My friend and pastor, Ryan Strother, posted an article on his blog this week that got me thinking. At this point, atheism is still the largest segment of my life – 20 years more or less. Christ stopped me in my tracks in December 1997, and I fully committed my life to him in January 1999. During that 13 months, He very patiently destroyed every argument I had raised against Him. Twelve years later, I can still clearly recall the whole logical structure that under-girds atheist thought and describe it for my Christian friends who find atheists a bit mystifying. I can still describe exactly how an atheist thinks about deities of any sort and the people who believe in them. But I can no longer believe those things myself. It’s like the old dot-matrix pictures people used to make. Close up, it just looks like a jumble of dots, but once you gain the right perspective and see the pattern, you can never again unsee it no matter where you view the picture from. I can recall a world without God, but I’ve seen Him now, and I can’t unsee Him, even if I wanted to try.
On the other hand, I didn’t lose the skeptical stance when I became a Christian. The reality of Christ and the Truth of what God has said in the Scriptures are as solid as bedrock to me, but beyond that, I have no sacred cows. Sacred cows are meant to be barbequed, not enshrined.
So imagine my surprise last week when reading through the scriptures from that morning’s Sunday School lesson (John 21), I arrived at verse 14 -
This is now the third time that Jesus showed himself to his disciples after that he was risen from the dead.
We had talked that morning about how Peter and the rest of the disciples had gone back to their former occupations out of what? Disappointment? Maybe things weren’t going the way they expected? In my reading that afternoon, I got to verse 14, and asked a question:
Me: How in the world did they go back to fishing AFTER they saw the risen Christ twice?
God: Ahem. Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing?
Me: Scrambling back to chapter 20 to make sure it really was twice. Yup, twice. Crushed.
God has still been leading, and I’ve still been following, but in some respects I’ve been keeping him at arm’s length. Not spending much time in prayer. Not much time in the Scriptures. Kind of anemic really. I can’t go back to atheism, but apparently it’s not too hard to start behaving as if I had.
One of the most helpful things I ever heard in a sermon was a description of the Christian life. It’s not so much like a line that goes from point A to point B to point C. Rather it’s more like an onion, and as you peel back the layers you keep encountering the same old threads of the flesh that you encountered on the surface. And so don’t be surprised or discouraged when you encounter them again. Instead, take it as an invitation to go deeper with Christ.
Questions inevitably follow, but right now I’m just enjoying the conversations again, and I’m enjoying “seeing him who is invisible” because I sure can’t unsee him, and I’m looking forward to peeling back more layers.
