Spiritual

My spir­i­tual jour­ney has cov­ered a lot of ter­ri­tory. Being a Christ-​​Follower has changed my life, and in this por­tion of my site I’d like to share things I’ve learned and that mat­ter most to me. Check out my spir­i­tual jour­ney blog, too: At the Cen­ter of It All.

For most of my child­hood and young adult life, I pro­claimed myself to be agnos­tic, though in prac­tice I was an athe­ist. I was curi­ous about church and reli­gion, though mostly in an intel­lec­tual sense. My fam­ily prac­ticed many of the super­fi­cial cus­toms of both Chris­t­ian and Jew­ish tra­di­tions; for exam­ple, we cel­e­brated Christ­mas and my dad often took me to church for Christ­mas Eve ser­vices, and we also lit Han­nukah can­dles. I val­ued them as fam­ily tra­di­tions, but didn’t really have any per­sonal invest­ment beyond that.

In col­lege, I got con­nected with a num­ber of peo­ple on my dorm floor who were born-​​again Chris­tians. We had many inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions and debates, and for the first time in my life, I ran into peo­ple who actu­ally lived what they believed but didn’t try to hound me into becom­ing one of them. That started a long and wind­ing process of research and explo­ration that took many years.

As a log­i­cal, ratio­nal per­son, I couldn’t just go on “faith.” I needed proof. I was also fairly sure I wouldn’t find it. But the more I read about the his­tory of the Bible and the facts around Jesus’s life and death, the more con­vinced I became that Christ was exactly who he said he was: the son of God. But I wasn’t ready to jump into the pool yet.

Early in my mar­riage, my wife asked me to join her in attend­ing a new church she wanted to check out. She didn’t want to go alone, so I gladly went along, just to keep her com­pany. My first impres­sion of the place was that they really wor­shipped God there. The music was lively, the teach­ing was hon­est, and the peo­ple were about as real as I’ve ever seen any­where. Within two months, I was attend­ing reg­u­larly on Sun­days and Wednes­days. I was also con­tin­u­ing my search for knowl­edge, and finally real­ized that I couldn’t put it off any longer. On June 16, 1993, I made a deci­sion for Christ.

It wasn’t long before I was greatly involved in min­istry. I wanted to learn every­thing I could about God and the Bible, and I wanted to con­nect with other peo­ple who had the same hunger. I served my church as part of the tech­ni­cal teams, run­ning video pro­jec­tion for ser­vices and design­ing the light­ing for our annual productions.

My life since then has of course had its ups and downs, but every day I learn more about God and every day I want to find ways to grow closer to Him. I decided a cou­ple of years ago that I wanted to doc­u­ment more about my jour­ney on a reg­u­lar basis and I started my first blog. If you’re inter­ested in more of the recent details, you can read it there. Though I don’t write as often as I’d like, that blog is where I work out a lot of the things that I wres­tle with, and I value the give-​​and-​​take of con­ver­sa­tion and com­ments. Because it is so intensely per­sonal, I ask peo­ple to reg­is­ter before read­ing it, but any­one is wel­come to join the dialogue.