“I hate my life.  I wish I was dead.  My life is a big fat lie!  I feel so lost and empty– a fake.   No one cares and I am tired of pretending that I am someone I am not.  I am suffocating.”  These are the honest thoughts I had many years ago.  But I found something that transformed my life. Let me tell you about it.

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Start Seeking God Because He is Already Seeking You.

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My parents were from a small minority of people who converted from Islam in the Middle East. My mother was a homemaker and my father was an entrepreneur who worked as a contractor for a construction company in Jordan and in the US opened grocery stores and restaurants.  He started cleaning toilets when he first came to the USA.  Both my parents were the hardest working people I know. However, in-spite of having what I needed physically at home, I suffered inside.

I had become what psychologist call an introverted child. Compared to the average teenager. I had apparently thought “too much”.  After the death of my grandfather Moses (at 107), it dawned on me that I will one day die too.  My childhood dreams stopped. It was at that moment at his funeral that I had a strange experience that changed me.At that moment my childhood stopped, ended and my adulthood began.

I saw graveyards as truly unnatural, no matter what my elders said. “Are we all meant for this?,” was the echo that enshrined my heart as I looked dreadfully upon the grave stones.

I became obsessed with the prospect of my own death. My parents were nominal Christians, so when I became of age to ask the personal and philosophical questions they were not equipped to address them–and I found out later neither where the priests in my community.

I hated life because of the lingering shadow of death that would be the inevitable victor.

I wished that the whole world would just disappear. I wanted to die

Pensées the French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623-62) wote :

I see the terrifying immensity of the universe which surrounds me, and find myself limited to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am set down here rather than elsewhere, nor why the brief period appointed for my life is assigned to me at this moment rather than another in all the eternity that has gone before and will come after me. … All I know is that I must soon die, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape. As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I only know that on leaving this world I fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be everlastingly consigned. Such is my condition, full of weakness and uncertainty. From all this I conclude that I ought to spend every day of my life without seeking to know my fate. I might perhaps be able to find a solution to my doubts; but I cannot be bothered to do so, I will not take one step towards its discovery.

My story was similar to this from Pascal…but I could not bebothered to NOT ask and It was a dark rainy night as silhouettes of rain drops covered my head as I stared out at the dark empty sky, which was nothing next to the emptiness inside my own soul. Was there a god? My studies in philosophy and science just drove me deeper into despair. Now I could not recite a biblical verse if you paid me that day. The glint of stainless steel fit in my 15 year old hand quite well.

It was a survival knife, and now I wanted to use it for something opposite its name, I wanted to die.

In desperation, I cried out to Him, the one I dreaded the most, and was most afraid did exist…God. The radio in my room began to echo voices of a preacher. I was annoyed, but listened anyway, the man spoke about God’s Son,