you can be right now. By
recognizing that what the incarnated God, Jesus of Nazareth, did on
the cross to deal with our moral shortcomings is so far greater than
anything you or I could ever do – that we can choose the only
proportionate response available: to do nothing but simply accept what
God has done for us, for me, for you. That is, God was in Christ
reconciling the world to himself, not counting our shortcomings
against us. I beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
Jesus himself said, "Truly I say to you, he who hears my word and
believes him who sent me has eternal life; he does not come into
judgment but has passed from death to life."

Eternal life is offered to each one of us. Notice what Jesus said –
"...he who hears... and believes... has eternal life." Put your trust
in that one great act of sacrifice that Jesus did on the cross for us
– an act so great and so complete that all we have to do is hear and
believe – and accept. Accept this gift from from the infinite personal
God. Come to the truth. Come home to the truth.