On Finding God

A couple of people have asked me lately about how I came to "find God."  That's interesting,

because I feel like my coming to faith was actually a matter of God finding me, rather than me finding Him.

My faith journey began very early on. I grew up with parents who were Christians and they taught me about God from my childhood. I decided when I was less than two years old that I wanted God, and so one day I just asked Jesus to come into my heart! 

I was not much of a logical thinker then, of course!  At that time, the desire for God just seemed to tug at my heart and I responded, almost without thinking, in the same way that a child will instinctively run to their father's arms. 

But in my teens, when I began to think about the process of "finding God," I questioned whether I had really been able to make that choice without understanding more about the process at the time. My mother's diary had recorded the decision, and it was obvious from her description that it had meant something to me then.  The day after I prayed that simple prayer, I was telling everyone I met about it, and asking them if Jesus was in their heart too. But as a teen, it bothered me that I could not remember such an important decision.

I tend to take life pretty seriously, so I spent a year agonizing over whether or not I had "filled in all the blanks" on my "application for salvation!" Had I believed enough, repented enough, committed enough to really "make" it happen?  Was there something important I had missed in the process that would invalidate the application?

Again, it was God who reached out to "find" me in my distress.  One day at the end of that year I was reading my Bible and one verse seemed to literally jump off the page at me.  In John 15:16 Jesus says to his disciples: "You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain. . ." 

That day I felt God speak that truth into my heart. I realized that our "finding" God is always initiated by Him, and it's completed by Him.  It's not what we do, but it's what He did, and does, for us. I chose John 15:16 as my life verse, and it settled my angst about my eternal destiny at that time.

I had other anxieties to wrestle with during my growing up years however.  When I was seven years old, my father was killed at work, and the trauma was so extreme for me that I suffered what would probably be called PTSD today.  I remember dreaming, one night shortly after his death, that he was crawling on the low roof of our house and a bear was trying to reach up and get him.  The dream ended before that happened, but I knew my father would lose that battle.  The thought that he was not all powerful after all pushed me gently toward the understanding that only in God could I find security.  All through my childhood and even into my adult life, as I lived with the grief and insecurity, I found myself forced to lean on the steady, gentle sense that an unchanging Heavenly Father was with me and loved me.  So my faith grew.

My faith met another challenge when I was a young adult.  Up until then I had been surrounded by Christian thought.  I'd graduated from a Christian high school and gone on to take two years of Bible studies at a Christian college before I found myself out of money and needing to move on to a public university.

I'd not known much about other religions or beliefs up until that time, and my first year in university was an eye-opener. I had entered the secular world being confident that God would protect me from all the erroneous philosophies that would challenge my faith. Then I got a job as secretary to the newly formed Philosophy department at Northern Arizona University, and I spent the next three years in very close association with professors who worked hard to enlighten me about the "real" Truth.

I remember thinking, at one point, that it was like all my life I had been walking up a hill following one road.  It was the only road.  Then I got to the top of the hill and looked down the other side and saw that there were many roads, and I began to wonder how I could be so sure that my road was the only right one.  It might just be the one I had grown up believing because I didn't know better. 

The big, seemingly insurmountable problem that brought me to this point of doubt is one that brings many people to question whether or not there is a God.  It's a universal question, and it's very hard to answer:  

If there is a good God, then why is there evil in the world? 

I could not answer that question and it made me really think.  It also scared me a little. I had built my whole life--my whole identity--on my belief in God. If he did not exist, that meant I had been building on a false premise and I would have to rethink everything I had ever believed, even who I really was.  

I had a decision to make at that point.  I had to decide whether my faith was the most important thing to me, or knowing the truth.  If my faith was false, would I be willing to give it up?  

It didn't take me long to decide that Truth had to be the most important thing.  I had always loved Truth, and I wasn't willing to keep on believing a lie just because it was comfortable and comforting to me.  So, in my mind, I actually let go of my Christian faith so I could objectively investigate what was actually true.  

But when I did that, it also didn't take me long to find my answer, because once I embraced the idea that the existence of evil disproves the existence of a good God,  I found myself confronted with an opposite question:  

If there is no God, then how do we explain the existence of good in the world? 

It is hard to explain "evil" if there is a good God, but it seemed to me that it would be impossible to explain "good" if there wasn't a good God.  I came to believe that Good is the reality.  Evil is just the absence of that reality.

After deciding that there had to be a good God, it was an easy step for me to see Christianity as being God's way of eliminating the evil. The Christian message made sense to me on a whole different level.  If evil separates us from the good, it's no wonder that "finding" God is so hard.  So hard, in fact, that the initiation of our discovery of God has to come from him.  I began to see that all those other roads going down the hill were only human constructs--human endeavors to "find" God. But Christianity was different.  Christianity was God reaching down to find us.

Some people say that their logical thinking has led them away from a belief in God, but in my case, it was logical thinking that led me to him in the end.  I experienced my "crisis of faith" and came out on the other side being even more convinced that the faith that had tugged at my heart when I was a baby was a true one, and to this day I am convinced that Christianity is the only logical explanation for it all.

Pascal once said that there is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart that can only be filled by him. Maybe all the brokenness and disconnectedness we feel in our world can be explained by that statement. 

I'm glad that God knocked on the door of my heart when I was too young to ponder too much about things.  Sometimes it is easier for a child to respond to God, before intellectual abilities cloud the truth. It's harder for smart people, who are older, educated and confident, to by-pass their internal critic when seeking spiritual reality. I do believe in logic, but I have found it can only take us so far in discovering truth about God. When we get to the edge of that cliff, we have to recognize the limitations of our own understanding, and reach out, and let God "find" us.