Mind of a Christian

From Atheist to Christ Follower

Growing up, I guess I could've called myself a Catholic. Sure, I was raised in a Catholic household, and I went to mass on Sundays, and attended a Catholic school for one and a half years, but really calling myself a Catholic would mean that I was engaged religiously according to what they do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wasn't too invested in the church in my early years.

Religion didn't play a big role in my life until my sophomore year in high school.

Oh boy, those were the days where I was cocky and prideful. My sister was first in her class, and so was I. I would consider myself superior over my classmates and credited my class ranking to my work ethic and determination.

Yeah, I was a big jerk.

In my second year of high school, my family moved to this born-again church. I don't know what denomination they quite are, but it didn't really matter to my sophomore self, because I sat through sermons that passionately preached about (among other things) how God is credited to all of my successes, and how I am nothing without Him. So, it wouldn't come as a surprise that my ego took a big hit and I up and rejected the existence of God.

Anyways, I became an atheist my sophomore year and became heavily rooted in naturalistic sciences. I crammed evolution down everyone's throats, and probably threatened to end a friendship if the other person didn't believe in the evolutionist explanation of life.

I believed that the Old Testament was purely allegorical, but that was just my way of denying the fact that I saw no value at all in the Old Testament. I regarded Jesus as some human being who was kind of cool and nice, and nothing more, and saw the Bible overall as an ancient moral book with no spiritual validity.

Throughout all this, I still had to go to that born-again church with my family, and there was a lot of friction between me and their sermons, which made me even more rooted in my atheist beliefs. I eventually convinced myself that Christians were out to get me and brainwash me into believing their doctrines.

(I wrote negatively about this born-again church here, back when I was an atheist. Bonus points to whoever comes across it.) 

So how did I come into following Christ?

My girlfriend invited me to go to her church with her. She knew I was an atheist, and I still had that mindset that Christians were out to get me, but I went anyways. The first few times, her church reminded me of my own, and I would get really defensive about it, but after a few weeks I realized that the people there didn't see me as an enemy or target, but just had fellowship with me with nothing but love and friendliness. I started to loosen up and feel comfortable around them discussing Scripture in their Bible studies.

The sermons at my girlfriend's church taught about love and being humble. At the time, I was surprised that Christians actually spoke about and encouraged love and service to others. This was a sharp contrast to the puffed up hell-fire sermons in my old born-again church. The negative image about Christians that I built up crumbled. 

My youth leader gave very interesting lessons about how so many elements in the Bible were written with intent, and that things are interconnected from one book to the next. I remember learning that in the original Hebrew texts, the Bible starts not with the first letter aleph, but with the second letter bet/beit, and the significance behind that (which I may go over in another chapter). The depth of his lessons made me interested in approaching the Bible, not as an absurd book, but as a well-crafted book.

Around the same time, I learned new things in college that would help me accept what Christians believed in. My humanities professor taught us that there are different systems of logic that within them things make sense, but across multiple systems things may not make sense. He gave non-Euclidean geometry as an example, showing us how you can say that the sum of a triangle's interior angles can equal 360 degrees.
< edit: I meant that the sum can equal 270 degrees, i.e. three right angles. My point remains - you can logically say one statement that is incompatible in another mode of logical thinking >
That doesn't make sense if you cross over to Euclidean geometry, but in non-Euclidean geometry, using elliptic space, it makes perfect sense.

Whoa now, Ethan. Why are you talking about geometry and triangles?

It made me realize that naturalistic sciences was not the only valid way of explaining the nature of our universe. Even more important, naturalistic science was not the absolute truth that I was looking to ground myself in.

By looking at our world in a different lens, I can come to the conclusion that the existence of God is logical and valid.

At this point, I wanted to follow Christ, but I lacked a proper understanding of who He is and my relation as a human with Him. I tried praying, but I was always unsure of whether I heard an answer, or my mind was formulating answers on its own. It took a particular event in which I felt a strong conviction to do something that convinced me that prayer works, and that God is there and He does answer prayer.

Over the 2016-2017 year, I learned that humans since Adam have been inherently sinful, i.e. short of being perfect according to God's standard. With this imperfection, big or small, we cannot redeem ourselves by our works alone, and that's where I learned how Jesus came into the picture. I learned that He allowed us to be reunited with God by paying the penalty of death in our place, and that we can accept His offering of salvation by believing in His sacrifice and resurrection in faith.

This took me a long time to learn, and it's only been until recently that I understood this. And after praying, I accepted Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, and His sacrifice to forgive my sins.

Now, I have a long road ahead of me. The life of a follower of Christ on earth doesn't end with being saved, but rather begins with being saved, and doesn't end until physical death.

It's actually pretty exciting.

So now I'm like a watered down, very very bad analogy to Paul. First he was Saul, then he became Paul.

First I was Ethan, and now I am Ethan.