Christy4Christ said:
This thread is not for debating the divinity or existance of Jesus but rather it is for those of us who are Christians to share our experiences with Jesus in our lives.
hmm... well, I can share how I became a Christian.
I was born into an agnostic family, my father is a professor of engineering and my mother was a linguist who chose to be a housewife to raise her children (something, btw, that I am very thankful for. Being a latchkey kid would not have good for me). Of the two of them, my mom was quite hostile to Christianity while my dad was for the most part indifferent. They raised my sister and I in a generally secular environment but not outspokenly anti-religious. Despite my mom's own personal revulsion to religion, she was not adverse to it's positive ethical effect in society, as such she did not prohibit my own religious questioning and occasional trips to church with friends...
Anyways, things were pretty smooth till we left UC Davis (my dad finished his PhD and was heading off to his professorship) and I moved to a new town in my early teens. When we moved I never really fit into the new school. My grades dropped very quickly and I found myself struggling to even graduate (I finally managed to get out with a 2.1 grade average when a few teachers gave me mercy grades to make sure I didn't flunk out). During this time I struggled a lot with life and fitting in. I wasn't one to openly flaunt authority, so I never rebelled in the violent and often anti-social ways of many others. I didn't like drinking or drugs because I abhored the effect they had on my mind (It just seemed stupid to me to spend money on things that would reduce my own efficiency and abilities. If someone else wanted to jack their life they were welcome to do it... I figured my chances of success were multiplied everytime someone else drank or took drugs as their own capacity to compete with me was lowered significantly). Essentially, I just became a very quiet, angry little kid who was flunking out of school.
Throughout HS I had been going to church occasionally with a friend of mine. It did help a little, though I didn't really fit in there much better than I did in school. Most of the church kids were from christian families and didn't know how to relate (I was painfully shy as well, so that didn't really help) so while I participated I wasn't really "in", so to speak (I wasn't really very cool, so that didn't help either. The church group was fairly insular so they didn't always open up to people new to the congregation, especially ones who were kind of eccentric and quiet). As a funny aside, the main group I did hang out with was the chess club. It was nine jewish guys and me. The club never played chess, it was primarily about arguing religion and politics (about half the group were atheists, the other half were religious jews and messianic jews). As for me, I only played checkers. I could never remember the rules to chess so the game tended to bore me after a while.
Near the end of my illustrious high school career I became a Christian. I can't remember the day, or even where I was. What was happeneing was that I had been reading some works by francis schaeffer and just piddling through a few biblical passages. At one point I read where Christ forgave his enemies and it affected me deeply. I realized that I had to do the same and put my faith in God. So I did, and over the next couple of days and weeks I forgave the people around me and slowly lost the sense of anger I had.
One other thing happened as well. At least for me, growing up was not easy intellectually. I had always struggled to see how the various secular theories I had learned could explain what I saw around me. Essentially, the more I grew, the more dissonance existed in my thinking. To me, this was very disturbing and only served to increase my own anxiety about life. One of the things I had been doing prior to becoming christian was reading the works of francis schaeffer. Though I can see the limits of his work now, I still found it to be an interesting attempt to reconcile the disparate strands of expeience under a Christian philosophical system. When I became a Christian, I began to see some of the intellectual dissonance I had slowly recede as I began to be able to reconcile things my previous state of mind had not been able to handle well. This continued to develop over time as I proceeded to apply this in the university myself until I eventually dropped out of college, worked for a few years, then went into business for myself (software, right now developing business efficiency stuff, but working slowly on computer-aided reasoning and research software... perhaps if you're lucky, you'll be buying some of it in 5 or 10 years =).
Anyways, I've been a Christian for 10 or so years now. It's been a great thing and I've seen God work in my life countless times. I don't have an answer to every problem, but I've seen God work on my mind and heart such that I have confidence in His truth and revelation. To be honest, I don't often deal with these sorts of skeptical inquiries anymore. I used to quite a bit a few years ago, but recently I've started to delve into church history and philosophy of language. That's about it...
ken
