I recently finished reading a book called A Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. Strobel earned his law degree from Yale University and spent a number of years as an award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune. As a young man and a staunch atheist, Strobel one day decided to investigate the claims of Christianity when his wife announced to him that she had become a believer in Jesus. In an attempt to disprove claims about Jesus (and to prove to his wife that all of the hype about Christ is a farce), Lee Strobel spent the next two years of his life weighing the claims for and against Jesus. In the process of building a case against Christ however, Strobel ended up becoming a follower of Jesus instead. Strobel recounts this journey, explaining that all of the evidence that he drew upon to disprove the claims of those who follow Jesus instead point to the fact that Jesus was who he said he was, in essence, the Son of God.
Reading about Lee Strobel’s journey to Christ caused me to reflect upon my own journey towards faith in Jesus. I came to Christ at a breaking point in my life. It was as if I teetered alongside the edge of a bottomless precipice ready to fall over at any moment. I was a straight A student, valedictorian of my class, starting point guard on the basketball team, a captain on the math team, a peer tutor in Spanish and math, part of my school’s National Honor Society, a member of the Spanish Honor Society, a Ron Brown Scholar, confident on the outside, a workaholic, and came from a loving home where my parents invested into me daily and made an effort to be involved in my life. From the looks of it, I had it together. People looked up to me and my friends often told me that I was a “model human being.” On the exterior, I was just that. Over the years I became good at erecting titanium steel walls intended to conceal my weaknesses and insecurities from others. These invisible walls shielded not only my pain, but prevented me from opening myself up to the possibility of being hurt by other people. While on the exterior I was the person who “had it together” on the inside I was torn up. I based my self worth off of my performance both academically and athletically. And so, I made sure to become the best at whatever I put my mind to; after all, my self worth was at stake each time I took an exam or stepped out onto the basketball court. I always remember being like this; I don’t recall a time in my life when things weren’t this way. It’s not as if my parents put pressure on me to perform up to a pre-imposed standard; if anything, my parents saw that I was unhappy, that my relationships with them and with my siblings were deteriorating, that I was unnaturally depressed, that I spit out venom intended to hurt. Contrary to appearances, my life was in shreds and no one realized this more fully than I did. I don’t know how much longer I could have continued to live like this. But then, one day, two years ago, I met a man named Jesus Christ. When I felt as if forces beyond my control would propel me over the edge of that precipice, I genuinely cried out to God for the first time in my life.
Faith is a funny thing. At times it seems contrary to what appears to be logical. But then again, my pain was not logical nor was the emptiness that threatened to consume me. When I surrendered my life to Christ I didn’t have a tingly sensation, hear a voice, or have a vision. However since that day I have seen Jesus slowly transforming my life in ways that dumbfound those who knew me as I used to be before entering into a relationship with Him. My relationship with Jesus isn’t something that I can really articulate into words; but I have experienced the transformative power that comes from being in Him and I have seen Him do impossible things in my life; things that never should have happened. Bobby once observed that:
"living as a follower of Jesus is to have help living. It's me understanding that I have many problems that have origins in a part of me that I can neither reach, nor fix. As I am, I am ruled by what I feel; what I feel, however, often distorts reality..."
Since following Jesus I have experienced peace that I never felt before; it’s the kind that comes from knowing that He knows the plans that He has for my life; it’s the kind that comes from knowing that I am unconditionally loved despite my insecurities, my shortcomings, and the times when I don’t perform well. The bedrock of my identity no longer lies with Amanda and how Amanda performs, rather my foundation is in Christ and that, I have come to discover, is the one thing in my life that never ever changes. That's not to say that following Jesus is easy, because it isn't.
"Choosing to walk with God is to choose to live a life full of life, but it is a fullness of life manifested in death (strange, strange concept). And not necessarily physical death (though it began as such with Jesus), but death to the natural human instincts that lend themselves to multi-level self-destruction. Does this mean that followers of Jesus live lives that completely suck? No, no. But our lives are guaranteed to be tried and tested. It's the only way we can become better people; someone bigger and better molding us and reshaping us and replacing the warped with what's real." -Bobby's Insights in "A Lesson Before Dying
I've spent some time thinking back to a question that used to baffle me.
During Jesus’ crucifixion, Peter, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, denied on three different occasions that he was even acquainted with Jesus.
Peter, though a former follower of Christ, was afraid to be associated with the man upon the cross.
As Christ hung on the cross, Peter, though nominally a follower of Jesus, still doubted that Jesus was in fact who he claimed to be.
This same man who denied Christ however, is the same man who was crucified for Christ; this is the same man who, during his execution, insisted upon being crucified upside down because he didn’t feel worthy to be crucified in the same manner as Christ.
I never understood what would transform such a coward into someone who willingly died a horrible, gruesome, violent and public death for the very man that he formerly denied in front of a few servants?
But then I realized: it’s the very same thing that transformed a staunch atheist into a follower of Christ; and it’s the same thing that changed a broken, depressed, and miserable workaholic into the person that I am becoming today. There’s something about knowing Jesus that transforms peoples’ lives and that has transformed my life. There’s no “logic,” or “hard evidence” involved in what I have experienced since coming to know Him. Rather my unwavering faith in Jesus Christ is much like the air; I can’t see it with my natural eyes, but I can see evidence of it all around me. And it sustains me…
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