eX-skeptic

Former atheist Marie left her devoted childhood faith in the face of intellectual doubts but eventually found her way to an intellectually robust belief in God and Christianity.

Resources:

Marie’s Non-Profit: MTM-CNM Family Connection http://www.mtm-cnm.org

Books

More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell

The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel

Works on the resurrection by Gary Habermas

Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells

Works by Nabeel Qureshi – http://www.nabeelqureshi.com (Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus and more)

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each episode, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian, to the great surprise of themselves and others. In most of the stories we’ve listened to so far, the former atheists had little to no Christian belief or faith or exposure to Christians or Christianity before they became atheists.

But that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, someone is intimately connected with Christianity and then decides to leave it, decides to leave the faith and community they once loved, the beliefs they once held, not necessarily because they wanted to leave, but they felt like they had no choice. In their minds, they could not sustain intellectual belief in God or perhaps questionable moral platitudes in the face and pressures of what they may be finding or learning that opposes what they once thought was true. They find their faith crumbling against the weight of growing disbelief. They can no longer sustain their faith or intellectual integrity or even social acceptance and continue as a Christian. It becomes no longer true or real, good, or relevant. Deconversion seems inevitable. Atheism seemingly becomes their only choice. That is, until it isn’t.

In today’s story, Marie, a brilliant thinker, left the Christian faith she loved for what she thought was the intellectual respectability and truth of atheism. But her once-settled atheistic presumptions were challenged, and she became open to reconsider what she once left behind. She found her way back, not to the childhood Christian faith she left behind, but to a substantive, intellectually grounded Christianity that has informed her adult thinking and sustained her life in powerful ways. I hope you’ll come along and listen to her story and that you’ll stay to the end to hear her give advice to curious skeptics or even former Christians towards rethinking their faith, as well as advice to Christians on how best to think about and engage with those who don’t believe.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Marie. It’s so great to have you!

Oh, it’s great to be here!

As we’re getting started, Marie, so the listeners can know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into your story?

Well, I’m Marie Wood. I’m married to David Wood. We’ve been married for 19 years. We have five boys, Lucien, Blaise, Reid, Paley, and Kepler, and I am very busy with the boys, and also I assist David with his work, and I also co-founded a nonprofit to support families affected by the rare disease that my sons Reid and Paley share, so that pretty much occupies my time.

Okay, great, and maybe we can learn more about that as we move through your story, and for those who are listening, I’ll put a link to whatever that nonprofit is in the episode notes. So let’s get started with your story, Marie. So that we can know about where you grew up, the community and the context of your belief or disbelief as a child, why don’t you just step us into that world of your family, of your childhood, of your community. Was there any sense of religion? Religious belief? Was there any reference to God in that world?

So I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, and we were practicing. We went to church every Sunday, and I always remember having a strong love of God at an early age. What was interesting was I ended up going to a Presbyterian church for preschool or for nursery and day care. So I actually heard the gospel at a very early age, and I really connected to it, and I used to just sing about Jesus all the time.

And I had this little T-shirt that we made at that nursery/preschool that said, “Guess who’s my best friend?” and it was a picture of Jesus with the long hair. And it was my favorite shirt. I loved that shirt so much that I wore it all the way until probably first grade.

But I loved God. I always had this… I used to fall asleep praying, and I just had this intense curiosity about God. I remember I was about five when I was trying to wrap my head around, “How did God begin?” And I remember I was talking to my dad. I said, “What was God’s beginning?” or, “When was God born?” And my dad would say, “Well, He wasn’t born,” and I thought maybe I wasn’t asking the question the right way, and I would try to come up with a different way, and say, “Well, when did He start?” And so I was curious about this concept of eternity and what that… It finally clicked with me when my Dad said something like, “Well, He’s outside of time.” And it didn’t quite make sense to me, but it made probably the most sense to me when he said it like that.

I was about five years old, and I lost my first tooth. I was staring, looking in the mirror, and I thought to myself, “Five years ago, I was not here,” and it was scary. It was scary for me. And only looking back I could say it was almost like a taste of my own mortality. And when you’re little, you are the world. You’re kind of selfish in a way. I mean, it’s childish. You see everything from your own perspective. And for me, that moment, just looking into my own reflection and thinking, “Five years ago, I was not here. I. This. Everything around me that I think. This is the world. This is everything. My perspective is everything to me, but it wasn’t even here.” And this sense of… just that, “I’m not that big. I’m not that important in everything,” and it was an interesting moment, and it kind of coincided with this thought about God as eternal.

So I had this strong devotion, and it was interesting because I was probably the most devout in my immediate family. With my parents, my dad would sometimes go to church and sometimes he would still be relaxing from his Saturday fun, and my mother, she would specifically say, “Well, I have to go and show my face.” It was more of like a duty. But for me, I actually experienced this joy going to church. I wanted to be there. I felt closer to God. I liked listening to the word. I liked singing. So it was really important to me. I probably looked up to my grandparents the most as my moral guides. They were churchgoers and all that. So that’s kind of where I was at a very early age.

That’s really quite impressive for a five-year-old to be so thoughtful, not only introspective but actually thinking about very deep questions, like, “Who made God?” or, “How did God begin?” Those kind of questions. And the concept of time and eternity and your own mortality. Those are big questions for a five-year-old. But I think it gives us an indication, even from an early age, that you are an inquisitive person, a person who needs to be intellectually satisfied in some way, but I love also your description about the joy and devotion that you felt. So even from the beginning, we’re getting a sense of who you are, in terms of not only deep intellect but also deep emotion.

Yeah. I would say that those two go hand in hand with my connection with God. And I remember the cross itself being a huge image to me. And the meaning behind it. I started thinking about much Jesus must’ve hurt on the cross. And I remember thinking, “I wonder if it’s possible for me, if I hurt, can I take away other people’s hurt?”

And let me not start crying at the beginning of my interview, but I remember I prayed to God. I said, “I feel…” This is sort of a strange prayer, but I told God. Again, I’m like six years old, and I told God, “I think I’m stronger than other people, so if it’s possible, you can let me hurt instead of other people.”

Wow. That’s incredibly unselfish. I mean, your devotion to God and your selflessness, based upon what you knew of Jesus and His own suffering, again, is very deep. It’s just deep, and that you personalized it in that way, again, speaks to a maturity beyond your years, at six years old. That’s quite amazing.

Yeah. I guess I think it’s important to share all this because, really, in seeing me as an atheist at some point in my life, to understand that, at the beginning, there was this really powerful connection between me and God, and I was. I was always thinking and wondering about God. And it was this joyful relationship. I think about, what’s his name? Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, and he says, “When I run, I feel His pleasure,” like I feel God’s pleasure. “I believe I was made for China, to be a missionary to China, but when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” And for me, I have something similar happen when I’m just thinking. I have this sense of pleasure, like a sense of the presence of God and His delight in me as I’m thinking about things and wondering about the world.

So I was about eight years old when I began to think about people who don’t believe in God, and I found that so strange. “How can people not believe in God?” And I even came up kind of like my own version of Pascal’s wager, where I thought, “It just doesn’t make sense, because if God is real and you believe in Him, then you go to heaven, and everything’s great. But if you don’t believe in Him, then it’s not going to turn out well. But if He doesn’t exist and you believe in Him, nothing bad happens, and if He doesn’t exist and you don’t believe in Him, it doesn’t really change anything.” So I told this to my dad, and he thought it was a great idea. And he said, “Yeah, you should tell grandma and grandpa about that,” and so at some point I was talking to them on the phone, and like I said, they were sort of my spiritual role models. And I started telling them my thoughts about it, and they could see where I was going, and they kind of almost cut me off right before I really finished my conclusion, and they both… I guess they had me on speakerphone because they were both responding to me, and they were like, “No, honey. No, no. God doesn’t want us to come up with reasons to believe in Him. He just wants a pure faith,” and I was sort of chagrined because I thought I was going to be praised. So I was a little surprised.

But it also created this chink in my spiritual world, like, “Okay, so you’re telling me that thinking and reasoning is not a part of being a faithful follower of God and Jesus?” So that was sort of a big wedge, because as you could tell, I was sort of a bright child, and I liked academics, and I was a high achiever, and so that was a part of my identity, being a good student and learning things, so it was at that point I kind of created, “Okay, so religion is this compartment that’s separate from all of me. It’s just one little part of me now.” And it didn’t impact me instantly, but I can look back and say, over time, my faith was becoming watered down in a sense. I mean I still had this connection to God. I still felt emotionally connected to God.

And yet, again, as I’m going through high school and becoming more of, you know, “God is sort of a good guy,” and, “There are these other religions. Surely all these good people are not going to hell,” and so my concept of the Gospel is getting a little bit more expanded or shifting a little bit, and once I got into college, as a science major—I was a double major in biology and psychology, and you really just get inundated with a materialistic worldview, a physicalist worldview. Everything is physical. A lot of psychology—there’s the nurture/nature debate, but a lot of it boils down to your physiology and your biology. And so, in biology, you just get really impressed with the theory of evolution, that it’s the basis for everything.

And I also took a philosophy class in my first semester at college, and my professor was an atheist, and I loved that guy. I still love that guy. We had great banter. Because at that time, I was still professing Christianity. And I remember writing my final paper, where I was still defending the faith, and I was defending the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and I think my argument was based on musical improvisation, and how there must be something more than just the physical world, because we sense it and how we feel about things. Again, it was still—because of all the skepticism, I guess, I was sort of being impressed with this notion that everybody who is in academia just doesn’t believe in God. Or they don’t believe in traditional Christianity. And it’s not really what smart people are supposed to think. And so was getting to me in a subtle way. And I would say by my second year of college, my concept of God at that point was very abstract. Definitely not a personal God. Definitely not the triune God of Christianity. Jesus was a really wonderful person. He was divine in the sense that He was extremely enlightened and loving and moral, and God was the force of life and creation in the universe, whatever that creative impulse that allows life to exist.

I mean, I even said to my dad one time—we were talking, and I said, “I don’t believe in God anymore,” and my dad, he was shocked because that was so strange for him to hear from me, of all people.

So when you went to college, obviously, there was a real paradigm shift that started happening there. If you went to college, and your faith, at that point, was more emotional. This personal connection. You had separated your reason from your devotion to God. Then you move into this—as you were talking about your atheist philosopher professor and you were trying to defend the existence of God. At that point, you were required, in some form or fashion, to defend God’s existence intellectually, and it sounded like you tried to do that. I wonder, at that point, were you… probably a couple of things. One is that were you finding any kind of intellectual or rational kinds of evidences or arguments for God at that time? Or were you just drawing from what you knew or what you felt? Like you say, you’re a thinker. Were you drawing from your abstract thoughts about it? So you weren’t finding a grounded intellectual rationality for God?

No. I would say my thinking at that point and my arguments for God were more subjective, and it was clear that—I didn’t even know there was such a thing as providing evidences for God. Because, again, I was eight years old, and I was told that that’s not a part of our faith. And so I had no idea that there were all these discussions happening. And my professor certainly didn’t point me to any books on the topic. I think what happened with being a biology major and studying evolution so much. I mean, evolution was part of all of my classes. I mean even my creative writing teacher was talking about evolution one day. “What do you think the first sound that people evolved? Probably a lament or a cry.” So I started feeling like maybe God is just this extra explanation that we add on to this, and the people who came up with the scriptures, and whoever wrote the Old Testament, those were people trying to explain reality, and now we know where everything comes from. We evolved from the primordial soup. “If you want to believe in God, it’s an okay addition, but it’s not a necessary one.” And just a big reversal of where I was as a child.

I guess instead of God creating man, man created god?

Right. Right. Yeah.

And that you, I guess, through these courses and looking at these examples of thinkers and educated people and academics—all those people didn’t need God. And you, as an intellectual, I’m sure, saw yourself as someone who perhaps doesn’t need God as well.

Yeah. Exactly. And oftentimes, they were antagonistic towards Christianity, and Christian values especially, so Christians are seen as judgmental and close-minded and anti-intellectual, so I was kind of imbibing all of this, and it obviously had detrimental effects on my faith.

So then you decided to leave it all behind. And you identified as an atheist, then, in college?

Yeah. Yeah. As I said, I did clearly say to my father, “I don’t believe in God anymore,” but then when I said that, I sort of felt something in my heart, like, “Do I really mean it that way?” And so then I kind of redefined God. I couldn’t quite say that I don’t believe at all, but I sort of redefined him as a sort of impersonal creative force in the universe. And mankind does good things towards others. That’s god, that’s love, that’s what we’re talking about. I actually had this traumatic experience that—I would say that, when I stopped believing in God and Christianity in the orthodox sense, the concepts that were connected to God also began to crumble or shift in a way, so God was a foundational belief, even the crucifixion of Jesus and saving the world. These were all the foundation for everything that I thought about. And so to take those away, everything started shifting and re-balancing, I guess. And I had this traumatic experience, and I started even questioning whether unconditional love was real.

I didn’t feel like the world was the place that I once thought it was. And I felt a loss. I had a sense of loss, but it wasn’t enough for me to believe in God. I can’t believe in it if I don’t think it’s real. I remember an aunt of mine was—like I said, most of my family was Catholic, but I have this one uncle who became an evangelical when he was young, and he and his wife used to talk to me a lot. I guess they could see a kind of openness in me towards the Gospel. And they had come to visit. They were in town, and we were at the beach, and my aunt was sitting next to me, and I was looking at the water, and she said, “You know, Marie. I remember you used to say you prayed every night, and you’ve always loved Jesus and all these things. Do you still pray?” or, “Do you still feel that way about Jesus?” and when she asked me that, I started crying. And I said, “I miss Jesus. I miss Him,” and she kind of put her arm around me, and she said, “God bless you for your sensitivity,” and, “I’m praying for you,” but again, just because I wanted to believe in Jesus, I still thought Christianity was the most beautiful philosophy that I’d ever studied or heard of or read, and I studied world religions. I read the Mahabharata, and I studied the intellects and Buddhism, all these things, and Christianity was still the most beautiful to me, the most attractive. But if it wasn’t real, I couldn’t deceive myself that way, no matter how much I wanted to.

So you still saw beauty in it. It wasn’t as if you turned, as some of your, I guess, professors had done, just to ridicule and speak of the immorality or all of that of it, that you actually still saw something worth believing in. You just couldn’t because you didn’t think it was intellectually viable.

Yes.

Yeah. So step us on from here. What happened next?

Well, then I, through a series of un-coincidences, I ended up at a rehearsal for the college speech and debate team, and there I met my future husband, David Wood, and also Nabeel Qureshi. And so I just—like I said, it was a series of un-coincidences, but I ended up in this rehearsal, and the coach just instantly loved me. She just loved me. And she said, “Marie, why don’t you join us for our next tournament?” And I said, “Well, I don’t have anything to do,” and she says, “Oh, you can do an impromptu speech. And we have an extra ticket because somebody dropped out.” So I agreed to go on this debate tournament, or speech and debate tournament, the next weekend. With nothing prepared. I was just going to observe and then do an impromptu speech.

And when I got to the airport for that trip, I immediately spotted David and Nabeel because they were so tall. One of their nicknames on campus was “the two towers.” They’re both over six feet tall. So I walk over there, because I have to establish my dominance and superiority, find the biggest guys to take on. And they were debating whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. And I’m listening to them for a second, and then I decide it’s time for me to get attention, and I go, “Well, you can both be right.” And they look at me, and David says—he was like, “No. Either I’m right, and he’s wrong, or we could both be wrong, but we can’t both be right on this. Either Jesus Christ rose from the dead or He didn’t.” And I was like, “Well, the important thing about religion is that, even if you have different beliefs, it all comes down to the same thing, that we need to love our fellow human beings and try to be decent to each other,” and yada, yada, and David says, “Don’t give me that. I come from the trailer park,” as if he’s establishing his legitimacy with his humble origins, so I kind of roll my eyes, and I was like, “Well, whatever. I come from single-celled organisms.” And his jaw kind of dropped, and he was like, “What?” And so we got into this little debate about that.

And this is what’s interesting, because, as you said, I didn’t actually have an aversion to Christianity itself, but for some reason, what came out of me in that moment was what I got from my culture, from my professors and everything, and I was mocking him. And he would try to contend with me, and I was so mean. And if you know me, it’s weird. Because I’m not normally mean. But I was so mean. I kind of joke that it’s almost a miracle that he even wanted to talk to me after this. Because I was so mean. I was nonstop ridiculing and mocking him. And he would try to speak, and I would burst out laughing. I have no… I mean, it was a divine intervention because I don’t know who’d want to talk to somebody after they were that nasty.

But we did. We kept talking. We kept talking through that tournament. We talked on the plane. And he’s engaging with Nabeel, who was a Muslim at the time and later became a famous evangelist as well, and one of things that hit me with David was when he told me that he used to be an atheist. And I thought, “Wow! So you used to be an atheist.” And I noticed, as we were talking and having these little arguments, that he was smart. And he was really smart. And that I couldn’t just brush him aside the way that I did some other Christians that I had met or evangelical Christians that I had met who were anti-intellectual, who were opposed to any type of higher education, because they thought it was just brain washing and all this stuff. I mean it can be in a sense, but obviously, if you present that to somebody who’s intellectually inclined, that’s not going to be attractive.

So David really shook my stereotype and some assumptions that I had about Christians, that you only end up that way when you’re raised that way, and to see someone who was as smart as him, who I couldn’t just wipe the floor with intellectually in a debate, and that he could actually really stand his ground. And then this concept that you can know that Christianity is true because Jesus rose from the dead. That was different. And I said, “Well, okay. I could see historical evidence that He died on the cross, and I believe that He died on a cross,” and I was like, “But you can’t prove that He rose from the dead.” And so these were the conversations we were having.

And it was the end of the semester, so we had exams coming up, but David and I started meeting every day to talk about these things. So we’d meet to study, and we’d be studying our stuff, and then I’d take breaks and read the books that he was giving me. So he was giving me things like  which was put out by the Discovery Institute. And so I’d read these books, and I’d kind of get huffy or be mad, especially with the ones that were contradicting evolution. I would get irritated. And David would kind of laugh at me because he’d say, “Well, what’s wrong?” I was like, “Well, they’re just making it sound like evolution is stupid.” So it’s okay for me to make fun of you for not believing it, but you can’t make fun of me for believing it. So-

Right. And in the meantime, you’re still pursuing… I think you were pursuing medicine at the time, right? And still studying evolutionary biology-

Yeah.

… in all of your coursework, and yet you were having this counter perspective.

Yeah.

But did it cause you to question evolutionary biology at that time? Or really what was underpinning your atheistic worldview?

Yeah. Yeah. That was the big challenge. Because again, I felt like God and all attendant beliefs, the idea of a personal god and creator, I mean that’s unnecessary if you believe that everything just evolved by accident. And what hit me about some of these books I was reading that were countering evolution and providing counter claims was that some of the very examples that I used to tell David, like, it’s irrefutable were staged photographs of butterflies that were pinned on tree trunks, that were presented to be a natural photograph. But there were staged photographs. There were hoaxes, like Haeckel’s embryos and things like that, and I said, “But those are in the textbooks,” and I was like, “Why would they still have them there?” So even if evolution were true, it’s not this impenetrable fortress that I thought it was and certainly not what I want to be basing my life choices and my concept of morality on as I started to realize this. So that was really shaking the core of my new worldview.

And there was this one moment. We were sitting on this sofa, and he was studying for his exams, and I was reading one of these books, and I had this experience that I was looking at the mirror in my childhood bedroom, which was—over the years, I had covered it up with these little mardi gras beads and sashes and stickers and pictures of friends, and I really could barely see myself in this mirror. Just in the very middle. And I was standing in front of that mirror again and all those things were gone, and I was just looking at myself. And I could see myself as I truly was, in all my rebellion. And I could see I was rejecting God based on lies and that I had really been willfully turning away from Him, the one who loved me the most. And it hurt. It hurt to see myself like that, and I just started weeping and sobbing. I was shaking with sobs. And David was, he was kind of startled, and he just quietly put his book down and put his arm around me. He said, “What’s wrong?” And I looked at him, tears streaming down my face, and I said, “I am. I’m wrong.”

And he invited me to church the following Sunday after that day on that couch, and the pastor did an invitation, gave an invitation, and he said, “Look to the person on your right and then look to the person on the left and tell them if you want to go up and profess Jesus that you’ll go with them,” and David was to my right, so when the pastor said this, I kind of turned to the left. But I could feel him waiting for me, so I kind of slowly turned back at him, and then he repeated the pastor’s invitation, and I said, “Yes, I want to go up.” So we went up, and we prayed as a group. And I didn’t really have any sudden feeling at that moment, but I did feel happy. I noticed a difference the next day.

What was that?

It’s sort of silly, but I turned on the TV, and it was Real World, an MTV program with these singles who live together, and there’s all this drama. And I remembered I had watched it a few days ago or a week before, and I was just laughing at their antics and their foolishness, but I remember this day I turned it on, and I started watching it, and I thought to myself, “How empty and meaningless. There’s nothing attractive about this,” and I was like, “It’s just this empty, vapid type of lifestyle.” And I realized that I had begun to see the world differently, like instantly. And I called it receiving Christian eyes. So it was sort of a silly example, but something instantly changed in me and how I began to see things. I guess you could say because there was that foundation leading up to it, but yeah. Something had shifted.

It sounds like something pretty dramatically had shifted.

Yeah.

It sounds like really obviously spiritually something had opened, and something had shifted, and the way that you viewed the world was completely different. Leading up to that, your mind had been changed and your… I love the way that you describe the way that you look at yourself in the mirror. It reminds me of when you were five, looking at your eyes so closely and actually seeing something, thinking more deeply, and there you are looking at yourself again. But maybe not just your eyes, but yourself.

Yeah. My soul. My spirit.

Yeah. Exactly. Seeing your soul and feeling a sense of alienation and pushing back and longing for, again, what you had found to be true and real. Something you felt was lost but now was found, in a sense. And then you found yourself in that.

Yeah.

That’s really quite extraordinary. So after that first moment, how would you say.. In thinking about living—it sounds like you lived for a while in disbelief and that life perhaps was different in the way that you perceived it and maybe even the way you felt it or lived it. Again, you’re an intuitive person. How would you say that your life transformed? Did it go back to that kind of childhood devotion that you had but yet not just that? That it was probably a more full holistic mind and heart and life kind of thing? That you didn’t have to segregate your rationality and intellect from your faith. How did that work its way out?

Well, it was exciting. It was thrilling because now I knew there were all these things I could learn about with God, and so immediately the emotional connection is re-established, that I’m connected to God again. But also just this hunger and passion to know more, and David had gotten me a Bible, and I was just—it was this giant study Bible. It was, I don’t know, three inches thick or something, and I was just bringing it to school, sitting in the cafeteria at our university, and I’ve got this huge Bible, and I’m reading it, and I mean just this hunger and thirst to know more, and I was so excited. Like a whole new world had opened up to me. It was so engaging. I felt stimulated intellectually in a way that I never had been before.

And then, of course, at this time, David and I, our relationship is growing. We had attraction while we were still on opposite sides, and it was fun being… not enemies but in opposition.

Adversaries, maybe? In that sense.

Yeah. And that was fun for me, while still liking each other, but then to kind of shift into this place where we’re both on the same page spiritually and to both be intellectually engaged with God and each other, it was really like a three-cord binding in that relationship, like between David and me and God and just us having this mutual passion to know more and to also share that with others. And that’s obviously played out in our lives, in his ministry, and then I support him with that.

So if someone was listening to your story, looking at your life, and said… I love what you just said because I think that the tendency would be to say, “Oh, she just believes in God because she fell in love.” But going back to your early reason for leaving the love of God, for being intellectually honest, I would imagine someone like you could not believe just because they fell in love with someone who was a believer, that in order to maintain your intellectual integrity… You saw its beauty, but you couldn’t believe it, even though you wanted to, but now you… You obviously found something, like you say, that was not only beautiful but true.

Yes. Absolutely.

And there was a groundedness, a substantive nature to it. If someone spoke to you or spoke at you about that, how would you respond?

Well, I would say maybe they need to check their own stereotypes and biases, and I feel like it’s sort of demeaning in a sense, to just assume that, “Oh, a woman falls in love, and that’s why she believes what she believes.” I think that I can stand enough on my own intellectual accomplishments that I don’t have to say that I have to be controlled and guided by somebody else. I mean I thrive in antagonistic scenarios and taking on the man and pushing back against the powers that be, and I mean I could talk about that later, but I do that all the time. That’s who I am.

You are definitely a very strong and independent and brilliant woman in your own right, and so… It’s like another presumption you had said earlier, “Oh, people just believe because that’s how they were raised.” There are a lot of things in your story that go against that, just like David. David wasn’t raised a Christian.

No! Not at all.

And now he believes it, and so there are rational evidential reasons, as well as just spiritual reasons and emotional reasons and existential reasons. A whole plethora of reasons to believe in the reality of God.

Yeah.

And your life and your story really demonstrates that. So as we’re coming to a close in your story, there are a lot of things, I think, that you could say to someone who is a curious skeptic, maybe somebody who looks at the Christian and sees something that is attractive, like the joy that you describe, but yet the intellectual depth, and that you, like you and David, who are brilliant people, can believe in God and do so for good reason and good grounding, and it’s not just something that you want. What would you say to someone who may be open towards taking a second look? or maybe even a first look? At Christianity.

Well, I would say be open, but I think probably anyone listening to this, I’m already preaching to the choir on some level. But I think that spending time reflecting on reasons you might not want to believe that have nothing to do with whether or not Christianity is true might be fruitful. To just really get real with yourself and say, “Is there maybe something else?” that it’s not so much that Christianity isn’t true, but apart from that, there might be other issues that you’re contending with. Because each of us is a whole person. It’s not just intellectual or emotional.

There are other things. I think you’re going to meet crummy Christians, and I would say don’t let them be the standard by which you judge Christianity. Maybe have a little leeway and ask yourself, “Do those Christians that I dislike, or the Christians that hurt me or that I find judgmental, do they really reflect who Jesus is?” Look into Jesus’s life and His teachings and think about how He lived and look for Christians that seem to be reflecting that and learn from them if you really want to learn about the Christian life. Keep seeking and reading and read both sides. I have so much conviction that Christianity is true that I believe it can withstand all of that scrutiny. But it’s probably just making that time and give it a chance and spend time reflecting and thinking, and God bless you if you’re on that journey.

Yeah. That’s good wisdom and advice, just towards being open, really, and pursuing where the evidence leads. So with regard to Christians, Marie, you’ve spoken about crummy Christians. And really contrasted them with more genuine Christians, those who try to follow and walk with Jesus more closely, and their lives reflect that. But you’ve also given, you and David both, just an incredible example, as well as Nabeel, of course, of what it might look like to be someone who is very bright and intellectually astute and able to go toe to toe with just about anyone who comes against them. So how would you advise us as Christians to either prepare or how we should live or engage with those who don’t believe?

Well, definitely in my story, I know it comes up a lot with certain stereotypes. I think that breaking stereotypes is important, and so that comes from Christians developing their own intellectual life, because I think that’s a huge stumbling block in our culture that’s very science minded, so I think that nurturing your intellectual life as a Christian and also your spiritual life. I think sometimes, especially with the intellectual-type Christians, you can kind of miss that piece a little bit, like how important that is. Because, I think it was Maya Angelou, she said people might forget what you say, but they won’t forget how you made them feel. And that’s probably a bad paraphrase, but something like that.

And so I think that developing your closeness to God is so important to how you convey Him to others and practicing the presence of God, truly practicing that presence of God and knowing Him on that deep level. And I think it kind of frees you from the sense that everything’s resting on you. I think that it’s a mistake to think, “I’ve got to win this argument. I’ve got to persuade this person right now,” but that might not be your part in their story. And each person is different, so we really have to be spiritually sensitive to where they are and to be listening to God and how we speak to people. And Jesus said that eternal life is to know Him and the One who sent Him, and so we, when we know Christ, we’re already partaking in eternal life right now. We’re already beginning to partake of that life, and we can offer a taste of immortality to others, the more we dwell in our reality and let it bear fruit in our lives. And I think that can be very attractive and persuasive and true. So that’s my advice to Christians.

Yeah. I think that’s a really great word. Something that’s really, especially in apologetic circles, maybe not emphasized as much, right? But there’s something really amazing. I know C.S. Lewis talks about it a lot, that we have, through Christ, the divine power to partake of God and for God to demonstrate Himself through us. And that really is the core of who we are and what we believe and how we live. And there’s something really wonderful about that. Thank you for reminding us, Marie. Again, as we’re closing our conversation, is there anything that we’ve missed or anything else you’d like to add here at the end? That you might have wanted to say? If not, that’s fine, too.

Well, I would say that God has become even more a present reality to me. As I mentioned, I have two children with a chronic illness, and I feel as though I’m a sentinel on the borderland between life and death. I’ve had to revive my children after finding them dead and flat-lined. And I have experienced miracles. I’ve come to the end of my rope. I would say I’m a very resilient person, but even human resilience comes to an end. And that’s where you begin to find that miracles happen and that God is really present in your life. He’s with me always, and I truly hope and pray that my story can encourage others and deepen their faith or lead them closer to God in some way.

Oh, I’m sure that it will. It really is beautiful, Marie. I love not only your vulnerability but also the stories and the thoughtfulness of everything, even from a child, the depth of the way that you felt and that you thought. And it is just a beautiful strand throughout, and here, again, at the end, I think the Lord really takes your story and your life, and He weaves such a beautiful tapestry, even through… Obviously, you’ve dealt with some incredible pain and difficulties, but yet he is there, and you are a living embodied example of everything you speak of. So thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your life and your journey with us.

It’s my pleasure.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast today to hear Marie’s story. You can find out more about her, about her website and the things that she was talking about on our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you’ve enjoyed it, I hope that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share the Side B Podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Jon Noyes was driven to fully live out his life-long atheism, but his pursuit was challenged when he began to consider which worldview best fit with reality.

Recommended Resources

A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions – Greg Koukl

The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between – Greg Koukl

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus – Gary Habermas and Michael Licona

CSLI Events & Resources

How to Pray for Others who are Suffering with Nancy Guthrie

January 21, 2022 at 8:00 pm Eastern

Registration Link

C.S. Lewis Institute Spiritual Checkup please go to www.cslewisinstitute.org/asc 

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. Often, those who are resolute in their own worldview don’t seem to change, but sometimes they do, and we are generally curious as to how that happens. 

Today, we’ll be listening to Jon Noyes’ surprising journey from atheism to Christianity. As an atheist, Jon’s list for reasons for disbelief in God and Christianity was long. In my research survey, he listed twelve distinct reasons supporting his once-held atheism. They range from lack of intellectual evidence and rationality to negative experience with Christian hypocrisy, from social and moral disdain to a personal distaste for religious people and institutions. There was hardly an unchecked box on the survey. He even took extra time to type in his strongly atheistic view that Christians were deluded and superstitious people who needed to change their false presuppositions and false beliefs. For him, atheism was objective, known through science, logic, and experience. There was no doubt that God did not exist. He enjoyed the benefits of disbelief, not only intellectually but in social relationships it gave and the moral freedom it granted. He was quite happy as an atheist. 

Jon was a convinced atheist with no intention towards changing. Yet today Jon’s passion is helping others discover the truth of Christianity, having completed an advanced degree in the study of worldview, and has worked full time in Christian ministry. It’s clear that a dramatic transformation has taken place. I hope you join in to hear his whole story, not only what informed his atheism but what breached those stalwart walls and prompted him to reconsider what he once thought so ignorant. What would cause someone so resolute to change his view about God? To move from an anti-theist, atheist position to becoming a passionate follower of Jesus Christ? I can’t wait to hear, and I hope you’ll come along. 

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jon. It’s great to have you on the podcast today. 

Thank you so much, Jana, it’s great to be with you. I love the work that you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a few weeks now.

Fantastic! Fantastic! As we’re getting started, Jon, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, so we’ll know who’s telling this story? 

Sure. So my story is probably typical, average. I grew up in a town south of Boston, Massachusetts, called Plymouth. The home of the pilgrims. To a pretty normal family. I grew up playing soccer and enjoying life in a suburb of Boston, and I just had a great childhood. I went to Plymouth North High School. When I graduated there, I moved to Washington, DC, and went to study criminal justice at American University. And I loved DC and living in our nation’s capital for, well the four years of college, but then after that, I got my first job, different than what I thought I was going to be doing. I ended up actually being a paralegal at a fairly prestigious law firm in DC, working on a lot of appellate work in front of the Supreme Court and having just a lot of fun in Washington, DC, and then I felt a pull to pull me out to California, so about 15 years ago now, I hopped on a plane and moved to sunny southern California, where I’ve been ever since, and I absolutely love where I live. I live in Newbury Park, California. It’s maybe about 45 miles north of Los Angeles and 8 miles from the coast, and this valley that I live in, it’s just the best place to raise a family.

And I have a beautiful wife. Her name is Riana, and she’s my rock. I love her with all my heart. And then I have four amazing little girls, so I have Eva, who’s ten. Phoebe, who’s almost nine. I’ve got Joelle, who’s seven, and then I have little Annette, who is four. She just turned four last month. So, as with everybody right now, I’m just figuring out life and how to raise a family and lead during this time of uncertainty.

Yeah. This is definitely a time of uncertainty. But yeah. Thank you for giving us a little introduction to who you are. I can tell, even though you’ve been in California for a while, you certainly haven’t lost that Massachusetts accent. I can hear that popping through from time to time. 

As I get more comfortable—so when I get passionate, and by passionate, I mean animated, it comes out. And then also as I get more comfortable, the accent really starts coming out. So if you don’t understand what I’m saying, I’m really, really sorry.

Oh, no! I think we can—you have a really great voice, too, so I think we can all understand what you’re saying. 

So, Jon, you said you grew up in Massachusetts. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about the religious culture there. Was there much of one? And what did that look like? 

Yeah. That’s a great question. I have a few friends back East who would claim to be religious, and when I say religious, I mean Catholic mostly, but it’s a cultural Catholicism. When I say that, I mean they don’t really go to Mass. They don’t worship God. It’s more of, you know, “My family is Catholic, so I’m Catholic.” And that probably describes maybe a third of my friends growing up. And then the other two thirds, I would say, are those which now we consider the “nones,” right? They have no religious affiliation whatsoever. My family in particular, we have Catholic roots going back three or four generations, but my family, we never practiced anything, really. And what that did is, in the cultural climate, it kind of allowed—well, a good thing is it allowed me to explore worldviews. It allowed me to explore my own convictions. However, the bad part of that is I wasn’t guided at all, and I became an atheist. By the time I was in high school, I was an atheist, and nobody ever really pushed back on my atheism. It was just normal. And that, I think, is indicative of the culture in the Northeast. I’m not saying that there aren’t any Christians there. There certainly are some really, really great churches that are doing awesome things, just none really where I grew up.

One of the most interesting things, actually. In Plymouth, I was just back East maybe two months ago and walking around the hometown where I grew up and kind of reminiscing, and we have a lot of obviously old architecture in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the first church that was ever built sits up on top of this hill. It still stands today. I think it was built in the late 1600s, and it’s still there. And it was a vibrant church for 150 years or whatnot, but now it’s actually a Universal Unitarian Church. And that is actually kind of the story, I feel like, of the Northeast. It started out with deep roots in the Christian faith, but then, over time, it kind of just gave way to a relativism and an inclusivism, and so now I would say most people, that I know at least, in the Northeast, in my circle of friends, my influences, are not religious really at all.

It was interesting growing up. Actually, my earliest memory of church—so, for some strange reason—and we never went to church, ever. We never talked about God in my family. I mean I literally have no recollection of the topic of God or Jesus. I actually had very little understanding of who God was, accurately at least, or who Jesus is, until I became a Christian. But my earliest recollection of religion growing up is actually, for some strange reason, my parents wanted me to get my first communion in the Catholic Church. Again, it’s a cultural thing. This is what you do. So they had me go to Sunday school, CCD, and I ended up getting kicked out of CCD. I was a challenging child, so my earliest memory is the Catholic priest of the church right down the street from my house kind of walking me out by the collar of my neck because I had done something. I don’t know what, but I definitely deserved this, I’m sure, and I remember my mom pulling around the church cul-de-sac in her blue Ford station wagon, the priest opening up the door, gently guiding me inside the car. And it was the summer, so I remember the window open, passenger side window, and him leaning in and just saying to my mom, “I’d appreciate it if you’d just never bring your son back here again.”

Oh, my! 

And it sticks in my mind, you know? I’m not going to relate that or put much weight on that led me to becoming an atheist or anything like that. It’s just an interesting commentary that that’s my earliest memory of really anything religious in my life, anything significant at least. So it was—I mean I’m sure I deserved it. I’ve always been a questioner. I’ve asked questions ad nauseam of just about anything, but—part of it was seeking. Part of it was just trying to stump people, even when I was—how old are you with a first communion? Maybe thirteen or something. So not even that old. But that’s my earliest memory.

And it’s interesting, and why I bring it up is because it’s the cultural component. That we do this simply because this is what we do. There’s no real meaning behind it. So my parents were willing to allow me to become catechized, willing to expose me to Catholic doctrine and teaching, but there was no meaning behind it at all. And that, for a kid, I think, produces a lot of confusion. Especially if you really do start leaning into these things and you realize that there’s significance to what we believe. It matters. Ideas have consequences. So in one instance you’re getting taught one thing at home. My mom would always say, “You do you. I’ll do me,” or whenever I was trouble or something like that, it was all relativism. But yet on the weekends they had no problem sending me to Catholic training, ultimately, where—well, I guess relativism has seeped in there, too, but I remember them trying to argue with me against relativism at the time at least. I mean, this is now, oh, my gosh! Like thirty years.

I bet that would cause a bit of confusion if you really tried to think about it with some clarity. But you said also in there that you had the tendency to question and also to challenge. As you were growing up, and I’m sure you were just fine in leaving catechism and CCD behind when you got kicked out, that it was just something you didn’t have to do, but as you were growing up and through those—you said your teenage years. You said around thirteen, fourteen. Did you have an opportunity to challenge anyone, any Christian or anyone with that kind of a worldview, a religious worldview, when you were pushing away from it? Did you have anyone in your world who represented what you would consider to be a Christian? 

Yeah. That’s a great question. I’d say through high school, no. I really didn’t know. My best friend growing up, to this day, he considers himself Catholic. I don’t know when the last time he’s been to Mass was. I don’t think he is truly sold out on the worldview. He certainly believes God exists. I think he’d probably say a few meaningful things about who Jesus is, but I never pressed into anybody, and when I did, they never had answers for me. And then up through college is really where I started leaning into my atheism. And when I say that is I tried to live my atheism out consistently. And so whenever anybody brought something up from a distinctly religious perspective, whether that be Christianity, Islam, Buddhist, whatever it might be. I liked to press into them and lead them in a conversation, trying to see if they could defend the things that they say are true. And I had a lot of fun doing it, to be honest with you.

But during specifically the high school years or my young adulthood, early years I should say, no. I didn’t really have anybody—nobody took their faith seriously in my life. I guess it’s just a symptom of where I grew up. Until I became a Christian, honestly… actually, until I met my wife, I should say. Until I met my wife here in California, I hadn’t ever really met a Christian who was walking the walk. I’d met people who were talking the talk but then very quickly as I—I’d love to take them out for a cup of coffee. Or my favorite place was going to the bar and buying them a beer and talking about religious things. And I would press into them pretty hard. And that, I think, is actually one of the—there’s two sad components to that in my mind. One is the people who claimed to be Christians. And some of them, I think, were Christians. I mean, I’m not saying that they weren’t. But they didn’t really have a rational justification for why they believed what they believed. And when I would press them, they’d say, “I believe this because the Bible says so and so.” And at the time, I’d say, “I don’t care what the Bible says. Why should I trust the Bible?” And that’s where the conversation started.

They also never really tried to share the Gospel with me at all. Again, I didn’t hear the Gospel until I was in my mid-twenties and after I had been kind of put on this journey from atheism to Christianity. And that’s something I think is just really important and should be fundamental in our lives. We should know what the Gospel is. And we should be willing to share that. And I always, in hindsight, when I think back on my story, that nobody ever shared the Gospel with me is concerning.

I’m curious. You made the comment that you tried to live your atheism consistently. You challenged others, perhaps at the college level, to defend what they believed to be true. Did you look deeply at your own atheism in terms of its own implications for your life, for reality? 

Yeah. I mean absolutely. So in college, I studied criminal justice, which, in its very nature, lots of moral conversations come up. When you’re talking about theories of justice, systems of justice, the judicial system, where laws come from. And Constitutional Law is one of the classes I took in undergrad, and by default, these conversations that we were having in class were moral from the get-go, so when I had friends in class… There was one gentleman I remember. His name was Chris, and he was from Connecticut, and him and I were, I guess, the loud ones in the class. We liked to participate in conversations and discussions, and he was Christian. And he would bring up the idea that there’s an objective morality, for example, to base our laws in. Certain things are wrong, not because we say they’re wrong but because they’re wrong in and of themselves, objectively wrong. And I would press back at him on that and then say, “Well, no. No, no. It’s obvious we came up with these laws. I mean this is the law of the land. The Constitution was written by men.” And we’d go back and forth.

So there was great dialogue in that, and as I got older and digging into these classes, I really started to lean into my atheism, meaning I tried to live consistently with my worldview, and I realized that, as I pressed into the world around me… I guess I realized a few things. First is there’s an objective nature to reality. Meaning we don’t construct our own reality out there. The world isn’t how we want it to be. And I tried to I guess justify that according to my atheism. If atheism is true, ultimately might makes right, and I’m a pretty big guy. I’m 6’3″, 250 pounds. I probably wasn’t that heavy in college. But I was still big. And I was bigger than a lot of kids. So I should just be able to take what I want, do what I want. And I started trying to really lean into that and live that out, and it led to some really dark places really quickly. Greg Koukl, when he talks about this—he’s my boss at Stand to Reason now. And he calls them bumps in the reality, and this would be the bump of morality. The bump of ouch. And when I leaned into my atheism, I was realizing that, no, there are certain right and wrongs out there, and they’re independent of my feelings towards them personally, which led me to have to come to the conclusion that there’s an objective moral depth, moral law to the way things are.

And that’s not the only place where I bumped into reality. It’s throughout my whole story. I remember, in California, because of the weather out here, it’s just so beautiful. I’d stay out at night, and I’d just look up into the sky, and an atheist, I’m thinking, like, you know… But I remember distinctly one night, in my back yard. I was living in Hollywood, and I remember reclining with a bunch of friends. We’re in lawn chairs in the back and just relaxing. A beautiful California night. Staring up into the sky and wondering, “Why is it all here?” and then how, “How is it here?” All the beautiful things that I was seeing in that sky and even the creation, the world around me, how’d it get here? And that’s another bump into reality, the bump of stuff, you know? And I think maybe a lot of your listeners are familiar with the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, and I didn’t know that this was what I was thinking about at the time, but I was thinking, “Well, nothing comes from nothing, so that means everything had to come from something. And what is that something? I see the world around me. It’s not a mental construct. We’re not these brains in vats. There’s a physical reality out there that exists. Where’d it come from?”

Because it couldn’t just pop into existence. That’s anti scientific. So it had to come from somewhere, and as I dug into that, I started realizing the best explanation for the physical nature, the physical world around us, was an uncreated Creator ultimately. An unembodied mind, a creative mind that is immensely powerful and that had creative depth, that wanted this to come. I didn’t know how else to justify that. And again, my atheism—I had no category for that. So on two fronts now, atheism, my atheism, which I was sticking to hard, was failing me. It wasn’t able to explain the world around me, reality, the way things really are. And then I remember also… I call it the bump of me. There’s a clear aspect to us that’s nonphysical. In hindsight, me and you, Jana, we’d call it our soul, but as an atheist, I had no category for the existence of my mind, for example.

I remember really thinking about what love is and, as an atheist, really, “Well, what is love?” And I was trying to live out my atheism. And I had no place for love in my worldview. Because I would’ve said it’s not even a feeling. I would’ve said it’s a reaction that’s happening chemically in your brain that’s making certain… Neurons are firing to make you feel a certain way towards something, but that’s clearly not true, because, for example, I love my Mom no matter how I think about her at the moment. Whether I’m mad at her or sad or whatever. I clearly love her, so there’s something that’s happening in me that’s controlled by me, not a product of a naturalistic process in my brain.

And then also introspection. How can I be introspective? How can I even think the thoughts that I’m thinking and process stuff? Why am I even struggling with these existential issues as I press into my atheism? Because according to atheism I shouldn’t be doing that. There’s no place for that in my worldview.

And now, kind of getting back to your question about talking to people about this stuff. It wasn’t until I met my wife, really, in southern California. I actually met Riana my very first night in California. I was literally right off the plane. I was at a party, and she walked in. And from the very moment I met her, she just enamored me. I was just… oh my gosh! Like, “Who is this girl?”  And we got to know each other, and we started dating. I didn’t know she was a Christian for a while, and then she did something crazy. She asked me to go to church with her. And I’ve done crazier things, Jana, for the affections of a woman than go to church on Sunday with her. So I said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll go to this weird place with you,” and it was. It was strange. It was really weird. But it was really good, too.

And it wasn’t until then that I actually met people who took their worldview seriously. Up until then I never got answers from people. Ever. And then finally now, and there’s a group of men there that I’m still close with. I haven’t been to that church now in about ten years. I’ve just moved on. But I’m still really close with the pastor and a couple of the men that took me under their wing, even as an atheist, and were willing to put up with my… I guess I should say put up with. They were willing to humor my questions, even though they didn’t necessarily have the answers. And they were willing to give of themselves, give their time and their patience and really walk with me and struggle through certain things with me.

Kind of a side note is we started going to this church, and my wife… She’s always been Christian. She would say that she has always… she was raised to believe in God. And the Christian God. And even though she was maybe backslidden a little bit, she wasn’t living it out, she would say that she had a strong faith. And she wanted to get involved in the church, and she wanted to become a member of this church, so I went to the membership classes with her. Trying to get more ammo against the Christian. And part of the membership process at this church was to meet with the pastor and his wife, and we met with them together, and I went into this meeting.

I’m looking back on it now. I was so conceited and arrogant is probably the right word. I went in there with notes. I mean, I had a stack… I’m putting my fingers out. It’s probably about an inch thick of carbon dating, questions on evolution, proving that the Bible isn’t what it claims to be. All these errors in the Bible. I had in my mind that I was going to go into this meeting, and I was going to de-convert this pastor, and that would’ve been a notch on my belt, you know? Because I’ve never talked to a Christian to this point that’s been able to defend their worldview to my liking, so how cool would it be if I de-converted a pastor?

And we’re sitting there, and I asked all my questions, and it was really great. Pastor Dave is Dave Polus, so patient, and he answered a lot of my questions to my satisfaction. To a lot of them, he said, “I don’t know. That’s a really great question. I never thought about it.” And the best thing is just he was just honest and real. He wasn’t trying to blow smoke at me or convince me, really, of anything. He was there to listen to me, and he answered my questions to the best of his ability. And at the end of the meeting, they hugged my wife, Pastor Dave and his wife, Amy. They hugged Riana, and they said, “We’d love to have you as a member.” Because my wife was Christian, clearly. And then Dave takes my hand in his, and he shakes it, and he says, “You know what, Jon? We have enough members now. Thanks for coming in.” Because if he had offered me membership, I would’ve been like, “This is exactly what I think that this is. This is all a crock. You just want my butt in your seat, and you want my bucks in your coffer, and that’s all you care about, exactly what I thought of the church.” And he didn’t. He said, “You know what? Keep coming around, but you can’t be a member here,” and I really respected that.

And then the best part of this is that he, as he’s shaking my hand, he pulled a book off of the bookshelf, an apologetics book, and I’d never heard of the word apologetics in my entire life, and he gave it to me, and he said, “You know what? Some of the answers that you’re looking for, some of the answers to the questions that you’ve been asking that I couldn’t answer, I think they might be in this book.” And I took the book home and I read it probably a dozen times, and for the first time, I was getting intellectual answers, respectable answers to the deep questions that I had, and now you combine that with the soul searching I’ve been doing. I’ve been realizing that, as I was trying to live my atheism out in reality, I kept bumping into reality in those areas, and then you combined this—okay, now there’s intellectual answers out there, and that led me to another book and then another book and then another book.

And then also right at that same time—God is just so good. Right at that same time, my future in-laws, they gave me my first Bible. They gave me a New Believer’s Bible. It’s the NLT, the New Living Translation. It’s, I think, edited by Greg Laurie, and it has cool commentary. Very simple. You know, “Who is Jesus?” “Who is Satan?” “Who is God?” “What’s the Trinity?” And these cornerstones of faith is what they call it in there. And I read that cover to cover over the span of three months. So I was being ministered to through just the nature of reality, trying to press into my worldview, seeing that the world is a certain way and my worldview wasn’t able to explain that. I was being ministered to by these Christian apologists who wrote phenomenal books that just put their ideas out there for people like me to struggle and wrestle with. And then I was also being ministered to by the word of God, and then that’s really—so my mind and my body were being ministered to, reality and the intellect, and now my soul was being ministered to through the word of God, and it was in that direct encounter really with the word of God, as I sat on my morning and afternoon train to and from work and read Genesis to Revelation, when I put the Bible down after interacting with it, struggling and wrestling with it, I had to draw the conclusion that God is the Christian God, and more specifically, Jesus is who He claimed to be.

And that was a turning place for me. It led me into a deep study of the resurrection and trying to see if my naturalism, if my atheism could explain the facts surrounding the resurrection. And after that study, and I remember sitting on my couch, and I had the… This is when I relented. I was sitting on my couch, struggling with—you have all this evidence centered around specifically the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. There’s these core pieces. Habermas now says maybe there’s 18 agreed-upon facts centered around the resurrection of Jesus. And when I say that, it means there were 18 pieces of history, events in history that are believed to have happened regardless of our worldview, so Christians believe that these things happened, Muslims believe these things happened, atheists believe these things happened. One would be an empty tomb, which is a more recent one. Or Jesus’s crucifixion. He died on the cross. That’s what happened. We generally believe that Jesus actually died on the cross. His disciples had what they experienced or described as an experience with the risen Jesus. He was dead. He was buried. And then the disciples said they interacted with Him again alive. But these things, people across the worldview spectrum believe happened, so these are pieces of evidence for the resurrection.

Now I have to put those—this is the way I thought, at least, at the time. “I have to take these pieces of evidence, these building blocks, and I need to come up with a hypothesis that explains them cohesively and together, not independent of one another.” And I remember sitting on this couch, and thought that went through my mind, Jana, was—this is really what I thought. And this is the turning point for me. “Maybe aliens came down and did something crazy futuristic to the body of Jesus, so that he got brought back to life.” And then I remember thinking, “If I’m willing to posit aliens and not God, I have a serious intellectual problem going on.” And right then and there, I said, “I’m cooked,” and then, as I’m saying this, the hairs are standing up on my arms because it was such a turning time, a turning place in my life.

Everything changed for me. Everything. My focus of life and how I was living shifting dramatically. And I haven’t looked back since. I’ve just caught fire. And it’s just so cool even now, just talking about that it. That was a really long answer to your very short question.

No, no. You know, what strikes me as you’re telling your story is that you—what I really appreciate really is that you were an intellectually driven atheist, honest about your worldview, pursuing whether or not it was true as related to the reality and the evidence that you were finding. You continued pursuing in light of the fact that you had some push back, some bumps in reality, but you were still trying to justify your atheism, but you were becoming open enough to consider another perspective. I think that that openness and your intellectual honesty is to be really praised, because I think we live in a time and a place where we have a tendency to just hold onto our worldview at any cost, no matter what other viewpoints may say or even what reality might say. We become so insular in our own perspectives that we’re not willing to even consider another point of view. It sounds like you went on a journey but you were willing to consider the evidence as it came. And I think that’s huge. 

And that’s true even today, right? I don’t believe what I believe because it makes me feel good or because it’s—it certainly hasn’t made me any more money. I mean I was making really good money. I was having a ball, so it’s not like I’m having a better life now than I’m a Christian. I don’t believe for those reasons. It didn’t make me popular or gain me any type of fame or anything like this. I believe what I believe because it’s true. And I’ve always felt that way. And this is one of the pieces… I teach a class called Discipleship at a local small Christian high school, and as I’m discipling these boys, these seniors… Just yesterday, I was telling them our main goal in life is the pursuit of truth. We don’t ever want to believe anything that’s not true. And I was like that as an atheist, and I’m like that as a Christian. And my mind is still open. I would love to talk to anybody. If you think Christianity is false, then give me the case as to why it’s false and why your explanation of reality, your reasons to believe the world is a certain way, something that explains the world around us is better. If you want to explain that to me and prove that to me, I’m open to it. Because certainly if Christianity isn’t true, I don’t want to believe it. If Jesus hasn’t been raised from the dead… I mean this is scripture, right? So Paul says if Jesus hasn’t been raised from the dead, then we’re to be pitied above all men.

Right. 

Not only that, but we’re still dead in our sins. And I might as well… If Christianity isn’t true, I might as well go back to my atheistic living, my hedonism, pursuit of my own pleasures, than living this life I live now. So I believe what I believe because it’s true. And that’s what I’ve always felt. Truth has been paramount to me my entire life. Nobody likes being lied to. Nobody likes getting the wool pulled over their eyes. Why would that be any different with our worldview? We should apply that to our worldviews. And so we should all be digging into… Whoever your listening audience is, you should be digging into your worldview. You should be pressing at it. Even the Christian. Don’t ever get complacent in what your worldview has to offer. Don’t ever just take it for granted. Dig into it. Test all things, holding fast to that which is true is what the Bible says. This isn’t a blind faith. It never has been for me. There’s too much riding on it.

Right. No, absolutely. Now you obviously, again, went through quite a journey of looking at truth, looking at reality, reading books, reading the Bible, and you came to a place, particularly, I guess, after considering the resurrection, that it was true. You came to a belief or an intellectual assent in the truth and reality of the Christian worldview. But, as you and I know, there’s more to it than intellectual belief. And you mentioned earlier something about the Gospel, that Christians had never told you about the Gospel. And I’m wondering how the Gospel played—what it is, first of all. How did you come to learn it? Was it through reading the Bible? Because you said you read it cover to cover on your train ride. And so I’m wondering how you put the pieces together between your intellectual assent and giving your life to someone? 

Yeah. So part of my pursuit of my atheism, one of the things that became very clear to me is that the world isn’t as it ought to be. One of the common experiences we all share, and when I say we all, I mean every person who’s ever lived on this planet shares the understanding that something is deeply wrong with the world. Whether it be a political issue, whether it be a family issue, an issue with friends or an issue with your job, the world around us screams out that it’s not as it ought to be. And if there’s a way that it’s not as it ought to be, that means there was a way that it ought to be. And that led me into just a pursuit of, “Okay, how ought it be?” and that’s really where we find the start of the Gospel. And this experience that we’re talking about today, this is why I think, ultimately why the Christian worldview is true. It’s because of the Gospel. The Gospel is simply the good news of what God has done through and in Jesus Christ. And it finds its beginning in a perfect creation. Everything was created perfect and right. God, at the end of His creation days, looked at it, and He stepped back, and He said, “It’s good.” He created man and woman, and He said they are very good. And everything was as it was.

But then something went wrong. A problem got introduced to the reality of the world. And that is sin. Eve had an interaction with the serpent and believed the lies. Did God really say? You know? And that’s something that we all struggle with. We all want… ultimately, we want to be our own kind of god. When I was little, I used to say, “I’m the boss of my own self,” you know? And that’s how we want to live life, and that was what happened with Eve. “Did God really say you can’t eat of that tree? He’s just trying to hold you back,” is what he said to her. And then she believed him and took of the fruit and ate and gave to her husband, to Adam, and he ate, and from that moment on, sin has entered the world, causing everything to kind of go awry. And that’s why things ain’t as it ought to be.

But the cool thing about the Gospel is, unlike any other worldview that’s out there, there’s a solution in the Gospel. There’s a solution in Christianity to the fundamental problem that we all experience. And that solution is that Jesus bore our sins on the cross. He bore the penalty. He turned aside God’s judgment, God’s wrath from us as payment for our sins. He took these things on, the brokenness of our lives, and then through that action, through the crucifixion, we’re restored. That shattered relationship with God. So you see, when we fell into sin, the main problem—yes, the world isn’t as it ought to be. Yes, we harm and sin against each other. But the main issue that we sin against God. We break that relationship that we once had, that was once had with Adam and Eve that was perfect. And that shattered relationship, Jesus, He rebuilds it in the context of the crucifixion and the resurrection, and then that’s now played out in the existence of the church. There’s a new life that we human beings, we find in Christ, and it’s granted out of the sheer grace of God. It’s not received by anything that we do. There’s nothing that we can do to earn God’s favor. It’s a free gift as we repent of our sins and turn to Jesus. We confess Him as the Lord, and then we bow to Him joyfully as we come to realize these things.

So the Gospel is the good news, and it’s the good news of what God has done in Jesus, by taking the fundamental problem of reality, that there’s something wrong with the world, and completely restoring it. Now, it’s not completely restored yet. We’re still waiting for the consummation, the final product, but it’s also something—just because it’s not here completely doesn’t mean we can’t experience it now, and I’ve experienced that in my life. As I took a deep look at the person that I was and the person I was becoming to be as I was chasing the morality that was granted to me through my atheism and then realizing that I was the problem! The problem wasn’t out there, like I used to think. As I started digging into my worldview, I realized that I was the problem. And it’s a personal problem and it needs a personal solution, but the solution, while it’s personal, is completely outside of us. Because I don’t have the capability to fix the problem. And it has to come from something else. And that’s where it came from. That’s the good news, the Gospel. That’s the Gospel, is that the solution to my personal problem comes through the Person, the life, and the work of Jesus Christ. As He lived the perfect life, the life that you and I, Jana—we should be living that perfect life, but we can’t because of sin.

As He went to the cross and died that perfect death, the perfect death that you and I, that we, everybody listening, that we deserved to die because of our sin, paying a price that you and I, we can’t afford. There’s not enough money in existence or ever been in existence to pay that debt. But Jesus paid it on that cross. And then it doesn’t stop there as He died and was buried in the tomb. The best part of the good news is three days later—He didn’t lie dead, and this is really what separates Jesus from any other God out there. He didn’t remain dead. He walked again. Three days later, He rose from the dead. He was raised by his Father, by God the Father, and in so doing we find the promise that all long for. Everlasting life, complete healing. Every tear will be dried. Every disease and infirmity will be cured. Because of that resurrection, we’re guaranteed a promise of eternal life with God the Father and his beautiful Son, empowered by the Holy Spirit to live perfect, sinless lives in glory. And that’s when Jesus comes back and ushers in the new creation, obviously.

But that’s the Gospel, the good news. The solution to the universal problem that we all experience, that we all know that’s out there. And I don’t know any other worldview that offers a more robust, accurate solution. It’s awesome.

Wow! It sounds like you’re convinced you found reality, and that reality is in the Person of Jesus. 

That’s right. It’s amazing!

Yeah. It’s incredible! Now you mentioned that everything changed in your life after you accepted this truth, not only for all of reality but for yourself personally. How did things change in your life? How are you experiencing this good news as applied to you personally? How is your atheistic life different from what you’re experiencing now? 

That’s a really, really good question, Jana. Wow. So there’s practical things. From what I choose to do and what I choose not to do. And I want to be kind of clear here. Before I was a Christian, when I was an atheist, I used to think Christians were boring. I didn’t want to be a Christian because I thought I’d have to be ruled by this Sky Daddy who was basically just sitting up in the sky waiting for me to do something wrong so he could punish me. And that’s so far from the truth. So when I say that my behavior has changed very practically, like practical living changed. How I spend my money, how I spend my time certainly. The relationships I chose to keep and the relationships that I chose to get rid of because they were extremely unhealthy. Not that they weren’t fun. They were unhealthy. So things like that changed, but it wasn’t because I was scared of a God that was waiting to send bolts of lightning down to punish me. My desires, my wants, and my focus shifted out of a reverence and a respect, as opposed to a fear of punishment.

So obviously, as an atheist, I didn’t try to live my life according to the standards of Jesus. I tried to live my life according to my own standards, completely subjective. And there is some overlap there. I think I tried my best to love other people to the best of my understanding and knowledge of what love is, but it wasn’t until I became a Christian that I understand that we’re told, all people, we’re told to love God and love people. That’s the great commandment. So as I became a Christian, I tried to align my life very practically into how Jesus has told me to live my life.

Certain behaviors had to stop. I used to drink a lot. I used to love to party and go out and have “fun.” That was my life. That had to stop clearly, and it’s not because… Again, it’s not this… I’m fearful of people listening who maybe don’t share my worldview or our worldview, Jana, thinking what I used to think, that this is your typical Christian who isn’t doing stuff because he’s fearful of punishment. I live and stand firm in the grace of God. There’s nothing that can separate you—if you’re a Christian, there is nothing that can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. There is now no condemnation in Jesus. That’s what the Bible tells us. So I don’t refrain from my sinful activity, and I don’t refrain from going out and drinking and having extramarital affairs because I’m worried about God’s judgment or punishment on me. I’m refraining from those things because I now want to honor God in all that I do, whether I eat, sleep, or drink, do all unto the glory of God, is what the Bible tells us. And that’s where my focus has shifted. And that’s where the dramatic shift comes in. I’m no longer the master of my own ship. I have a new Master, and He’s a good Master. And I know that He wants not only the best for my life… He not only wants me to have the best life now, but he also wants me to have the best life for ever and ever and ever.

So my focus completely shifted off of pursuing my own desires to pursuing the desires of the One who created me, my Heavenly Father.

I now get to serve God with every aspect of my being. And no comparison on a naturalistic perspective.

That’s an incredibly transformed perspective. Loves and living. That’s amazing. Jon, as we’re coming to a close, I know that there are probably some skeptics out there. Perhaps they’re curious enough, as you were, to explore the evidence and to go where the evidence leads, and I wondered if you could speak or give advice to someone who perhaps is where you once were as an atheist. 

Yeah. Absolutely. Press in to your worldview. Don’t take the common answers at face value. When somebody teaches you something or you hear something… In hindsight, Jana, when I’m thinking about my atheism, when I was an atheist, I carried with me all the atheistic slogans. I used what I would call the nail in God’s coffin, my argument from the problem of evil. I had a surface level understanding of the problem of evil, but then when I started digging into it, I actually realized that it’s not just… I mean, it is a problem for the Christians. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a problem for everybody, though. It was my problem, too. And when you get outside of yourself, you’ve got to kind of step back and be intellectually honest and say, “This is a problem for the Christian. What about my solution? And which one’s better here?” So pursue your own worldview to where it leads, and then not only that, but then, if you’re listening to this and you’re an atheist, live it out. Try to live it out in a consistent fashion.

I have a really, really wonderful friend, and she claims to be a relativist. And she says that. She says, “No, I believe relativism is true. We make our own system of rights and wrongs.” Well, I leaned into her about that and said, “Well, how is that even possible?” There’s one political candidate that she just can’t stand, and I said, “But you’re rejecting this person on moral values, but those are just that person’s moral values, and those are up to him to make.” And so there’s this check there, and she actually was honest enough to say, “You know what? You might be right.” Now, that’s not an argument to convince her of the Christian worldview. I’m just saying let’s be consistent with our worldviews. Which worldview is most consistent with reality? Lean into it. Don’t take people’s words for it.

Those atheistic slogans I used to carry with me. When I started actually really trying to dig into them and see what the meaning was behind them and where they came from, when I started reading deeply about evolution and where we came from, the solutions didn’t satisfy. So in one aspect, the answers are in your own worldview. If your worldview can’t give you the answers to certain fundamental things of reality. If they can’t answer the fundamental questions of reality, meaning, purpose, origins, destiny, morality, then you might want to consider a different worldview. And how well does that worldview line up with reality? And so that’s what I’d say is dig in to your questions. And that goes for the Christian, too. Don’t ever be satisfied with answers that don’t satisfy.

Right. 

One of my recommendations is, when I read scripture, and this is for Christian and non-Christian alike. If you’re going to dig into the scriptures, and I highly recommend that you do, start with the Gospel of Mark. It’s really quick. You can read it in three or four days. But don’t just power read it. Christian and non-Christian alike, read it, and when you come to a place that’s like, “What? What are you talking about? What’s this mean?” Stop and actually think about it. What does this mean?

“What’s this? Let’s wrestle with this.” Don’t ever take your worldview for granted. Lean into it. Press into it. I said, earlier on, that there’s consequences. Ideas have consequences, and the consequences are dire. There is nothing more important to think about than the nature of reality and whether or not God exists. Because how you answer that question is going to dictate how you live practically your entire life. And especially as you seek to live out your life. Does your worldview explain the things that you’re trying to live out? So dig in, press in. And that’s the other thing, is don’t ever give up. Don’t take unsatisfying answers as gospel truth. Dig in, press in, don’t ever give up. And enjoy the process.

No, no. That’s great. That’s great. And finally, if you wanted to just turn and talk to the Christian in terms of how they can best engage with those who don’t believe, perhaps the way they live their lives. You know, in a nutshell, in a moment, can you give a word of advice to the Christian? 

Two things. One is be confident because we have a very powerful ally on our side, and that is reality. Reality, and when I say reality I mean the way things really are, is on our side. So we don’t ever need to shy away from any topic. We don’t ever need to worry about pressing into any issue. It all falls back on the fact that we don’t want to believe things that are false. We just don’t. So if it’s false, I want to know, and we need to lead with that perspective. We need to dig into the hard issues and with the understanding that reality is actually on our side. I think atheists especially, or certain other worldviews, come across as intellectually robust or maybe they have more answers, and it’s just not true. Christianity, in recent times, I feel like has gotten away from an intellectual stance. We were seen as… Christians are oftentimes seen as anti intellectual, and there’s nothing further from the truth.

And the second piece goes along on this, on the coattails of this, read. If you’re a Christian, I hear it all the time as a pastor and as an apologist, “I don’t like to read.” Well, you’ve got to learn to like to read. Read widely. Read people you disagree with often. Read ancient works. Read the church fathers. And most importantly, read your Bibles. Every day, read your Bibles. Start memorizing, committing scripture to your mind. And you’ll see amazing things happen, and you’ll see confidence come through.

Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Some of us, the worst fear that we have is that we’ll talk to somebody and they’ll know more than us. I think that’s fantastic because it’s an opportunity for me personally, if this happens to me, I get a free education. I get to sit and ask some strategic questions to somebody and say, “Wow! You obviously know way more about this than me.” This happened to me with a friend. He’s a marine biologist. He has his PhD from MIT. I mean this guy is brilliant. And I didn’t know that when I started the conversation. And very quickly, I realized, as we were talking about evolution. Very quickly, I realized I was so far out of my depth with this man. I was like, “He’s playing a different sport,” and he was schooling me. But I don’t have a problem with that. Because, again, I don’t want to believe something that’s false, so instead of trying to prove my point, I’d just sit there and ask him, “Well, tell me. Tell me all about this. Why am I wrong? And where am I wrong? Show me and prove it. What can I be reading so I know more?”

And one of the ways that we can learn how to converse really, really well is reading Koukl’s book. I don’t know if you’ve read it, Jana. The tactics book?

Yes. 

It’s phenomenal. And the tactics in that book help give us the confidence that we need to go into a conversation. So the first thing is we have reality on our side. We don’t need to be scared of anything pressing in. Christian worldview best explains the way the world really is. Second thing is read and read often and widely. Read people you don’t believe or trust. Read people that you don’t agree with. Read old stuff. Especially church fathers and things like this. And read your Bibles. And then also read Koukl, I guess.

Yes. Yes. 

Yeah. And don’t be afraid to press in and don’t be afraid to not have the answers. Nobody has all the answers. That’s why we’re not God.

Yeah. I think that’s really excellent advice, and if I could add one more Greg Koukl book to your advice to reading Tactics, I would say his recent book called The Story of Reality. If you’re a Christian or even not. That really, in a very accessible way, speaks to everything you’ve been talking about in terms of what we experience in our life and in the world and how the Christian worldview is the best explanation for reality. 

Yeah.

Having listened to you, I’m also equally… not only inspired by your story but also very challenged, as someone, as anyone should be listening to your story, to really not take whatever worldview you have for granted but actually be an open pursuer of truth and after truth. Whatever that is, because it will lead you where you need to go, and if you’re pursuing truth with an openness like you have, even if you began like you did, in an effort to disprove, you were still open enough to not shut down anything that conflicted with your own worldview. You were open to receive it and to question it and to challenge it. And it led to where you are. So I think we can all take, again, a kind of inspiration from all of that, from what we’ve heard today, and move from this conversation and be re-inspired towards seeking in a very intentional way what it is that we believe, why we believe it, and does it match with reality. 

So thank you for bringing that to us today, Jon. I really, really appreciate it. 

Well, thank you, Jana. And thank you again for all the work that you’re doing in putting this podcast out there. I’m such a supporter of what you’re trying to get done, and I think the work is incredible, so you’re leading the way. Thank you so much.

All right. Thank you. 

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jon’s story today. You can find out more about where he works at the Stand to Reason ministry and the books that he recommended by Greg Koukl in the episode notes of this podcast. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life. 

Like his father, Justo Amato was a resolved atheist well into middle age yet he unexpectedly came to believe in God.

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. It’s often thought that religious people are religious just because they grew up that way. They don’t know any different, so they just believe, and it is thought that, once they discover the truth about religion, they will no longer believe.But what happens when someone grows up in an atheist household, resolutely identifies as an atheist until middle age, and then comes to believe that religion, particularly Christianity, is true?

When someone has been an atheist for most of their lives, later into middle age, the odds of such a dramatic life shift from nonbelief to belief is often surprising, both to the person who’s making such a tremendous paradigm shift, as well as those around them. Those who are resolute in their own worldview often don’t seem to change, but sometimes they do, and we are generally curious as to how that happens.

Today, we’ll be listening to Justo Amato’s long journey from atheism to Christianity. Following in the footsteps of his own atheistic father, it wasn’t until his late 50s that Justo reconsidered his own beliefs. I hope that you join in to hear his story, not only to understand why he was an atheist for so long, but what changed to allow him to reconsider what he once thought impossible to believe. This should be interesting.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Justo, it’s so great to have you.

Thank you, Jana. It’s great to be here.

Wonderful, wonderful! As we’re getting started, Justo, why don’t you give us an idea of a little bit about who you are?

Okay. First thing, I was a little 4-month-old immigrant from Spain, so as a little boy, I don’t think I spoke any English until I went to kindergarten. Neither of my parents spoke English. My father spoke a little bit. My mother spoke none. And so my brother and I grew up speaking Spanish and English back and forth, always speaking English to one another but Spanish to my parents, and-

Your family. That’s fascinating. Your family moved over from Spain, so you were immigrants to the US. What part of the US did you grow up in?

Well, we settled in Bound Brook, New Jersey, and that’s where I lived up until I was 44.

Okay, so you grew up in the Northeast.

I did.

Yes. So what was that like, growing up in the Northeast in terms of both your family and your community? Was there a sense of religiosity? Was there a community of faith? Catholicism, I believe, is probably fairly strong in the Northeast. What was your world like growing up? Was there God in it?

No. My father was an atheist. As a young man in Spain, he saw the priests living very well while the community was struggling, and so he just became totally anti-church. So I never heard even the mention of God or Jesus, never saw a Bible. Most of my friends in my neighborhood were Catholic. One of my good friends was an altar boy. Why he was an altar boy, I’ll never figure out, because he was the wildest kid. But anyway, nobody that I knew really went to church on a regular basis. They went Christmas, New Year’s, for communion, but there were really no strong religious people in the neighborhood at all, and so I had no religious training, background, nothing, and it was that way until I was 28 years old. And then I went to the beach, and I met Annabel.

During that period of time, those 28 years, that’s a long time to really consider who you are and your beliefs and what you believe and what you don’t believe. I guess you considered yourself an atheist during that time? And if so, what did you think of Christians and Christianity and belief in God. What was that to you? Was that just something people did on Christmas, Easter, but there wasn’t much more to it than that? How did you consider or what did you think of religion and religious beliefs during that time?

To be honest with you, I didn’t give it much thought because my friends, they never brought up religion at all. I mean I had friends, six or seven friends. Nobody ever talked about religion. So I never even gave it much thought, Jana. And now I meet this young lady. She was 20. I was 28. And it turns out she teaches Sunday school, and she was at the beach with her friend, who was also a Sunday school teacher, so for the first time, I’m hearing about God and Jesus. I went to church with Annabel a few times before we got married, and I didn’t have a problem with going to church, but I didn’t really give myself to anything. I just went and was an observer.

So you weren’t antagonistic towards religious faith.

No.

I was never antagonistic because when I asked Annabel to marry me, and she told me, “I’m going to bring up our children, if we’re lucky enough to have any, I’m going to bring them up as Christians.” I had no problem with that. But on the other hand — I had no problem with it, but I wasn’t ready to accept Jesus, either.

Right. So you, as a good husband and father, went through the motions of church going in order to do something with your family, I guess? Is that correct?

Right. Yeah. Initially, I wouldn’t go. Annabel would take the children, and then Christopher, when he was five years old, said to me, “Dad, how come you don’t go to church with us?” And I didn’t have a good answer, so I said, “Well, okay, fine. I’ll start going with you.” And I started to go with her. And that’s when I met the associate minister at this church that we were going to, and he was such a fine man.

So I’m curious. As someone who had never gone to church, all of your life had really very little exposure to it, what were your first thoughts when you went to church? Not knowing exactly what that was.

Well, the first thing that impacted me was this associate minister. He was such a fine man, and I thought to myself, “Wow! This is what a Christian is like, being like this man?” I was impressed. I thought the world of him. But I still wasn’t ready to accept Jesus.

What was it about his lived Christian life that was impressive to you?

Well, he was so kind and so gentle, and he would give Annabel such fine advice about — like she would say, “If you were confronted with a bull, would you wave a red flag in front of a bull? So when you’re dealing with your son, don’t antagonize him. Just be calm.” Anyway, he was very, very helpful to Annabel.

So it sounds like he gave wise counsel.

He did.

Yeah. So as you were sitting there in those church services, and they were singing songs about God and Jesus or teachings from the Bible, what did you think about all that? In terms of did you think there was any truth to it at all? Or did you think that the Bible was just stories, and they were singing to a nonexistent God? I mean, as an atheist, how would you consider those things?

Honestly, I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. I just thought, “This is what Annabel wants to do. The kids are benefiting from this, so I’m on board.” But I didn’t see it applying to me, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, yeah. So you didn’t see it applying to you because, as an atheist, there’s a sense of autonomy and independence and that you don’t need that kind of thing in your life. Is that how you were considering it?

Yes.

So in your mind, were Christians someone who were a bit more needy, I guess you could say, or weak, or needed that crutch, or something like that? But it just wasn’t for you?

That’s about right. That’s about right.

But you went through the motions of going to church. How long did you participate with this view? I guess you started going-

I did. For about 13 years. We lived in New Jersey for the first 13 years we were married, and then I lost my job, and I was looking for a job, and it turned out that the job was in Florida, so, in 1978, I started the job in April of ’78. And Annabel and the kids stayed in New Jersey until August. We were having a house built, and the kids were finishing school.

So you moved down to Florida, and you moved the family down to Florida, and I’m curious, too, all this time that you are participating or going through the motions of church for the sake of your family, was Annabel — I’m just thinking for the sake of those who are married to people who don’t believe in the same way. Did she ever talk with you about, “Why don’t you believe?” or put pressure on you, or was she just fairly quiet and just appreciative of you coming? How did that work out?

She never put any pressure on me at all. I guess she felt that, in time — in fact, the associate minister had told her, “Don’t push him. He’ll come around to it when he’s ready. You’re not going to help anything by putting pressure on him,” and so she took his advice.

And I’m sure you appreciated that.

I did.

Yeah, yeah.

So now we’re in Florida, and we had a couple across the street that was attending a non-denominational church that they were very pleased with, and they invited us to go with them. And we did. And so now we started going to this church, and again, I was going every Sunday. I was going to different events. But I was just going through the motions.

Right.

I wasn’t really prepared to accept Jesus. I didn’t see a need for it. And then they had home fellowship groups, and this very good friend of ours, the wife, kept putting a little pressure on me. “Why don’t you come to these meetings? Come! You’re going to love it!” And so I did. I started going to those. Now, I started meeting men that I had a lot of respect for, and I started thinking, “Gee. These guys, they believe. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get over this resistance that I have that goes all the way back to when I was a child and never heard of Jesus, never heard of God, never read a Bible, never saw a Bible?” And so now I began studying in the Bible a little bit, and that went on for a few years, and then one day—we would go to church regularly.

It was a Good Friday, and Elizabeth happened to be here. She was in grad school, but she was here, and so Annabel, Elizabeth, and I went to church on a Good Friday, and we met another couple that we were friends with, and they had communion. And I had never taken communion because I felt, “I’m not a Christian. I’m not a believer. I should not take communion,” but all of a sudden I just felt an urge. “I should take communion,” and I did. And Annabel almost fainted. Elizabeth put her hand on our friend who was sitting next to her, and she said, “I can’t believe what I just saw my dad do! I can’t believe it!”

Yes. Well, yeah. I’m sure it was a bit surprising.

That was the moment that I accepted Jesus. And I still can’t explain why then, why that particular night, but that’s when it happened, and then I began to really become a Christian, to participate in home Bible studies and to work in the children’s ministry and to do things, so that was the evening that I accepted Jesus. And I think it was 1992, I think it was. Let’s see. Yeah, I think it was about 1992. So it took me a long time.

Right, right, yeah. But there was probably something in—I’m sure, years of consideration, sitting through a lot of church services and sermons and then meeting—it sounds like you met a lot of Christian men who embodied a life that you respected, which I think it sounded surprising, but-

One of the biggest impacts on me was my son. My son, Chris. Now, as a young man, he was a little bit wild, and he got into drinking and I didn’t even know the extent that he was drinking at the age of 16 or 17, and his friends, they were not a good influence. My son would say to me, “You don’t like my friends, do you, Dad?” And my response was, “It’s not that I don’t like your friends. I don’t like the influence that they have on you and the things that you do when you’re together. You’ll do things that you would never do on your own. Now, he went to graduate school at Emory, and he met some really fine men, and without mentioning any names, he had a wonderful influence about him. He had an accountability partner, and all of a sudden, I saw this transition in my son, going from this kind of wild guy who drinks too much for his age, who might be in danger of becoming an alcoholic, to a really fine—you know, a Christian. And that had a big influence on me as well. That transition that I saw in Chris, that had a huge influence on me, in addition to the home study groups that I was involved in, but seeing that change in Chris had a huge impact on me.

What was it that was so impactful? Was it the fact that you just watched his life being transformed into the Christian life and then it was attractive to you?

Yes. All of a sudden I saw—you know, here’s a guy. He was drinking way more than I thought he should drink. He was doing things that I didn’t think he should be doing. And now, he’s surrounded by wonderful young men. His focus is different. I just saw a transition from a wild guy to a strong Christian, a strong believer.

Wow. Yeah, it’s amazing to see a life transformed like that, especially when it’s your own child whom you love, and you know who they are. They’re not hiding anything from you. You just know them as a parent, and to see that kind of life transformation must have been amazing.

Right.

Yeah. I actually know your son, and he’s a wonderful man, so you and Annabel have done an amazing job with both of your children. Elizabeth and Chris both are just—I can’t say enough about them. They’re amazing, amazing people.

When it comes to Good Friday and the message of Good Friday, I’m sure that there was something quite compelling. The gospel of Jesus, knowing that there’s acceptance and forgiveness no matter what you’ve done. I’m sure that that was something that you felt or—was there anything particular? Good Friday, for those who are listening who may not know what that is, Good Friday is actually the day designated when Christ was crucified on the cross, where Christians come together and remember that, and what He did on their behalf, that is, taking on the sin of the world. So that we don’t have to earn our acceptance with God.

Right.

Rather, God paid for our sin. And it’s a really amazing thing when you realize or take that in personally, and there must’ve been something about the message of that evening and understanding what communion is. Communion is really remembering what Christ did for you, basically, as a sacrament.

Right.

Yeah. So I’m sure there must’ve been something there for you that evening, kind of a culmination of many, many years of taking very small steps, but nevertheless, you were taking steps forward. It sounds like even though you were resistant for many years in your life, you continued to find yourself taking steps forward. And then the next thing you know, you find yourself actually believing this Person of Jesus. I guess it happened over, like you say, a long period of time.

Right. No. It was a gradual, very gradual, process for me. And all this time, my father—my mother died in ’79, and my father started coming to visit us every January, February, March, roughly those two, three months. He was still an atheist, and as far as I know, he was an atheist the day he died. So he never—my father was a really kind man. He was very good to both my brother and I. He was a good husband. But he was never, never a believer. And yet he had a niece who was a nun. She became a nun at 15, and he loved this woman. After my mother died, he would go to Rome and spend two, three months with her. He went to Spain and spent time with her there. I got to know her really well. She loved Annabel, even though Annabel didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and she didn’t speak hardly any English at all. They really loved one another, and they had a connection, and the connection was Jesus. The nun, she believed in Jesus. That was their focal point that drew them together.

Wow! That is interesting, considering your father had been really put off or rejected the church because of perhaps what he had seen as a child, the negative things that he saw, what the priests and what they were doing as compared to the people and all of that. It seems, though, that his niece, as a nun, gave him a different picture of, perhaps, who Jesus is through her life, and I’m glad to hear that. Sometimes people can get the wrong impression from an institution or a person who represents Christ or Christianity but not really understanding the real person of Christ himself, and I hope that your niece gave him that.

Right.

Yeah. So wow, what a story! So how old were you then, when you accepted Christ in your life?

Let’s see. I came to Florida at 44. I was probably around 50, early 50s.

Yeah. That’s quite a long time to go in your life, where you actually kind of change in midstream, to go from nonbelief to belief, but that’s a wonderful story. It’s a wonderful story, and so it sounds like your life—you’ve been convinced of it since, right?

I have.

You’ve held onto it. You took a long time to get there, but it’s something that you obviously have become convinced of and believe in.

I have. Yeah.

I presume, through continued Bible study and whatnot, you’ve really embraced it as your own, as true and real, and that Jesus is a Person worth knowing.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So as we’re just thinking further about this, knowing what you know, since you went for such a long time as a nonbeliever, I wonder—there were probably things that you appreciated or that you didn’t appreciate in terms of Christians approaching you or—like you say, Annabel was very patient and didn’t push Christianity upon you or anything, and you had those wonderful examples of men that you respected who were Christians. What would you advise Christians as to how they could best engage with those who don’t believe in Jesus? I would imagine having patience is one of those things.

Yeah. I think the most important thing is not what you say but how you live your life. Because people are watching you. And in some cases, they’ll know you’re a Christian not because you said you were a Christian but because of the way you treat them, that you show kindness. I’ll give you an example. We had this security gate with guards, and this one day, I drove in, and I would always speak to the guard. Always. I’d always speak to him. I’d ask him how he was doing, how his family was, and he said to me, “You know, I think you’re a Christian.” And I said, “Really? Why?” And he said, “Because you take the time to talk to me. You don’t just drive through the gate and ignore me.” And he said, “I’ve noticed the same thing about your wife.” In fact, there was a lady guard that worked there, and Annabel befriended her. She would watch her daughters for her. And they became really good friends. And she said the same thing. “It’s how you treat me. It’s how you speak to me.” So I’m convinced that, if you want to bring somebody to Christ, then you need to show them, in your life, what Christianity means. And it’s not so much preaching as it is the way you live your life.

And how you treat them. How you make them feel.

Yes.

Yes. Valued.

You don’t just drive through the gate and ignore him because he’s a guard. He’s a human being, and he’s got a family, and he’s got interests, and so if you stop and talk to him and just be a friend, it’s going to impact him.

Yeah. It’s amazing what an impact or difference just small things can do, just small gestures that are really huge sometimes to other people, valuing others. Yeah. That’s pretty wonderful. For those who might be quite skeptical of the Christian faith, of Christianity, of belief in God, have rejected it for whatever reason, but might be curious, just as you were, I guess, curious on some level. What would you say to someone like that?

I think I would say, just observe Christians, and I think, for the most part, you’re going to find that they’re kind, they’re accepting, they’re loving. You might want to consider that this is something worth doing. I mean not only your soul, but I think it’s just a wonderful lifestyle. Aside from the fact that you’re saving your soul.

Well, those are two very big things, having a life that—as Jesus says, a life that is truly life, a life that’s abundant in so many ways, knowing that you’re fully known and yet fully loved. Amazing things that you can find within Christianity. I can imagine some skeptics out saying, “Well, that’s not the Christians I know.”

Right. Yeah.

And that sometimes can be a really difficult issue. Just like your father encountered a priest who didn’t fit what he thought Jesus was about. And so I think sometimes—I think our witness can be good, in terms of when we do live the Christian life and allow Christ to live in and through us, but unfortunately sometimes we don’t always live as we should, and sometimes looking past the Christian life towards Jesus is the best way to really consider Christianity, because He was perfect. The only one, right? But yes, but Christians can make a difference, especially if they are truly embodied Christians and are living faithfully in the way that they should and loving, as you say, in the way that they should. It is a very attractive thing to do.

So thank you so much, Justo, for telling your story. It sounds like it was a long walk, you know? One step at a time over a period of years, but I think what I appreciate most about you is that you were willing to, in a way, sacrifice and surrender your own purposes for the sake of your family just to go and that you respected and honored your family, even though you didn’t believe. And it’s amazing to me to see how even placing yourself with a willingness to place yourself in a situation that may have been uncomfortable, that you didn’t agree with, but over time, you became willing to actually see Christianity and to see Jesus for who He is and Christianity for what it was and that it was something worth believing.

So in my research, I’ve seen—this sense of the will and whether or not someone is strongly resistant no matter what or whether or not they’re actually willing to give it a chance, and I think, in your story, you allowed the truth of Christ and the Person of Christ to come through on His own terms over time into your heart and mind. And I’m so thankful, because obviously you have left a legacy with your children and no doubt grandchildren at that point.

So thank you again, Justo, for telling your story, and I really, really appreciate it.

Thank you, Jana, for the opportunity.

You’re so welcome.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Justo’s story. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next podcast, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Episode Transcript

Hello and thanks for joining in.

I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast where we ‘see how skeptics flip the record of their lives’

Each podcast we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic but who unexpectedly became a Christian, to learn from their perspectives both as someone who resisted God and then as someone who not only found God but is also follower of Jesus.

Achievement and success often drive us.  Unmoored to God, skeptics are often believe they can take life by storm and find its fullness and fulfillment on their own.  There’s no need for God.  As poet William Ernest Henley penned, I am ‘the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

Sometimes after reaching the summit of personal or professional success, and the best of what the world has to offer, we’re often left with a sense of emptiness after the temporary glory recedes, wondering is this all there is?

In my research with former atheists, While many reported a positive sense of satisfaction within atheism prior to conversion, slightly more than half (27/50; 54.0%) (Q15) ‘did not find Atheism to be generally satisfying but soberly accepted it as truth.’

This begs the question, are they willing to ask the deeper question – is this all that life has to offer?  It is in this moment of existential reflection, a decision is made to keep on or to search for something different, something more.  Someone may become open to that which was completely walled off before, or not.

That is part of our story today.  Sue found the height of success in Silicon Valley and a wonderful family life, but somehow it didn’t ultimately satisfy her soul.  It set her on a journey of searching for something more.

I hope you join in to hear her whole story – not only what informed her skepticism, but what allowed her to reconsider what he once thought so irrelevant.  This should be interesting!

Welcome to the podcast, Sue. it’s so great to have you here today.

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell me a bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps what you do?

Yeah, so I live here in northern California, a little town called Pacifica, on the beach. I have a wonderful husband who surfs, which is why we’re out here by the beach, and three teenagers. One is a sophomore in college, the other is a senior in high school, and then the other is a sophomore in high school. I work at Sales Force. I’m a senior director of content experience, so basically documentation and videos. And I kind of grew up in Utah and Colorado.

Wonderful. So you grew up, in, you said Utah and Colorado. Let’s start back there. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. Also, not only where you grew up, but your family, your community, your friends. Was there any sense of God or religion in your growing up years?

So I grew up in a town called Layton, Utah, which at the time was 95% LDS, Latter Day Saints, or also known as Mormon. And we were not that. My parents were Christian, and at the time, I have this vague memory of going to a children’s church meeting, but we kind of walked away from that. They had a falling out with that church pretty early on, so I have a vague memory, but then we were pretty much agnostic. Tried a few different churches throughout that time, but the key was that we were not LDS in this very LDS environment.

So the impact of that is two things: One is that I was an outsider. I really couldn’t do all of the events with all the other kids. They would talk about things like their Ward, and I just wasn’t part of that. And then also my family and myself in particular was the target of evangelism. Pretty hard core evangelism. Pretty interesting attempts at evangelism. It felt at times like the whole town wanted to convert my family.

So I developed this huge wall against religion of all types and just decided that was not for me. I wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the impact of it, of making me feel like an outsider and making me feel pressured, then I didn’t want anything to do with it, and I kind of developed this… I was pretty much anti religious, I would say. I mean I was that friend in college that was sending articles disproving this and that to my friends of faith and having deep, long discussions about how illogical it was and irrational it was, and I really felt like I didn’t need that in my life.

So these walls that you built towards religion, that persisted, it sounds like, all through your childhood. Even when your parents were nominally Christian or whatever, there was no faith on your part. There was no real belief on your part. And then you just became averse to any sort of religion. I can’t imagine feeling like such an outsider in a such a religiously dominated world of which you were not a part and they were aggressively pursuing you. What that must have felt like. I mean if you resisted it to a point of antipathy. You wanted nothing to do with it. What would that feel that? I guess that informed your understanding of who God must be, right?

Yeah. And I definitely don’t want to demonize that environment, because they were also incredibly loving. I mean one of the kindest environments you can ever imagine is just about anywhere in Utah. So I look back very fondly and have many friends who are LDS, back then and now. So definitely not in any way trying to paint it in too negative of a light. But there were a few moments. I know once I got invited to what I thought was just a snowmobiling weekend with some friends, and it turned out that it was that, but it was also a chance to sort of get me a little bit isolated, and both the kids and parents kind of surrounding me in an attempt to convert me. So it was quite odd and pretty traumatizing. I think I was maybe 10. So yeah, I built that wall, and then the repeated attempts of my mom to get me to go to church, and I found it so boring. My sister and I would just write notes about how horrible it was to each other. I really did think this was just irrational and quite unpleasant.

So obviously it wasn’t worthy of belief and not logical, rational. So what did you think belief in God and Christianity was for? Whether it was protestant Christianity or LDS? What did you think religion was if it wasn’t true for you?

I just thought it was a crutch. I thought, “Well, that’s nice for you, that you need that little pick-me-up to keep you going, and you can pretend that there’s something bigger than this world. And then I also thought it was just superstition. I had a friend who wasn’t really very Christian, but she would say things, “I just felt something. I felt a presence,” or, “Sometimes I feel like somebody’s here,” and I would just kind of internally laugh. I mean, there was a lot of arrogance in me all these years, like, “Okay, you can go on and think that.” I wouldn’t call myself an atheist. I wouldn’t say I said there’s no God. I just would simply say, “Nobody knows. Nobody knows. It doesn’t really impact my life terribly. I’m going to focus on driving my own future.”

Just the captain of your own ship?

Yeah.

So it sounds like you did encounter some people who were Christians growing up. It just didn’t sound like something you wanted to be a part of.

Yeah. In fact, my parents… Because the public school was so heavily LDS, they pulled me out, and they put me in a Catholic school for high school.

Oh, okay.

And that also was pretty negative experience. I remember we had to take religion class, and it was led by a priest, and we were supposed to journal about what we were learning about, and in my journal, I would ask questions, like, “I’m not so sure about this,” and, “I wonder about that,” and I’ll never forget, when he was returning our journals. It was kind of a U-shaped classroom, maybe about twenty students, and he threw mine across the tables, and he said, “See me after class.” And I was terrified. And I was very much a people pleaser, so that was really shocking. And embarrassing. And afterwards, he said, “Don’t ever question my authority.” So I was quite, in some ways, traumatized by Catholicism and by the more Christian angle of things as well. Had very few positive experiences related to that.

So that makes sense to me, so that when you actually went to university, it was something that you wanted to fight against, or you said argue with or-

Mm-hm.

… or whatnot. That it was not something that was even an option for you.

Oh, absolutely not an option, and I was quite angry about it and wanted to debate and sort of fight the whole notion of it.

I’m curious. When you wanted to fight the whole notion of it and you ran into Christians in university, did anyone have any kind of rational, logical, evidential answer? Anything solid or substantive to come back against… Were you even open to listening what a Christian had to say?

I don’t know that I was actually open, but I had wonderful examples of Christians in my life. I really did. I dated a man for three years who was devoutly Christian and tried so hard to get me to convert. Even had his father call me and try to convince me. And I worked with really amazing people as well. None of that really softened my heart. I mean, it just didn’t penetrate at all. I didn’t hate Christians, certainly, and I didn’t think that these people were illogical, but I just felt like, “Well, that’s fine that you need that.” I accepted that, but it in no way got me to change my mind. Really nothing that they said.

So it was just a psychological crutch. Something for people to have a sense of belonging perhaps.

Or maybe they were just raised that way, and so of course they would think that way. So a little bit of maybe even brainwashing. We’re all brainwashed in some way. We’re all products of our environment, so of course they would be, too. So that was what I thought.

Okay. So that kind of perception of religion and Christianity and belief in God, how long did that persist? You said you went through college, and you started in the business world. I presume your agnosticism continued, and tell me about that part of your life, when you-

I mean, my entire career, my entire life, I was perfectly fine without God and really did not pursue it in any way, met my husband. We have three wonderful kids. And for Christmas, we thought, “Yeah, it’d be good to teach them about Jesus,” just kind of informationally. This person existed and this is what people believe about him. Very lightly, you know? And then immediately taught them nobody really knows the truth, and so explore things as you wish. We didn’t want to create a pushy environment for them, where they couldn’t ask questions, and where there was only one right way, and that was really important to us. And I think we did raise kids that questioned and that hopefully don’t feel pressured by us, but I never personally pursued religion in any way during that period, other than just saying, “Yeah, maybe. Who knows?” Not making a big deal of it.

Okay. And during that time, too, you were achieving quite a bit of success in your own personal or business career, weren’t you?

Yeah. I have been very blessed. I put it that way now. As opposed to ‘I was doing so great.’ But I had wonderful parents that supported me, and I had the opportunity and privilege to get an education and a graduate education and have always worked hard, so that can get you pretty far. And I started a PhD program in English and then found there’s no real market for that field, but luckily, you could translate that into tech, so I got a job in tech writing, which was really satisfying and very marketable. I did that for two different companies for about 14 years and then, after that, landed at Sales Force as a technical writer and then moved on to management, and that’s kind of where I am. Now I lead multiple teams of writers and engineers documenting our products. So really satisfying, super exciting career journey. Very fulfilling. And on the side, wonderful husband and friends, so I wasn’t feeling this huge gap. I wasn’t hitting rock bottom. Things were pretty good.

So if things were going so well without God or any of that, any crutch, and you were achieving all of these wonderful things, and you had a terrific life and family and career, what caused you to stop and think or wonder or change course? What was going on?

Yeah. So I think I did have to hit rock bottom in some way, so while things were going well, at some point in my career, I started to just feel dissatisfied. I thought, “Okay, I have everything, and I mean literally in a tower.” In San Francisco, we have these enormous Sales Force towers, and I’d be looking out, thinking, “I’ve got a great team, great family, great job. Why am dissatisfied? What is wrong?” And so I had kind of a void in my life, and I could not put my finger on it, and so I figured, “Well, it must be my job. Maybe I’m supposed to do something more meaningful.”

So what is it that changed for you? If you had the good life, what is it that made you perhaps stop and think that maybe God is worth thinking about?

Well, I definitely never considered it. It really had to kind of push itself into my life pretty aggressively. So the way it all happened is I had this great life, but I was still starting to feel dissatisfied for some vague reason. I would look around and think, “I’ve got everything, so why am I feeling kind of dissatisfied?” And so I figured it must be my job. Maybe I’m supposed to something more meaningful than technical writing with my job. Maybe I’m supposed to make this big impact on the world or help people, you know? I had this desire for more meaning. And so I quit my job and pursued a new role that was kind of on the surface more meaningful. It was leadership development. Teaching managers across these Fortune 500 companies how to be ethical and humane and kind and follow best practices. And it was really exciting. I was traveling around the world making this impact. Managers would come up to me… One manager said, “This changed my life!” And I thought, “Wow! That’s got to fill that void,” you know? And I tried to push it in there, and it didn’t fill the void.

And so that was really scary. Like, “This is not solving that need. Well, what is that need?” And then a couple of things happened that really made this kind of a high priority, this pursuit of meaning, and one is that this job was not what I thought it was. It wasn’t just teaching. It was also selling these classes, and it turns out I’m terrible at sales, so I was just falling flat on my face. I’d never failed before, in life really, you know? A straight-A student and career progression. And that was shocking. I think I sold $7,000 out of a $700,000 quota. Like one percent, you know? Everything kept failing. I’d get close to a huge deal, and it would fall apart. So that was really devastating to my identity. Because I was a business success, you know? And that evaporated.

And then on the home front, so I have a son with special needs, and those needs were just starting to show themselves right about this time, and so health wise, all sorts of problems were happening with him, and we just were not able to find the help that we needed. Everything was like a shut door, so my identity as a businessperson and as a mother were collapsing. I was not a great mother, helping my ill child. I was not a great businessperson. So who was I? I was like nothing! And I was very depressed about that. I remember I was in a hotel room on one of these business trips, and I said, out loud—and I certainly did not think of it is a prayer, and I was not in any way intentionally talking to God, but I just said, “Wow! I give up. I don’t know what to do!” like, “I cannot fix this.” And I just had never said that before, had never said that out loud, and of course, now I see that as a prayer, as the white flag, and after is when God just came into my life in these really systematic ways.

Wow! Wow! So that was a major turn of events. So you were praying even though you really didn’t know it was a prayer. It was that point of, I guess, laying whatever you held of yourself down and saying, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Yeah.

Some point of surrender, but you it wasn’t real clear at that point, I’m sure, what you were surrendering to or to whom.

Yep.

But things changed. So tell me about that.

Yeah! So very weird set of things started to happen right after that. I mean just immediately. I woke up the next day, and I flew home, and I remember I had this huge desire to listen to Christian music, which I had never wanted to listen to before.

In fact, I used to mock, and I used to say, “This is so cheesy,” and I didn’t even know how to find it, but I just went to Spotify. This urge was so great. And I typed God, and up came this really beautiful music. And I just found it enthralling. I mean I could not stop listening to this. It just was kind of filling me up in some strange way. I was kind of embarrassed. I didn’t want my family to know. I would listen on headphones and things. So that was one.

And then shortly after that I was reading through some medical material for my son, and weirdly, in this medical article, there was a paragraph about God. And it didn’t fit. And it was talking about how belief in God can be as healing or more healing than any kind of medication. And it was saying we are surrounded by a world created by God, and that was weirdly appealing and filling me up as well.

And what it made me do is picture somebody in my head from my past. Clear as day, I thought of my kids’ old karate teacher, who I knew.  He had invited me to church once. And I turned him down. But I remember I used to sit in the back of the karate studio and watch how he trained the kids. No matter how good or bad they were. No matter how old or young they were. Even the parents would take his class with him. He loved them. He loved them for who they were, and just was like this funnel of love in a way that I had never seen before, and he was who popped to mind, and I thought, “Oh, yeah! He invited me to church,” and I somehow got the courage to text him. I had his number. And I said, “Long time no chat,” and, “Can I go to church with you?” And he said no. No, I’m just kidding. Of course! And then that was a really kind of big moment for me.

I bet he was shocked.

Yeah. He was shocked.

Out of the blue!

Yeah. I didn’t even tell my husband that I was going through all of this. It was all just kind of keeping it inside at this point.

So then you went to church with him. For the first time as an adult. Curious, I presume.

Yeah. I had taken my middle daughter had expressed curiosity once, and I had taken her to a couple of churches, I think. Just trying to allow her to question and everything. But yeah. For the first time on my own volition, I went to church, and it was this tiny little church in my town of Pacifica, and I walked in, and it was a pretty transformative experience.

And at the very end… And I remember crying. For some reason, I was in the back, crying, and at the very end, these two people went under this big cross, and they said, if anybody wants prayer, we’ll be right here, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” So something gave me the courage to go up to them. I’d never asked for prayer or been prayed over in my life, and I just said, “Can you pray for me?” And they put their arms around me and said this beautiful prayer, and I was crying, you know? And I just thought, “Wow! There is something real happening here.” And that made a really big impression. I was very confused, but I kind of drove home in tears and dried my tears and just thought, “I don’t really know what’s going on here,” but that was a big step.

That would be a big step. From someone who was rather agnostic and really resistant to God for so long, and then you surrendered in some way and became open, and then somehow He shows up. You feel, in a sense, a palpable reality that there is something more than you had thought before.

Yes. Absolutely.

So I guess at that point you were very open to exploring whatever this was. Tell me about that.

So I was kind of sitting with all of this, and I was going on a business trip, another business trip, so while I was there, I was unpacking my things, and I got a text from this karate teacher. And I was still in the wrong job and still unable to fix the situation with my son’s health, and this text said, “Sue, I pray that the Holy Spirit will reveal Himself to you today.”

How did you feel about that? Did you understand that language? Did that seem kind of weird? I can’t imagine.

You know, I did not understand it, but I felt it. I understood the feeling of it. I understood that this man took time out of his day to send me a prayer, to send me something quite bold. I mean it makes me almost want to tear up now. I sat on the bed just holding my phone, like holding this prayer, like this was just pure love in my hands, you know? Unsolicited love. And I will never forget that. How powerful that felt. Even though I didn’t understand it. And so I sat there and just kind of meditated on it, and it was only about 30 minutes later I get a phone call, and I’m thinking, “Okay, what’s this about?” And it’s my Aunt Jean in Texas, who, of course, would not have had any contact with this karate teacher, and she sounded really nervous, and she said, “Sue, this is going to sound weird, but I’m supposed to call you right now, and I’m supposed to tell you about God.”

Wow.

And of course I thought, “Oh, my gosh!” I just got this text from the karate teacher almost preparing me for this call. I feel to my soul that God heard the karate teacher’s prayer and really compelled my aunt to call me. Because we had never talked about religion before. I mean I knew she was a Christian, but I had no interest in it my whole life, so it was quite bold for her to call me, and I said, “What made you call me?” And she said, “Well, when Missy died…” Missy was her daughter who had died of an aneurysm long ago, and she said, “I felt the same urge to call her, this urge from God to call her, and I didn’t, and I always regretted it, because that night… Maybe I could’ve called her before the aneurysm. Maybe I could have told her I loved her.” And so she said, “I vowed that if I ever got that feeling again, I would obey it, and I had that feeling tonight. I’m supposed to call you. It’s very powerful.”

And she didn’t preach and she didn’t lecture. She just told me what it meant to have God in her life and to be able to pray. And she told me stories. She told me two to three stories of God showing up in her life and lifting burdens and transforming things, and it was so beautiful. I was absolutely in the presence of something. And I had a decision at the end of it. What am I going to do with this? Is this the wildest coincidence, or is it real? So I was at that moment as the call was ending.

Yeah, I would imagine you would… As she’s speaking about God showing up in her life, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t be thinking, “Is God showing up in my life right now?”

Right.

Yeah. It couldn’t be coincidence. Thirty minutes from the text. And it had been years since she had felt that urge, and then it’s all on you.

Yeah.

It would be hard not to think that, in C.S. Lewis’s terms, the hounds of heaven are kind of focused on you at that moment and that you felt that in some way. How did you respond to this focused personal attention from God?

Well, I had to decide in my head, is this really God? Because that whole thirty minutes was really a decision point. Before, it was like, “Wow, this is weird.” Now it’s like, “Wow! I think God might very well be real,” you know? “Oh, my God!” And I’ll never forget that kind of decision, because it’s like a door opening to a universe. It’s like you realizing what you thought of as the universe was actually like a room, and opening the door and seeing there’s an entire world out there. There’s an entire existence. There’s an entire way of thinking and living and being. There’s a God. There is a God. There is God, the God! And all of that, I just couldn’t deny it anymore. I couldn’t deny what had happened, like physically. These things did happen. I have the text. I even snapshotted on my phone the time that Aunt Jean called. I wanted this evidence. These things happened. And I can’t deny that. And then I can’t deny how I feel, which is just what it felt like.

My mom passed away a long time ago. We were best friend. She had cancer. And it felt like I was being held by her. That’s what it felt like, is being in the arms of someone that loves you more than anything else.

That’s very profound, very powerful language you’re using.

I decided I would verbalize that before we hung up, and I just said, “I believe you,” which was a big step, actually really saying I believe in God. I think it’s true. And we hung up.

And real. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that was a major turn for you. I imagine that your husband was a bit surprised. Your children were surprised. Tell me about that.

Yeah. Well, I’ll tell kind of the next phase first, which was still I had to process all of that. So I remember after we kind of hung up, I fell to the floor really and just sobbed for, like, three hours, really thinking back on a whole life of taking credit for the blessings that I had been given, taking credit and knowing, like, the whole time God was there. The whole time He was doing it for me. And how unappreciative I felt. And how just really sorry I felt. And I remember trying to pray, and words wouldn’t come out, and then finally, once I went through all of that, I realized what my prayer would be. My first real prayer to God was, “I’m sorry.” And I could verbalize that. And it was like instant forgiveness. Instant load off my shoulders, instant euphoria, almost. And I texted the karate teacher back, and I said, “You’re not going to be what just happened.” And he said, “Praise God. Get a Bible and read John.” So I found a Bible, and that kind of started this journey, and I went back home after that, and I stumbled back in this church, and I told the pastor and a couple of others, like, “How do you give your life to Jesus?” And he said, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s pray,” and we just said a really messy prayer, and I feel like I had already converted in a way in the hotel room, but that was nice to verbalize and to say, “I give my life to Jesus, to following Jesus.”

And so yeah, then how do I integrate that back into my life? I’m really careful about not talking about my family in public, just to protect their privacy, but I can just share real vaguely that definitely it was shocking to have your mom come home as a born-again Christian. I say that proudly. I’m a born-again Christian. Even though I know that carries a lot of negative connotation, and I would’ve never thought I would ever say that. That’s pretty shocking to your family. But we had lots of really good conversations, and it turned out to be just a wonderful thing for all of us, and I now tell my story, like here, and they’re very, very proud of me for all of this growth and change.

Yes, I would imagine so, and how wonderful to have that kind of support. Calling yourself a born-again Christian, that does carry with it a lot of preconceived notions and connotations.

Yep.

I imagine, working in northern California, Silicon Valley. How is that received as a successful businesswoman in northern California in the business place, in the workplace. How is being a born-again Christian taken? I would imagine that would have challenges of its own.

Yeah. So that was an interesting part of all of this. I feel like it was only a few weeks after I converted, or maybe a few months, that I got an offer to come back to Sales Force, so I feel like that was a gift from God and that I was there and not just for myself, not just to make me happy, but to bring faith, to make it safe to have a faith in the workplace. And so I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I was really clear that that was part of the reason I was coming back there, is to be a leader of this movement within the workplace, and so I was very scared. I didn’t even want to wear my cross at first or tell people about it. I was really scared. I remember I started by wearing… it was like a flower cross, so it almost didn’t look like a cross, you know? And I would wear it to one meeting, and I’d think, “Okay. Well, nothing bad happened. Nobody mocked me. Nobody yelled at me. Maybe I can wear it to two meetings,” and then I’d eventually wear it all day, and then made it a real cross, and as I was testing the waters there, too, I also was searching for people that were professing anything related to faith, maybe like in their signature on their email. I noticed somebody had a Bible verse. And I noticed someone else had posted something about faith. And so I kind of found them, and we started a quick little Bible study, a prayer group, and it grew. It grew from two to five to now it’s hundreds of people all around the world. Very quickly.

But then that wasn’t the whole story. That’s great, to have that and have a safe place to pray and talk about your faith in the workplace, and most companies are kind of growingly having things like that, but that wasn’t still a kind of top-down initiative. So that’s another thing I focused on is, “How do we have faith be recognized as a legitimate form of identity?” For some people, their faith is their number one identifier, over their gender or race or cultural background. And so what about those folks? When we say, “Can you bring your full, authentic self to work?” If that’s your number one identifier, you should be able to. In fact, that should be celebrated. As long as you’re not pushing it on others, you shouldn’t have to hide it. In fact, that will lead you to probably leave if you can’t express that side of you. So we worked with the leaders and formed Faith Force, which is an official employee resource group at Sales Force, and it’s hugely popular.

That’s fantastic. Very bold and I think innovative and really courageous in this moment. I like the way that you say that, is that identity. The [number marker?] typically in Christianity is that that’s who you are and your primary identifier as a follower of Christ, and all of those other things are secondary to that.

In thinking about your story, thinking way back, when you criticized belief in God and Christianity as irrational and illogical, as a crutch, I can imagine the skeptic listening to your story and saying, “Oh, she just kind of had a powerful experience of God. She’s now one of those who needs God as a crutch,” and you’re an intelligent woman and a thinker and very rational, so how did you fuse those two things together in terms of justification for the things that you believe?

Yeah. Well, I started studying in great depth, found some really trusted mentors to kind of help me through that, and what I found was good data. What I found was… Almost nobody describe that Jesus existed. Very few people deny that. Or deny that He was crucified. Nobody denies that He had followers, that He had these apostles that kind of spread His message all around the world. There’s enough evidence of that that is historical, not necessarily written by other Christians. And we know that Christ got crucified, so obviously it was very risky to express this kind of belief in Jesus, and they did go into hiding after he was crucified. They went into hiding, were scared for their lives, and then something happened. When Christ resurrected. Something happened the size of a resurrection.

Nothing else can explain it that would lead to the entire world changing, that would lead to these apostles not only not hiding but risking their lives and most of them dying to tell people what happened. To tell them, “He came back to life! I saw it! That means what He said is true. That means He’s the Son of God, the one and only Son of God. I saw it! I witnessed it. I experienced it. I experienced these miracles,” and enough people back then professed that to their death that it changed the entire course of history, and they wouldn’t have done that for a lie. They wouldn’t have all universally said this lie that He came back to life if it wasn’t true. There would be no benefit to them to do that. And so that, to me, is the sticking point here. Did He live? Yeah. Did He call himself God? Yeah. Did He come back to life after death? Well, it sure seems that that is true. And if that’s true, then what He said was true, what He said about being the Son of God is true. And that’s something we have to reconcile. That’s something that we should think about. Well, what does that mean? If it’s true, that changes everything.

Yeah. It sounds like you did due diligence to really look at the rational evidence for your belief. You knew that God was real, and you wanted to substantiate the truth of what you felt and experienced with God, and I appreciate that about you. It is almost mind, heart, and obviously your life coming together all at once. Now you said there was a moment where you had, it sounded like, everything the world had to offer, but yet, you were dissatisfied, that somehow all of your achievements and your success didn’t fill up something in your soul. And I’m wondering, after belief, and you found God, has that sense of emptiness been filled? That sense of dissatisfaction moved to satisfaction or abundance. Did it make a difference?

Yeah. I mean absolutely it has, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a miracle cure-all, in the sense that life is still super hard. My son’s medical concerns only got worse. They’re very severe. And so every day we deal with that. And there’s no clear solution. And it’ll be a battle for the rest of his life. And yet I don’t feel alone in that battle. So I take walks with my dog, and especially when there’s a lot of unknowns, and I just feel like, “Okay.” I pray every day, and I say, “Okay, I think this is what I own,” and I listen. Like, “Is that what I own? Okay, that’s what I own.” And it’s not God telling me, but it’s a clear feeling, like, “Okay, this is what I’m supposed to do today. Please help me with that thing.” Maybe it’s an appointment with a doctor. That’s what my focus is, and I do need to step forward into that. And then the reminder, “I’ve got the rest.” And I’m like, “Yeah. You’ve got it, God. You carry the entire weight of this thing. You carry the future of my son, of me, of my entire family. You own it. You own all of it. And I’m going to do this one baby step today.” And that’s so much more manageable than thinking, “What am I going to do next week?” “What am I going to do next year?” “What if this happens to him?” “What about when I die? Who’s going to take care of him?” I don’t worry about all of that anymore. I honestly don’t. Like, “God, what do I do today? That? Okay. I can do that.” And it changes everything. I mean it is just like having just your best friend, your best parent, your best coach, just telling you, “I’ve got it. You do this. I do that.” Teamwork, you know?

Especially, I’m thinking, looking at the world today, there’s just so much fear.

Yes!

And so much, I guess, sensed need for power, among many, wherever you go. And so what I hear you saying is that you really have a peace that you didn’t have before and a sense of… really peace whether it’s in this life or what’s to come. And I would imagine that would inform everything about your life.

Yeah. It’s very manageable. That’s what I would say. Sort of no matter what happens, and I really mean that. I think the worst tragedy ever… I feel like I could manage it because I don’t have to fix it. I don’t have to lead it. And I don’t have to carry it. I can carry my part. And it is a great sense of peace. And it takes work, too. I mean I have to carve out that time in the morning to look back, and I think God for what He’s done for me the day before and acknowledge Him, and I go through the Lord’s Prayer, and then I look at my day ahead, and I say, “What am I supposed to do today?” And it’s usually one thing. And then I ask Him to help several people in my life, and He does, and I go into my day. And it is every single day like that. And it is now quite… Just peaceful.

Yeah, it sounds like it’s driven by both peace and purpose.

Yeah.

And purposes that are not only in your world but beyond yourself and purposes for the world, especially with what you’ve done with regard to prayer and bringing forth faith in the workplace in such a substantive way. You’re to be applauded for that. I think that takes immense boldness and courage, and you are obviously a woman who possesses those things.

So as we are coming to a close, I wondered if… Picture your former self. Just angry, just resistant at God, no need for God. Perhaps somebody is just the least bit curious, though, and you could be somehow that karate teacher in someone’s life or just based upon your own journey, what would you tell a curious skeptic?

I would totally empathize with them first, because I think a lot of Christians, when they’re trying to convert others or they’re trying to persuade others, go about it so poorly. And that was my experience on the other side of things, so that’s the last thing I would ever want to do is pressure somebody, so really just empathizing. At least my reasons, I get why to be skeptical. I think it’s perfect legitimate. I’m surrounded by people who are legitimately skeptical. They’re not crazy. You’re not a heathen. You’re not all these terrible words that I think you might be depicted as. It’s awesome that you question. It’s awesome that you push back. This is so great. That’s what God wants of all of us, you know? And if you’re ever interested, I’m here for you. That’s what I would say. The worst thing you can do is pressure somebody.

Definitely from the perspective of the Christian who is trying to be the best follower of Jesus that you can be. Don’t be ashamed of your faith. Own it. Wear it proudly in the sense of never show shame for being a follower of Jesus. He’s a wonderful Person to follow and the Son of God and that’s one thing. And the other thing is just be loving and encouraging, and at the right time, people will ask you questions. Don’t be afraid to bring it up in the sense of, “What’s your faith background?” “How did you grow up?” “What are your thoughts about faith?” And really listen and care but don’t manipulate. Don’t pressure. That isn’t your role whatsoever, and it’s not reflective of Jesus. So I would just tell the skeptic, “I totally get it, and that’s awesome that you question.”

Yeah. Because truth is not afraid of being questioned, right?

Yeah. Jesus can take it.

Yep, yep, absolutely. Is there anything else you want to add to your wonderful story before we end here, Sue? Any thoughts or anything you think that we’ve missed?

I would end with Revelation. One of my favorite passages in there, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anybody opens the door, I will come in and dine with you, and you with me.” So I just want the whole world to know that scripture, that God is waiting. He’s been there the whole time. He’ll be there the whole time, and He will come in as soon as you open the door, as soon as you say, “Okay, I give up. I actually can’t solve this whole life thing on my own. I don’t know, but I guess I need God. I guess I’m open to God.” Then He will come in. He will come in, and he will be there with you forever. So that’s my wish.

Well, you are certainly a living, embodied testimony of that verse coming to life. And I’m so grateful to you, Sue, for telling your story. It is a beautiful story, an amazing character arc, you know? Moving from complete disbelief to just an amazingly beautiful ambassador for belief in God and Jesus and Christianity and the life that it can bring you. And I also appreciate your honesty with all of that. It’s not all roses. It is a journey. It’s a daily struggle. But just like you said, there is someone who’s greater who’s in control who loves you, who is with you and for you and has purposes for you, and in Him you have peace.

Yeah.

So with that, again, thank you, Sue, so much for joining me today.

Thank you.

All right. Here we go. I’m going to-

Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Sue’s story.  You can find out more about her, her blog, her work with Faith Force at her website: www.leanership.org.  I’ll include this along with some of her recommended resources in the episode notes.

For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]

If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time where we’ll be see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side to see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone’s who’s been an atheist and became a Christian. Through listening to their story, we can appreciate both sides from someone who’s been there. If you believe in God, you can see how someone might dismiss the ideas of God, religion, and Christianity. If you don’t believe in God, perhaps you can see how someone who once resisted God moves towards belief.

But as for all of us, what we believe in affects our understanding of who we are, our identity. In fact, our identity can be shaped by many things. How we see ourselves, how others see us, what we do, the group we’re a part of, who we want to be, or how we feel. Our identity can be shaped by our friends, our family, our life experiences, our desires. For atheists, there is a sense of freedom in creating your own identity without restraint. Free thinkers who form their own identity, their sense of self. Sometimes our identity can also be shaped by knowing who you don’t want to be, a soft anti-identity. We don’t want to be a part of a group of people that seems culturally irrelevant, judgmental, unscientific, hypocritical, uneducated, weak, narrow minded. Pick your adjective. These are terms often used for the religious. We want our identity to be as far from that as possible.

That is where our story begins today but not where it ends. The sense of rejection of the religious identity. Jeff moved from an atheist identity to take on the identity of the group he once despised, Christians. How in the world did that dramatic shift happen? I hope you’ll listen in today to see how this story plays out.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeff. It’s wonderful to have you on today.

Hi, Jana. It’s great to be here.

You’re a familiar voice to me. We met several years ago. We both have a mutual affiliation with the C.S. Lewis Institute here in Atlanta, and so that’s where I got to know you a little bit and got to know a little bit about your story, so having you on the program today is truly exciting for me, because I know the dramatic changes that you have made in your life. In fact, you’re doing some pretty amazing things now in terms of even your current study of theology at the graduate level. Can you talk with me a little bit about just who you are now and what you do, so everyone gets a chance to know a little bit about who you are.

Yeah, sure. So I work as a software manager at an engineering company here in the Atlanta area, I’m still in school, but I have switched my major from theology to Old Testament. I just had a lot of interest in looking deeper into the Old Testament, the history of the text transmission and things like that. So that’s my current focus in school, working on a Masters of Arts in Old Testament Studies right now.

I know, in your story, you’ve come a long way from where you were, from your atheism. So why don’t we start at the beginning, in your childhood, and give me a sense of the home in which you grew up, your family, perhaps your friends and the culture. Was there God in that world at all before you had a sense of your atheism? Tell me about that.

It’s a very interesting question because there was God in the sense that some members of my family would consider themselves Catholic from an upbringing perspective, but there was not God in the sense that we ever went to church or prayed or talked about God or anything like that. So we’d occasionally get together, and when my grandparents were in town, for example, my stepmother’s parents, they would pray, and they were pretty devout in their faith, so they would go to church. We would say grace for supper every night, even though that was about the only time we talked about God. Other than when my Dad would hit his hand with a hammer or something like that, and then I heard God’s name quite often.

Okay, yeah.

But growing up we didn’t really have much interaction with other Christian families. My friends, there were no Christians in my peer group, at least not that I knew of. If they were, they were closet Christians. Primarily I hung out with people that were pretty much humanists and a lot of interest in the occult and anti-Christian sentiment. So a lot of it was rooted in some of the punk rock culture and the New Wave/industrial music scene and things like that. So a lot of the people that I hung out with could consider themselves Wiccans or witches or humanists or even Satanists in many cases. Not a lot of Christians.

So, Jeff, as you were growing up, you had some dots of religiosity with a dinner prayer, that kind of thing, but it’s obviously not something that your family took on with any serious nature. As a child, it sounds like it was just part of the routine but nothing more, but I would imagine that these humanist friends that you had, was that more towards like middle school, early teen? Or high school? Tell me about when you started hanging out with these friends.

It was really late middle school and going into high school, I guess, is where that really started. And just one point from the earlier comment. I do remember one time clearly going to Mass with my stepmother’s parents, and my dad went with me, and I remember as we walked into the Mass, they had the holy water set to the side, so that you could genuflect, make the sign of the cross and all of that, and I remember watching my grandparents, step grandparents, go in and dip their fingers in the water and cross themselves, and as a young kid, I wanted to emulate that behavior, and I remember reaching over to touch the water and my dad pushing my hand away. So it was a very interesting dichotomy because, on the one hand, we’d do these supper prayers. On the other hand, when we are engaging these rituals in a Mass setting, it’s something he didn’t want me to participate in. And it’s funny because I’ve never talked to him about it. I never really thought much about it. But it’s just an interesting contrast.

Yeah. It makes you wonder why he would almost endorse a ritual in one sense but not in another.

Yeah.

I’m sure that was a little bit confusing for you.

It was. But as a nice young person I just put it aside and didn’t think about it for years.

Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. So your impression of God or religion or Christianity at that time, growing up, particularly in your teenage years, as you were, it sounds like, part of a group that was rejecting all of that. Did you have any views towards religious people or institutions?

Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think that actually gets at the root of what my religiosity was. Because it was really focused on people. And I’ve told a number of people over the years that, as an atheist, I actually wasn’t a very educated atheist. I was educated in my observation of people but not educated earlier on in the way atheists approached questions about who God is and the historicity of the Gospel accounts or things like that. So it was very much a focus on people, and even more so a focus on how I perceived Christian people to be, particularly with my peer group and my desires as a young man. It was primarily centered around hedonistic enjoyments, and so for me, Christians were those that were trying to take away any fun out of life, take away the joys of life.

Yeah. And that’s interesting, especially related to even the… perhaps not only the activities that you were involved that were no doubt pleasurable on some level, but also you hinted that there was some kind of dark spirituality that you were even interested in. I’m curious about that aspect of your kind of pushing away from one form of spirituality but actually engaging in another.

I think on some level there was a part of me that wanted to believe in something more, and I remember, at a younger age, maybe earlier middle school or sometime in middle school, reading The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, which was talking about King Arthur legends and Merlin and things like that, and I remember at one point—part of the story line centers around Mithraism and the idea that perhaps Merlin was this Mithraist and that’s where his power came from, and I don’t remember the story that well, but I do remember the aspects of Mithraism, and so I recall walking to the bus stop one morning and tying this little spruce branch around a tree and sort of doing this little offering idea, and I think I was always enchanted by the idea that there’s something greater, but I didn’t really believe in it, particularly as I got older. So while I had friends that were involved in Wiccan religion and some paganism, I didn’t really have the sense that there was this devil that would listen to you if you decided to become a Satanist or that you could influence nature as a witch or anything like that. But I wanted it to be true on some level. And, in fact, I embraced the humanistic aspects of Satanism, to the point that I had a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible and read through that and was really enamored with that sort of mindset.

I know that the humanistic impetus in that movement is very strongly that you’re the captain of your own ship and a very strong sense of autonomy and control over your own destiny. Was that appealing to you?

Oh, absolutely! A big part of that is, “If it feels good, do it,” and I think our modern culture even has quite a sense of that as well, which is, “If it feels good, it can’t be wrong unless it starts to encroach on somebody else’s boundaries.” And so, for me, that was a very appealing message, and again, as young man with a desire to have the sensual enjoyment in life, that was very compelling, to say, “Whatever feels good to you, go ahead and and do it.”

So in a sense, then, you were involved with friends and your particular culture that was pushing away, I guess almost an anti-God sensibility, from religion and religious things, but at the same time, you said that you were focused on the people and that there was a negative hue or a negative perception of Christians and Christianity. What informed that? Was that informed by the actual experience with Christians? Or was it something that was informed more by what people were saying and what you perhaps wanted to hear?

That’s a really good question. I think that some aspects of it were certainly informed by the media, and in particular, this was growing up as a teenager in the eighties and watching MTV and music videos. As an eighties kid, there was a lot of push back against the culture. I remember—I was speaking about it to somebody the other day—the Genesis video with Ronald Reagan and just this idea to push back against authority. And then Reagan and Nancy and the Moral Majority and all of those influences, where you’re looking at this media imagery of far right people wanting to put censorship labels on music. And you just sort of built this view of Christians as this vocal group of people that want to take away anything that you might enjoy. But again, I wasn’t really informed by a lot of direct personal experience with individuals. It was more of a collective thing.

I see. Yeah. Because it sounds like there weren’t a lot of Christians, I suppose, in your world.

No. Not at all.

I would imagine, too, that it would be easy to develop a bit of an us/them kind of mentality and strengthen your understanding or perception of who you think someone is without direct engagement. That’s a very easy thing to do.

Absolutely.

So you were developing this sense of identity, this, I would imagine, anti-Christian identity, informed by your friends and the culture, your moral choices. Was there anything else involved in that? Perhaps education or your view of science or anything else that contributed to that push back against Christians and Christianity?

As I said, I wasn’t a terribly educated atheist. In fact, I’m much more educated in atheist arguments at this point in life than I was at that age. But I did think that science was the answer to everything, so it was, in a sense, my religion. Although again—I was a smart kid. I had a good education. I understood basic scientific principles. But I did not really have a clear sense of all the different lines of argumentation that I’m aware of today. Nevertheless, I still felt like the earth began with the big bang and everything evolved, and where was the need for God in all of that? Science could explain all the questions that we have. And religion was just some holdover from a time where people didn’t have any understanding of the universe they lived in. So I absolutely held that prejudice, but again, it wasn’t a terribly well-informed prejudice. It was just something that I inherited by default.

So Jeff, it sounds like, again, you were pretty well comfortable with your identity as an atheist. How old were you, by the way, when you really identified yourself with that label.

I think the first time I applied that to myself was when I joined the Army. In fact, when I joined the Army and they were issuing my dog tags, they ask you for your religious preference. And I had never really thought much about it as a question, and so I put atheist on there as my religious preference, and it was, I think, the first time I had ever thought enough about it to say, “This is what I am.” Later, I remember having to get dog tags reissued, and they refused to put atheist on there for some reason. It was very strange. So I put agnostic, but I really still considered myself an atheist. And I think I did teeter back and forth a little bit, only because it seemed like atheist was such a firm position to take, and how much can we truly know? So while I was functionally an atheist, sometimes I would label myself as an agnostic.

So then, Jeff, walk us along. Tell us what seemed to move you in a different direction. What seemed to cause you to perhaps question this identity or the way that you were thinking about God and Christians and Christianity?

It’s a difficult question to answer on some levels because I don’t really know when the transformation of thinking began. When I look back at the influences that stuck with me, many of them were things that happened, but I didn’t recognize until later that they had some impact. So for example, as a 19-year-old person with an attitude, I had a Jehovah’s Witness come to my door, and he wanted to talk to me. And I was feeling particularly obstinate that day, so I invited him in, and he started talking to me about what he believed, and at some point in the discussion, he was talking about the Bible, and I said, “Well, what makes yours more valid than mine?” And he said, “Well, what do you mean?” And I walked back and I brought out LaVey’s Satanic Bible. And I fully expected this to have the guy kind of walk out on me, and he didn’t. He stayed and engaged.

And I had asked a number of questions, and I remember, several days after he had visited, he came back, and he had a stack of papers that he had printed out that had answers to a number of the questions that I had asked. And I never even looked at them. I threw them away. And to this day, I’m not even completely sure he was Jehovah’s Witness because I don’t really remember, but he knocked on the door and wanted to talk about God. But looking back, I recognize the impact that that had on me, because this guy believed what he was selling enough to come back to an obstinate kid and want to give him the education, to give him the answers that the kid was asking for.

So things like that, as I look back, I see that there were a number of occasions that were similar to that throughout my life. And I think, over time, those softened me a bit. And I was able to start to see that it’s not just a bunch of hypocrites but that there are people that really do put into practice what they say they believe, and they take it seriously.

And so as I started working in a professional career, I was 29 when I finally accepted Christ, and over a few years prior to that moment—and it really wasn’t a moment. It was actually a process. But a few years prior to that, I had been befriended by a guy who I worked with named Greg, and Greg was a very devout Christian, and I had another friend named Kevin who was a very devout atheist, and it was that picture of the angel and the devil on your shoulder, each one whispering in your ear. But Greg and I would talk quite a bit, and I would ask questions, and he would have answers. And when he didn’t have answers, he would find answers.

And as I started questioning what I believed about the origin of the universe and what existed prior to the big bang and how did it come to be, some of those questions really started to nag at me. And I thought, “I need to look into this a bit more.” And those were the kind of questions that Greg actually wasn’t very well educated in, but he had friends who were, and he would get resources and help me to start to explore some of those things. And so, over time, that exploration is what led me to change my views and come ultimately to believe that Christ is who He says He is. Who Christianity claims that He was.

Wow! That’s interesting because… especially the way that you describe your being softened to the possibility of God, that it came through people who authentically believed. It wasn’t just a ritual that they performed or I guess a service that they showed up to and lived differently through the week. You engaged with people who actually took their faith seriously, and believed that there were answers to be found within religious faith, which I’m sure was a bit novel in a way, particularly not only with regard to answers spiritually, but also answers you’re describing even with regard to reality and the world and the cosmos. You’re talking about a bigger picture of reality and having answers to questions like that. I find it interesting, too, that you had these two friends, both kind of speaking into your ear and into your life. Was that a bit challenging at times? I’m also curious. Did your atheist friend find substantive answers for you when you were looking for them?

Interestingly, no. And I think part of that is because there’s a certain degree of posturing that goes on as you’re coming to these questions about what you really fundamentally believe. And so I had a reputation as a loud person of atheistic persuasion, and so, with my friend at the time, my atheist friend, I probably was not very forthright with my questions and this process. Because you don’t want to be seen as somebody who might be going to the other side, although to be fair, I didn’t think that I was. I had no belief that I was actually changing what I ultimately thought or believed to be true, but I just had these questions. And I didn’t take the other questions back to this guy. The Christian friend was a compelling place to go and ask because of the authenticity. And because he really did live out what it looks like to be a Christian, with the humility and the kindness and the love and the gentleness. And so he was very approachable in that way. And I didn’t feel judged by going to him. And I would have felt judged going to my atheist friend and saying, “Hey, I’m looking at these questions, and there’s something compelling about this Christianity thing.” So I was not very comfortable going to my atheist friend, which is interesting.

Yes, yes. So I would imagine, in this exploration, it was intellectual. There were answers that you were seeking. How long did this process take? I presume, over time, that as you were finding answers that you were able to see how those answers were making sense, not only of the world but of the way that you were living or perceiving life?

Yeah. And it was a fairly lengthy process for me. And this is where our relationship with the C.S. Lewis Institute is interesting because I can very much appreciate Lewis’s journey from an atheist to a theist to a Christian and the time that that took. And I can also appreciate his story about his motorcycle ride where, when he departed he wasn’t a Christian, and when he arrived, he was, if I remember it correctly. I have that view, to some extent, of my personal journey as well. Because, as I started down that road, I started believing that there must be something more and particularly looking at the origin of the universe as one of the big questions. The scientific answers just ceased to make sense for me after a while, and they almost became a little bit reaching, particularly when you start looking into multiverse theories and things like that.

It seemed to me that you’re exercising a different kind of faith to kind of go down that road, so as I became more of a theist and open to the idea, my wife, at the same time, who has grown up in a Christian home and was a very strong Christian as a young person, started returning to the church and found that she wanted to raise our kids with Christianity which, early on in particular, a very contentious desire for her. It was contentious within our relationship. I didn’t want my kids to be raised as Christians. I certainly didn’t want her giving money to the church, which, for some reason, bothered me more than the idea of her raising my kids as Christians, and so as she started returning to church, I started being more open, and it was during this time that, one morning I woke up, and she was getting the kids ready to go to church, and I said, “I think I’ll go to church with you today.” To this day, there was nothing besides God that I could say that informed that desire, because I was adamantly opposed to it up until that point.

And so I went. And it was one of those stereotypical moments that you hear about where the pastor seemed to be speaking right to me. And that was not a conversion moment for me, but it was a moment that continued to open me to the possibility that maybe Christianity does hold some answers. And so that helped me to get past that obstacle of going more into almost a theism to being open to a greater possibility of theism to being open to the possibility of the truth of Christianity.

One thing I think about when I hear your journeying is you continue, beginning at some point you became open to the possibility of God. And then you became open to another aspect. Something softened in you because of seeing authenticity or commitment to faith or perhaps you became more open because you started questioning. And you allowed yourself the possibility of another worldview being true. And that strikes me because oftentimes, if we’re not open, it’s hard to really see and weigh your current worldview versus potentially another worldview or the explanatory power of another worldview. And to me it sounds like you were making intentional choices to be open to another perspective. Oftentimes we hear there’s no evidence for God, and so if there’s no evidence then it’s not even worth engaging for some. How would you respond to someone who might make that declaration, “There’s no evidence for God,” in terms of perhaps even openness to consider another perspective.

Yeah. It’s a great question. And one of the difficulties in talking about evidence for God is that there is no single one thing that you can point at and say definitively, “There you go. God exists.” By the same token, there’s no one thing you can point at definitively and say, “There you go. God does not exist.” And so for me it was ultimately a cumulative case, where there are a variety of evidences and things that we believe to be true, hold to be true, understand to be true. Things that we scientifically believe and things that we intuitively believe. And I spoke earlier about morality as an example of right and wrong and the idea that right and wrong is either grounded in something or it’s just grounded in our own preferences and group-think. And particularly in America today as we look at all of the division and the challenges that we face as a country, of people that have different views of what’s right and what’s wrong, we all believe instinctively that there’s something grounding that sense of right and wrong. And so being open to the possibility that that foundation is, in fact, God, that without God, there is no ultimate floor for morality. It really is a question of preference.

And so as we start to wrestle with our own priorities, in life and in how we engage the world, I think this question keeps coming up. As I look at beauty, how do I understand beauty? Recognizing that different people view things differently. How do I understand morality, recognizing that people have different beliefs about different subjects. And being open to the possibility that God ultimately is and can be a foundation to those beliefs and thoughts and considering that. And looking then at the different evidences that are available, at the different ways of approaching the subject.

So yeah, as you were saying, I think sometimes it really does require a little bit of openness to take a look at the evidence that’s there, but I’m glad that you really emphasize here that there’s not one sort of bulletproof argument for God, if you will. That Jesus is not the end of a philosophical argument, although of course there are other things like the resurrection that really historically, evidentially ground the reality of His resurrection and claim to be God. Some perhaps have a little bit more evidential value than others, but still, as you say, it’s not just one thing. It’s a combination of things. And I applaud you for really being open to taking a journey of exploration because, for most of us, I think we like to live in the comfort of our own worldview and not be challenged, but you were willing to go on a journey. And that’s not an easy thing to do. For your worldview and your world, really, to flip upside down.

Yeah. I think you make a really great point, and I just wanted to weigh in on that and say that I think you’re absolutely right, and particularly with the resurrection. That was a significant factor for me. And particularly as you look at how the church spoke about Jesus and wrote about Jesus. It was all based on the resurrection. And you look at Paul’s writings, and he essentially says, “If Christ has not been raised, then your hope is in vain.” And, to me, that is an interesting confirmation of the fact that these Christian writers were making claims that they believed to be true because they’re flat-out saying, “If He didn’t come back from the dead, all of this is just a joke. It’s useless. So go on and do something else.” That aspect of Christianity has always been very important to me because it is making the claim that our faith is rooted in an actual event that took place at a particular point in time.

For those who might be listening and are curious about perhaps what resources you might have looked at in investigating some of these big questions, do you have any recommendations?

Great question. Of course we mentioned C.S. Lewis Institute, so I have to say that C.S. Lewis has a number of books on various topics. I think Mere Christianity is a great starting point to be open to exploring some of these questions of what is Christianity and what do Christians believe and why is it compelling. I think moving on, his book on miracles, for me, is a very interesting one and compelling because it’s essentially… To distill it down, it’s opening up to the possibility of miracles and understanding them in their context and whether or not they logically could exist. I think there are a number of great books written by different philosophers, Alvin Plantinga comes to mind, to just explore some of the questions. And there’s a number of books on Old Testament history, and I guess, as I think about it, maybe the answer is so difficult to come up with, particular set of resources, because I recognize that everyone’s challenges are in different areas, so some people might have challenges with the historicity, and some people might have challenges with some of the ethical claims or moral claims. And so it’s more difficult than to make a single recommendation or a couple of recommendations, because people are going to want to research in the area where they’re most passionate.

Right. You mentioned, as part of your journeying, that you read the Bible, perhaps for the first time. Was your experience with that informative or enlightening or surprising or those kinds of things, in terms of your own journeying?

Very much so. And as I mentioned, I had started going to church, and so there were a lot of things I was unfamiliar with. Growing up in the US as a kid, I remember going to the dentist, and they always had these big blue book of Bible stories and things like that, so I had that level of exposure as a very young child. As an older kid, I didn’t have any exposure whatsoever, so I wasn’t fluent with any of the Bible stories. When my wife started taking our kids back to church, she subsequently bought a lot of Veggie Tales videos, which is this animated cartoons about vegetables singing and talking about God, so my biblical knowledge was pretty well informed by Veggie Tales more than anything else. So on one level, as I would read through these stories, correlating the cucumber and an actual person from the Bible is fun and exciting. But the biggest thing was just, again, as I said earlier, seeing pictures of Jesus throughout the scripture. And when I came to the New Testament, that’s when it really all started to click into place.

Reading through the Old Testament was challenging, and you see stories that, they’re hard to make sense of. And you have a lot of questions. But when you get into the New Testament and you start to see how Jesus can answer those questions and make sense of some of those stories that were difficult, I think that’s where things really began to click for me. And so, as I talked about the 34-week Bible study that I was in, it was the latter part of that when we had finally gotten into the New Testament which was when I became a Christian. And even then, going on from there, I think there was still a process. I can’t put a finger on an exact day.

So everything kind of started to come together to make sense as a whole, as an understanding of the world, of yourself, of reality.

As we’re wrapping up our conversation, I do want to, here at the end, give you an opportunity to talk with somebody who may be listening who is curious, not only about your journey but perhaps their own, and that they may have that sense of openness perhaps that you had at one point. What would you say to someone who is a curious skeptic and intrigued by the possibility of God and Jesus and Christianity and the Bible?

I think the first thing I would say is that there’s a lot of noise on both sides. There are a lot of voices clamoring to be heard. And for me, it was important to take myself out of that a bit and to recognize that there are experts on both sides of this subject. There are experts scientifically. There are experts philosophically and theologically. There are people that are experts in the Bible and the transmission of texts, some of which believe and some of which don’t believe. And being open to the reality that there are people with the same inputs that reach different conclusions. So recognizing the impact that your worldview, what you believe about the world and the way things work, is going to have on your ability to receive some of the information you’re studying and being open to the possibility that your worldview is perhaps skewed. And allowing for the possibility that the other side might have something true to say. And spending time researching both sides diligently. And it’s easy sometimes to fall off to one side or the other and not look at both sides, so I think it’s important to look at both sides critically but openly.

I think that’s great advice. No matter which direction you’re coming from. It’s always good to be thoughtful about not only your ideas and your worldview but others as well. And for those who are listening today who perhaps are believers in Christianity and in God, and they want to be able to engage with those who don’t see life and the reality and the world the same way, what would you say to them to help foster a greater example, like you mentioned in your story you had people cross your path who were a real embodied example of Christianity that, on some level, you found attractive. Can you speak to that?

Yeah. I would say be slow to speak and quick to listen. People want to be heard, and they want to know that you’re listening to what they’re asking, that you care about what’s important to them, and no one wants to feel like you’re just there to put a notch in a belt or to get your word in, so listen carefully to what people have to say and hear their genuine concerns, and then seek to find the answers to those concerns. And don’t just go in with a program or an agenda. Take time. And don’t bucket people into one group. There’s many different beliefs across the spectrum of atheism, agnosticism, Buddhism, etc., as there are within Christianity. There are a lot of different things that people believe, so take the time to get to know someone, care about them genuinely, and answer their questions sincerely.

I think that’s excellent, excellent advice, Jeff. Thank you so much for coming on today, telling your story, giving us advice, and just some tremendous insights, not only into your journey but challenging us all to really be more thoughtful about what it is that we believe and why we believe it, so it’s encouraging and exciting for me to hear such a dramatic change, really, from actually someone who has an Anton LaVey Satanic Bible on their coffee table to now having a Christian or Judeo-Christian Bible that you’re actually spending time studying at the graduate level. Wow! If someone doesn’t say that’s a transformation, I don’t know what is. So I’m just excited and encouraged really for people to listen to your story and to really be challenged in their own way of thinking and living, so thank you so much for coming on.

Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s very exciting.

Great.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jeff’s story today. You can find out more about the C.S. Lewis Institute, as well as some of his book resources that he recommended during his story in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it, and if so, subscribe and review and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see again how someone else flips the record of their life.

A Christian for 15 years, Jim rejected his faith and identified as an humanist-atheist for nine years.  Although he could not see a possible return to God, he found a more robust faith than he had once left.

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we hear how someone flips the record of their life from atheism to Christianity. Each podcast, we typically listen to the story of someone who was an atheist and became a Christian. Today’s story is a little bit different. Jim was a Christian who became an atheist, who then found a more robust form of Christianity and reconverted.

A commited Christian for 15 years, he left Christianity in his mid 30s and passionately identified as a humanist atheist for nine years. During that time, he genuinely could not see how he could possibly go back to believing in God again, and yet he did, with his faith even stronger for the experience. I hope you’ll come and listen and explore Jim’s extraordinary story with me.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jim. It’s so great to have you!

It’s good to be talking with you.

I love that English accent. Having gone to school there. I’m sure our listeners will really appreciate it, too. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, Jim?

Well, as you know, my name is Jim and I’m from the UK. I live in Swindon currently, which is about 80 miles west of London, actually not that far from Oxford. But I was brought up in London, in the east side of London, a place called Rainham, and now I live in Swindon. I am an IT audit manager. I’ve worked in IT for about 15 to 20 years. I’m married to Liz, and I have two kids, one Hannah, who’s just recently gotten married despite the COVID-19 situation and the various lockdowns that we’ve had.

And I have a son who’s just finished secondary school, and he’s started college now. So that’s us. Family of four. And I’m in my late 40s, and yeah. So that’s a brief introduction to me.

That’s terrific. It certainly gives us an idea of who you are and where you are in the world, really. And congratulations on your daughter’s wedding.

Thank you.

That’s really wonderful. So let’s go back to your childhood, it sounds like in East London, where you grew up, to get your story started. Was God any part of the picture at all among your family and your friends and even around your local culture?

Well, I wasn’t brought up a Christian, but I was fairly ambivalent towards faith and religion, I’d say, generally. I would probably describe my upbringing as a very typical British upbringing where, when it comes to faith, and in particular Christianity, my views about Christianity were formed mostly through the lens of popular cultural influences and references, like Christmas and I can remember Nativity plays. I think my idea of Jesus was formed mostly through a film called Jesus of Nazareth that starred an actor called Robert Powell, who is a classic blue eyed, dark haired European-looking man who kind of wandered the hills of Palestine sort of listfully floating around, making short sentence statements about different parables and perhaps not easily understood who was just a nice man who was mistreated by Roman soldiers, and I think that’s pretty much all I knew about Jesus.

And my idea of religion was that it was just something that was there. I neither was against faith and religion or for it. You probably know that, in the UK, we have a long history when it comes to Christianity and the church. We have the Church of England, and we have a lot of pageantry and a lot of traditions, so I just saw Christianity as something that was very much tied to the Church of England, old churches, old parishes, and effectively just Christianity was a way of being nice and being good but wrapped up in religious ritual, I think is probably how I kind of saw it.

And my parents, they didn’t go to church. And again, I think they had a similar view, that Christianity was something that was nice but not something that we particularly were invested in, and religion was okay, as long as it was on balance and that you kept your feet firmly on the ground, and I think probably that there was a sense of right and wrong that I had as a young person, but I didn’t really think about where that morality came from. I just kind of had that sense that, “Well, if there is a God, I haven’t robbed a supermarket, so I’ll probably be okay.” So that was kind of my view of Christianity. Didn’t really give it much thought and was quite happy to, as a young person, explore life and all of life’s opportunities.

So it sounds like you had a pretty good childhood and a nice family, a nice life. You did good things. You were a moral person, just along with the culture. So did you explore what you did believe? If you didn’t believe in religious institutions or in religious tenets, that they were nice stories or cultural rituals but not much more than that, did you consider what you did believe at that point? Or was it just kind of going with the flow?

I think it was going with the flow more than anything, and I think that… I was brought up in the eighties in my teenage years, and I don’t know about [UNKNOWN 07:54], but I think, for me, the term atheist tended to have negative connotations of some sort. I don’t know why, but I tended to think that. So I wouldn’t have described myself as an atheist. I just didn’t really have any passionate views on faith or religion, and I didn’t know much about religion.

A lot of that changed, though, when I went to university, and it was… When I went to Dundee University in Scotland that was a story of coming to terms with the future that I was stepping into. I was doing a degree, but I was struggling with whether that degree was actually the degree that I wanted to do, asking questions about where it would lead to, and I think I did have periods of reflection as a young man at university who embraced all of the social benefits, as I saw them, of being at a university, going out to pubs and drinking and socializing and all of that kind of thing

And I found myself faced with the kind of life questions I think that a lot of people do ask themselves about life’s meaning and life’s purpose and where I was going. And the turning point for me was when I realized that I wasn’t really taking care of myself, and I was struggling with motivation, particularly to kind of think, “Well, what is the point? I could get this degree. I could aim for success. But I don’t know what success looks like. I could aim for something in life, but I don’t know what that purpose is,” and I was missing out on a lot of lectures and not doing very well. And I realized, “If I don’t get my act together, my life is just going to take a bit of a tumble, and I need to do something about this.” And so I decided that what I would do is I’d hang around with those friends that I knew who seemed to kind of do life pretty well and were disciplined when it came to study and seemed to be a good influence, and I didn’t really realize this at the time, but it turned out that the group of people that I hung out with were all Christians, and so I found myself in the company of Christians, and the strange thing is that I found out months later that, in the corridor in [UNKNOWN 10:36], where I was staying, I think there were about three or four Christian guys who were all in this corridor, half of whom had actually moved into that corridor in the first term through various reasons, and in fact, I myself had come to be in that corridor because there was a mix-up with the room allocation, so there were all these coincidences that I found out afterwards that led me to being surrounded by Christians. I was tripping over them.

Yeah. I would imagine that would’ve been quite unusual, really, in Britain, actually, in the eighties, like you said. It was a nominally Christian culture but really not much more than that. So that is an interesting coincidence of sorts.

Yeah. That’s right. And I often put it this way: I accidentally became a Christian. And what I mean by that is I was talking to a visiting friend of the guy opposite me, a chap called Ian, and I was in his room, and this girl, Maggie, was visiting, And she kept talking about this place called Menzieshill, and I thought this was a park or a woodland or something, and eventually, she said, “Would you like to come to Menzieshill, because we’re going this afternoon, and I said, “Sure. Why not?” It was a nice sunny afternoon on a Sunday, so we’re in the back of her car, and I was talking to Ian, and I said, “What kind of park is this Menzieshill? Is it a park with swings and playgrounds and things like that? Is it like open kind of fields?” And he just looked at me incredulously and said, “Menzieshill is a church.” And I remember kind of thinking… I kind of felt two things, really. One, I thought, “Oh, my gosh! What have I done?” And then the other thing I thought was, “Oh, actually it might be quite nice to go to church.” And so I sat in this Church of Scotland Church, and I don’t remember what the sermon was, but I do remember that I had a strong sense of being like a child and a sense that there was something here where there was a second chance, a second opportunity for me to do life differently.

And the long story short, I went through this journey of discovering the Bible. I read a Gospel that somebody gave me. I was asking questions. And another Sunday we went to the church, and they had communion, and as they were passing around the bread and the wine, I said to Ian, “Should I take this?” And he said, “Well, you ought to be a Christian if you’re taking Communion,” and I said to him, “Well, my mom and dad never christened me when I was a child because they thought faith needs to be your own decision. We won’t baptize you as a young infant,” And this is almost embarrassing, I thought the word Christian came from christened. It didn’t dawn on me that the word Christian came from Christ. So I assumed in my head that a Christian was someone who’d been baptized as an infant and had been through some kind of ceremony and declared by a vicar or a priest as a Christian and perhaps given some kind of scroll or certificate or something like that.

And so I said to Ian, “I wasn’t christened,” and he said, “No, no, no. It doesn’t matter. That’s not that, but you should be a Christian,” and then afterwards, when we had a conversation about this, I realized that we were getting our wires crossed, and I said to Ian, “I’m getting confused here. What is a Christian?” And when he told me that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus and has decided to follow Him and that this was a personal decision that you made, not something that you are granted by an official, I said him, “Well, I did that last Wednesday,” and he said, “Well, then you’re a Christian.” And this was news to me. And the reason why is because it suddenly dawned on me that faith and religion can be quite different things. It’s one thing to have faith in and to follow and be committed to the person of Jesus Christ. It’s another thing to just adopt a religious framework and all of the kind of things and trappings that come with that. And I was amazed by that. That was a real revelation to me because, again, having come from no Christian background at all, I was relieved and amazed and very grateful that actually I could call myself a Christian. Based not on meeting certain requirements of an institution. So that was how I first became a Christian. At the age of 19 at university in Scotland in Dundee. And remained a Christian for 15 years.

So obviously something happened. But before we get to that, so your experience as a Christian for those… did you say 15 years?

Yeah.

How was your experience as a Christian? Before you decided that wasn’t for you?

So I was very committed, and I was part of a very strong Christian union at the university, read my Bible, prayed, shared the gospel where I could on campus, and after university, I spent a year on mission in Kenya with an organization called Africa Inland Mission, teaching at a school and preaching in a church just southeast of Nairobi. And then I came back to Dundee, and by this stage, it was the mid nineties, and stayed in Scotland for a short while and then moved back to London and attended a church there, where I met my wife, Liz, and we had our daughter Hannah. And so my faith continued, and I was certainly very committed. If people ask, “Well, were you really a Christian? Did you really give your life to God? Were you really committed?” The answer to that is absolutely yes. I was a Christian. I understood the Gospel. I’d responded to it. And I had committed my life to Christ and chose to follow him. I think what happened, though, is you don’t just suddenly wake up one night and decide that you’re going to throw all that away. And it’s a long story.

Lots of different things happened, but I think that probably the way I would summarize it, to begin with, is that I started, over years, to lose the simplicity of the Gospel. My faith, which was based on the Person I knew, became more about what I knew and whether I was right about things. And so the relationship with God kind of took the back stage, and what was front and center stage was more whether I was right about different things. It was the Gospel plus I have to have this doctrine right, and I have to be right on this nature of Christian walk and Christian living, and I think that, coupled with the kind of daily grind of life. Trying to cut out a career. Trying to cope with domestic life. And also I think when you go out into the outside world. I found that there were good people who were not Christians. I mean according them good in the sense of broadly speaking the way one might use that term.

But they were people who were getting on with life who didn’t have faith, and I think that, if faith becomes ordinary and mundane, it just becomes less distinct. The Christian faith can become less distinct from any other religion or any other view, and I think that there are also areas of my life where perhaps there were compromises, not necessarily big compromises, but I think that what I found was that my life outside of church just looked very different from my life on a Sunday, and so I almost found myself living this dual life, really, where there was a kind of Christian side to me, and it was compartmentalized away from the rest of me, which was all about trying to get on with life, trying to achieve things, trying to do well in my job, trying to get on with the people who I worked with, all of those kind of things. And I think that’s what kind of happened over the years.

And there was also this sense that your faith and Christianity becomes more complex in the sense of we all have to face into the fact that there are different denominations, there are different churches, that Christians don’t agree on everything, but I think that, for me, what I think happened was that truth mattered, certainly mattered to me, and continued to matter to me, but I found myself feeling that my Christian life was so far away from the lives of those who I worked with who weren’t Christians that it became very much an us and them kind of situation. And it felt like Christianity and church was just becoming a smaller and smaller island, if you like, of people who agree with you. And that was how I started to see it. From an emotional level I found myself struggling with trying to balance the kind of working life and the pressures of life with what faith meant to me on a daily basis.

And I think intellectually I did have questions, but to begin with, I think those questions weren’t necessarily initially a challenge to my faith in the sense that they would necessarily lead me to reject my faith. I think what happened is a combination of all of these different things that kind of brought me to a point where, again, as I said, in some of the beginning, my faith just became like a philosophy, really. More about what I knew and not about personal relationship. And once God doesn’t mean that much to you in your daily life, the next logical step is, “Well, then why believe? Why carry on believing?” And so I started to investigate some questions. I was probably more challenged around questions of science, particularly around origins and evolution. I was asking myself questions about that. I was asking myself questions about salvation and what happens to people who haven’t heard the gospel. These kind of things that are challenges and we try to grapple with. But I did it very much in isolation. I didn’t really talk to people about it. It was more of an introverted journey that I went on. And I think that things just started to erode away.

And eventually I remember I kind of raised some of these things with my wife one evening, because she could tell that I wasn’t myself. And I was a bit reluctant to kind of open up, and she said, “You’re not yourself. What’s going on?” And it kind of opened up this door where suddenly I just blurted out all these different memes, I think they’re called, aren’t they? All these different kind of thoughts that I’d dabbled together over a period of months and just blurted out all these questions and doubts that I was having, and I think poor Liz just didn’t have a clue where this came from, and she’s like, “Whoa! Where’s all this coming from?”

And so that was quite a testing time. I think I was probably already, in my heart, on my journey away from God at this stage, but the one thing that I was concerned about was I was a member of the church in North Swindon. I had a church community around me. My wife was still a Christian. And I was obviously concerned about how this could affect my relationships, my relationship with my wife and with my family and those friends around me who were Christians. And that was obviously really important to me, and I didn’t want to… It wasn’t so much I didn’t want to disappoint them, but I didn’t want those relationships to break down so much. I certainly didn’t want my marriage to break down, and I was kind of faced with that, “Do I just keep this to myself and keep going to church and just put on kind of the right expression and turn up, don’t say anything, and then just live your life like that?” And I kind of did that for six months, and then it all came to a head when one of the elders in the church said, “Could you give a testimony in a couple of weeks?” And I think that was it, really. I thought, “I don’t think, in good conscience, that I could do that,” and so I phoned him up and said, “Look, I’m really sorry, but I won’t be coming to church anymore. I just don’t believe anymore,” and I stopped attending. And then that led to, obviously, a challenging period for me and my wife to kind of reconcile that and work through that.

Obviously, it was quite a stunning surprise for your wife. But as you were going through this process and you came to this culmination point, and the church, you were forthright with them and truthful. Did they try to approach your doubts or skepticism with any kind of intention at all? Did they engage you on why you had left? Or did they just let you go?

They did reach out to me. They were very gracious, actually, and I think, looking back, they were really good. They were very gentle. The elder of the church who I called up to say I didn’t believe anymore… the pastor of the church was on sabbatical back in the US for a few months, and so it was one of the elders who was running things, and he met with me in a Starbucks coffee shop, and he just wanted to understand what’s happened, and I talked to him about things like: Is the Bible really the word of God? How do we know it’s true? Isn’t it just that there was a council that made the decision that this is what is scripture, what is canonical, and therefore isn’t it all just manmade? Doesn’t the science suggest that we’ve just evolved and that we are just physical, material beings? What about rational thinking and reason? Shouldn’t we be prepared to question why we believe things? And all sorts of things that came up. And I remember he responded and said, and this is a bit embarrassing, really. He said, “I’m not very intellectual, and obviously you are, and you’ve got these questions, and I don’t really have the answers to all of those. Or I can’t answer them sufficiently.” He said, “But I’m happy to keep a dialogue with you.” And I’m a bit embarrassed by that in the sense that I don’t see myself as very intellectual. Because I thought, “Well, actually, I don’t know whether, hand on heart, I could say that I’d fully investigated these things or fully done my homework or had given opportunity for engagement with somebody, to say, ‘Look, I’m having these questions, and I want to explore them.'”

And I remember, when the pastor returned from sabbatical in the US, and he’d found, anyway, because they called him on the phone and said, “Look, Jim’s not attending church anymore,” and he got in touch and said, “Hey, I’d love to meet you for a coffee,” and by this point, my attitude at the time was very defensive. I think I kind of saw myself as, “Look, I’ve been a born-again Christian. I’m familiar with the inner workings of evangelical Christianity. You can’t fool me. I know your tricks. I know you’re just trying to bring me back in.” And so I had this very defensive, nonengaging position that I’d adopted. And thought, “I will do the honor of meeting with you and have a coffee,” and he asked a few questions, and we had a bit of a discussion. And he certainly struck me as someone, from his answers, who had a lot more to say and said, “There are really good answers to these questions, and a lot of what you said, I think, isn’t strictly true.” And he said, “I’ve been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and do you want to go through that?” And I’d read The God Delusion, but I remember I just turned him down. I said, “No, I’d rather just carry on with my life,” and I remember he was really disappointed.

I remember walking away from that meeting and the look of disappointment on his face because I wasn’t prepared to engage, and I think, again, this is because—I know everyone’s experience is different, and some people would say that they don’t feel the same way, but even in my atheism and my skepticism, while I was convinced that it was purely on intellectual grounds, there was definitely a heart decision to it as well, and I don’t think I was fully honest with myself at the time, but I was already determined not to believe, and the kind of intellectual questions that I had and I guess the arguments that I felt that I’d formulated and that I’d heard, particularly online from the New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, they were really just a means to substantiate the decision that I’d made to leave church and to give me good grounds for it and to feel that it was okay what I’d done and that I’d done the right thing and it was rational and reasonable and so on.

But my wife carried on going to church and I did attend the occasional lunch with some friends from church who were very careful not to bring up the topic of faith, and in some ways it was frustrating, because I remember I was kind of thinking, “Just you wait. The first time that someone brings this up, then I can let them have it.” And tell them all the reasons why… “Don’t you realize these things that you haven’t thought of? You’re just blindly following this faith, and I’ve seen the light, and I’ve now decided to use my head and reason and logic and all those kind of faculties that I have to make a decision on this, and you’re just blindly following faith and carrying on.” And of course, it didn’t come up. They just shared meals, and that was it.

It was nine years I was an atheist. But when I left church, I’d made the decision that I didn’t believe in God anymore, but I wanted to land somewhere. I wasn’t satisfied with saying what I didn’t believe. I certainly felt, “Well, what do I think, then? I don’t want to be a non-person. I don’t want to be somebody who just doesn’t believe. I do want there to be some kind of foundation for my life. What is that?” So I kind of did the usual thing that a lot of people do in this day and age that we live in. I used Google and looked on the Internet, and I came across some different organizations.

Then I came across humanism. And of course I’ve heard of the term humanism but didn’t know much about it, and I thought, “Oh, humanist sounds good, because at least this is something where we’re saying, ‘Look, we’re all in it together. We’re human beings. Our morality and our reason and our purpose come from within. It comes from a shared human collective view of things.'”

And so that seemed more attractive, and it seemed a bit more positive than the atheists, so I thought, “Ah, okay, humanist sounds good.” So I very strongly identified, certainly in those early years, as an atheist humanist. So I didn’t just backslide. I didn’t just kind of slip away or just stop going to church. There was no particular hurt, actually. When I left church, I did it 100 miles an hour. And actually I would say that I did go as far as saying, “I’m not just an atheist. I’m an atheist naturalist.”

Okay.

You’re probably aware that Richard Dawkins is famous for that quote. He said something like, “We are just dancing to the tune of our DNA and to the sound of the universe, and this universe is not personal. It’s just a cold universe and-

Right. It’s a very sobered perspective.

And at the time I appreciated that. I just thought, “This is honest atheism. This is where atheism should logically lead you to. It should lead you to naturalism because anything other than that is just a compromise. There can’t be anything other than just the natural. At the time I certainly felt, “At least he’s honest about his atheism,” that there is no hope. And there is no purpose. And that is how I felt.

That’s a little bit interesting or a little bit ironic, even, for someone who, early on, was really searching for meaning, purpose, and looking at their future and desiring a worldview that actually provided substance towards that, as compared to the naturalist who, as you said, in Dawkins’ quote, “There is no real meaning or purpose. You’re just dancing to the music of your DNA,” right? Everything’s determined. There’s no free will. There’s no real purpose, no good and evil. If you are that honest atheist naturalist, did that not disturb you on any level?

How did I feel? I guess I kind of satisfied myself that, “Well, if this is it, then this is it. And there were very intelligent people who believe this and accept it and yet still get on with their lives, so maybe the biggest challenge I’ve got is to find a way of continuing with life, carrying on with a purpose, as if there is a purpose,” even though philosophically, I was in a position where I didn’t feel that there was objective purpose or objective meaning.

If we look at the world around us, we don’t look at people who are constantly, on a day-to-day basis, struggling with existential philosophical problems about who they are and what their meaning in life is. Not to say that people don’t think about these things. They do. But by and large, when you look at the world around you, you see people getting on with their lives, and I think I was kind of envious of those who’d never thought about God and never thought about theism or atheism before. They just ate and drank, had family time, and enjoyed life as much as they could. Yes, they had their struggles and tried to cope with them. And I kind of envied that, because I thought, “Well, the toothpaste is out of the tube now. I can’t go back to a position of just, ‘It doesn’t matter.'” Because I knew that it did matter, and I can’t just switch my mind off to it.

So it was a bit of a struggle, but I think what I did was I just pushed certain things down beneath the surface and kind of wrapped myself up in this view that the most important thing for me is to be true to myself, which is true of anyone, to be honest about how I feel about things, and find a way to keep going with my marriage, find a way to keep living a fulfilling life and be the best dad that I can be, be the best husband I can be. I certainly didn’t want my marriage to suffer as a result or fail as a result, and so there’s something to work on, and keep going with my career. And find purpose in that, even if that is just an illusion, if you like, of the mind that says that there is a purpose, and it’s just something that’s just synaptic gaps firing away in your brain and that’s actually why you think that there is purpose and meaning to life. Even if that’s true, just kind of carry on regardless. It’s interesting you bring this up, because I think there was this transition from a very passionate, “I’ve stepped away from God, and I’m really affirming myself as a skeptic, atheist, humanist,” and I was very defensive about that.

hearing someone like Christopher Hitchens, who was just so florid in his language, so fluid in the way that he could present his ideas, he was just really good to listen to, and I’d listen to Richard Dawkins.

I met Richard Dawkins. I went to a book signing after a debate between Richard Dawkins and Professor Robert Winston, and I remember queueing up, and I got to the desk, and there’s Richard Dawkins in front of me, my hero. At the time. And I said to him, I used to be a Christian and I’m not anymore,” and I remember he just looked at me, and there was this awkward silence for about 5 seconds, and then I thought, “Well, I’ve got to say something,” so I said, “Oh, it’s Jim. Could you just put ‘to Jim’ and sign your name, please?” And he did that and handed me the book, and I walked away.

He had no words. Nothing.

No words at all. And it was just… it was bizarre. It was just a really strange encounter.

Right!

… got a convert away from Christianity to atheism. He just didn’t say a word. It was really odd.

Awkward, yes.

This is kind of that first phase of skepticism for me, where I’d wrap myself up in these warmly affirming, “You’re right to be an atheist. Here’s some really clever words and some clever arguments to keep you in that position, and whenever your wife gets home from church with the kids, you just remember that you just got the latest newsletter from the British Humanist Association through the post and read that,” and I would just do all these things. I wasn’t very adversarial or combative because, again, I knew that my wife was going to church still. I didn’t actually meet with humanists personally and join the group personally. I did all of this very much at a distance, just within myself. Probably because I felt that actually that might be too much. It might just cause there to be too much conflict. And then, of course, rather selfishly, I thought, “Well, if at all things go wrong, it’ll be me that gets the blame, you see?” So I was a bit selfish, I’m sorry to say. So a lot of this was kind of private thoughts and private readings.

But then things changed a little bit, because again as we said before, I started to move into this stage of, “I just want to get on with life,” and, “I just want to move forward.” And so fast-forward a few years. I found myself becoming… It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t convinced by the arguments anymore, but my experience was that it felt like a lot of the humanist narrative that I was exposed to in social media, in the different literature that I’d received and so on, seems to be, “Whatever the church is saying, we’re opposed to it.” “Whatever religion says, we’re opposed to it,” and I kind of found myself becoming a bit tired of it. And particularly when there’s that kind of famous message that Richard Dawkins gave. He said, “We just shouldn’t debate people of faith. They’re not worthy of debate. We should mock them. We should ridicule them.”

Oh, at the Reason Rally, I believe he said that. Yes.

Yeah. And I just thought, “Hang on a minute. These friends of mine who I met at university who were Christians, they were intelligent people.” I knew of some who were far brighter than I was. Far more academic. And they were Christians. And I know friends and family who are Christians, and I thought, “I don’t feel that way towards them,” and I have to say, it’s absolutely right to say, not every atheist or skeptic feels that way, and we certainly shouldn’t assume that that is a typical view that they have. I know a lot of atheists have come out and said that they don’t think that Richard Dawkins was right to say that kind of thing. Because it’s not helpful. We don’t want to tar everybody with the same brush.

But I think what happened during that time was I just softened. I think the defensiveness that I had had, the opposition to any attempt to engage had just softened, and I kind of found myself thinking, “Do you know what? I won’t renew my membership of the British Humanist Association.” I was only a member for a year, so I didn’t contribute much. And, “I’ll just kind of settle down a bit and not be so defensive,” I guess. And so life kind of carried on for a few years.

But I joined a band, and I was doing well with work. I did creative things. And sort of carried on in that kind of vein. And then I hit this period where it was really funny. There was one friend. I can’t remember who it was, but I do remember the conversation, and I did share with people who’d never been Christians before that I was an ex-Christian, and I always found it really difficult to try and explain to them how important that was. From their experience, having not been a Christian, they just kind of saw it as, “Oh, right. Okay. So you don’t believe anymore. That’s all right, isn’t it?” They want to just get on with their lives. And I was like, “No! You don’t understand! This is a really huge thing. I’m not a Christian anymore, and don’t you realize that Christians think that this is really important and that your life depends on this decision and how important it is that we use our minds,” and all this kind of thing. But I remember having a conversation like that, and the response I got back was, “Well, you don’t know. One day you might come back to faith. You might change your mind,” and I said to them, “I can’t honestly see how that would be possible, given that now I’ve…” as far as I was concerned, I’d dismantled Christianity. I pulled back the curtain, like in the Wizard of Oz, and revealed what the real truth was, and that was how I saw it.

So I saw a return to faith as really impossible because of where I’d arrived at. And yet it happened.

And yet. So how did you make that turn? What happened that caused you to reconsider?

A number of different things. I think first of all, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and we were talking about our lives, and I just said, “You know what? I’ve got a great job. I’m really appreciative of my life. My job’s going well, and it’s fulfilling. Ish. I mean obviously there’s always something else that one would like to do differently perhaps. My family’s great. I live in a comfortable house. I can take the dog for a walk with a view over Swindon, and it’s lovely in the mornings. I’m in a band, playing bass in a band.” And I remember saying, “If I could go back to my 18-year-old self, I know that if I said this is what your life would end up, my 18-year-old self would say, ‘Hey, I’ve made it. I’ve done all right.'”

And I remember having this conversation, and then a couple of days later, I was thinking about this, and I had probably a similar question to what I had right back when I was 19. I just went, “Yeah but so what? So what? What do I do next? What is the rest of my life going to be like? And where is meaning and purpose in life?” And that question came up again, the big kind of, “So what?” question. “What is the purpose of life?” And, “What meaning is there?” And, “Is it just manufactured? Is it just a way of kind of coping to get through your existence?” And I kind of had this little alarm bell, going, “Uh oh. Hang on in a minute. Let’s not go there. That’s going to lead me to God again,” so I kind of brushed that under the carpet.

But then other things happened. I remember there was a time when I was sitting outside, on a bench outside my house one summer evening, and I was thinking about my career and my job. And again, I enjoyed it and I liked it, but I was also kind of thinking, “I feel that I want to do something different,” and I was kind of going through this little struggle. And this thought came to mind, that, “Hey, one day I would have prayed about this, but I don’t have that opportunity now. That’s not available to me anymore.”

And there was a kind of sense of personal reflection, sort of an intellectual exercise. It was just simply asking, I guess, the beginnings of the question, “Why did I walk away? Why did I choose to actually abandon my faith, given that there are other believers who must have gone through similar things, who must have had similar struggles, and probably some who’ve gone through far worse situations than I’ve gone through, and yet have kept their faith?” And I thought of people like Corrie ten Boom and others like that, who I just thought their lives weren’t anywhere near as comfortable as mine is. I was so grateful for the life that I’ve got relative to others, and yet others have stayed the course.

I think because I was already in a place where I’d softened a bit and I’d become less defensive and just more open generally, I kind of went through this period of reflection. And I remember lying in bed one night and thinking back through my life, and it was really strange actually. It’s an interesting time because I was kind of looking back at all the different years, every year of my life, from the age of 19, and all the different events that happened, and it was almost like my life was kind of being played out. And I just couldn’t sleep. And I kind of woke up the next morning with that question of, “Had I made the right decision? Was it all about the intellectual doubts or was there something else?” And so I thought, “I need to kind of address this again. What’s my biggest obstacle?” And I thought, “Okay, let’s look at science. Let’s see if there’s anyone who’s said something about this in response to the kind of New Atheist monologue that’s come out,” people like Dawkins and Hitchens and so on.

And I don’t remember how I found it. I did a search on my Kindle to look for a good book to read, I just thought, “I want to read something that’s by somebody who’s at a university that is a reputable university and not a Christian institute.” So I kind of did this search. I came across this book. I think it’s called Gunning for God by a man called John Lennox, who is a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and I thought, “Oh, Oxford. That’ll do.” I think the subtext to that was something like “why the New Atheists are missing the mark,” or something like that.

And so I read that, and I started to read the writings and hear some of the counter arguments to those typical arguments that I’d seen from the New Atheists, talking about whether religion was the root of all evil, whether it was a poison, as Christopher Hitchens called it, whether Jesus really did rise from the dead and what the evidence of that is. And I also kind of read other books by John Lennox as well. In a short period of time, and I did all this secretly, without my wife knowing, because again I think just being that introverted thinker, I just thought, “Well, this is my little journey. I’ll just think about these things.”

And then I think what challenged me was I was confronted with the realization that I’d probably put obstacles in the way of faith that weren’t really legitimate obstacles that were kind of false obstacles and barriers to continuing believing. The big thing for me was about evolution and what our origins are, and my view when I was a Christian was that, if you believed that the Bible is inerrant and is inspired, then you are committed to a six-day creation event and a 6,000-year-old earth, and if you can’t commit to that, then you’re not somebody who takes scripture seriously. And I found that when I read what John Lennox had to say on that, he just said, “Actually, that’s not the case,” that actually that view on the age of the earth and on the six days of creation has been debated for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s not a new thing. And just kind of challenged my thinking on that. And so I started to unpick this view that reason and rationality and logic are tools that are exclusively for use by atheists and nontheists and skeptics and that faith is something that is purely a blind faith. And lots of other things as well. But I found John Lennox, the way he wrote and the way he expressed himself was really clear, really articulate, and also very fair.

And I also listened to, or watched online, a couple of sermons by a friend of mine called Gavin who was at university that he gave at his church in Perth about the kingdom and the convent. And it was almost like just being reintroduced to the Gospel again, but hearing the Gospel in the context of the entire Old Testament and New Testament, and I went for a walk with the dog to a little parkland that overlooks Swindon. And I remember I sat down, and I was thinking about all this, and I just thought, “Do you know what? I could investigate everything and keep investigating and then look at the counter claim or counter argument and then look at the counter counter argument and keep going. How much knowledge do I have to amass before I can be satisfied on this question of whether God exists or not and whether he wants to relate to me or not?”

And I realized that, if I’m not careful, my project that I’d embarked on would just be this never-ending constant series of questions. And it’s good to question. I’m not saying at all that that shouldn’t happen. It’s absolutely right that we ask questions. But at some point we have to get to a stage where we stop and make a decision. And so I found myself saying the first prayer of nine years, which was, “Okay, God. If You’re there and You’re real, I’m prepared to think about You again,” and that was as far as I was prepared to go. You know, it wasn’t really a prayer. It was more just kind of a statement, and then I walked away and kind of went home.

And it was actually just a couple of weeks later that I found myself in the same spot, and I just thought, “Do you know what? It all starts to make sense,” and I don’t know if you recall. There were these pictures that were really popular about twenty years. I think they were computer images. They used to call them Magic Eye, and you’d get a book of them. And they just looked like these really complex patterns, but if you were to kind of look at them carefully, you should see a 3D kind of image by staring at them.

Yes.

And I can only liken it to this, that what I realized that I needed to do was not focus on the individual patterns, not focus on every single individual question, but to kind of just step back, take time, reflect, and look at the big picture. And when I did that, it just felt to me like there was a coherent message behind all of these questions that I had and all of the answers that I felt were there. What I mean by that is that the thing that made most sense of what I observed in the world around me and what my experience of life was, the thing that made the most sense about that, was that there was a God, that He does exist, that we are created beings, that we are immaterial minds and not just physical brains, that the universe hasn’t existed for eternity and didn’t just pop into existence by magic but had a beginning, and that there is a meaning to life that has been given to us externally by a God who has given life meaning in the first place and given us meaning.

And so I then found myself thinking about Psalm 139, which came to mind. I think there’s a part where it says, “You perceive my thoughts from afar,” and I was just reflecting on how that Psalm talks about God knowing our minds and knowing our thoughts, and I thought, “God knows the questions that I’ve got, and He understands them. He knows why I made the decisions that I made,” in that process of reflection, I just prayed the prayer and just said, “God, I’m yours again. I’m back,” and recommitted my life to Him.

Wow! That’s an amazing story. And you speak of the process, the journey in such eloquent terms, and I’m very struck by your self-awareness of the different aspects of your journey, whether it be intellectual or existential, your awareness of your openness or resistance. Perhaps the way that you describe yourself as an intellectual—or an introverted thinker, I think you said. You are very thoughtful, and we are the grateful recipients of that thought process, because you’ve made it so clear.

Some of your story reminds me a little bit of the way Esther Meek describes what she calls knowing God in her book, called Longing to Know. She describes that same thing as the 3D picture. It is there to see, but you have to have the intention and the willingness to reflect to see it. So in the same way in which you sat back, you thought, you studied, you listened, you reflected, and then the picture came into being. It made sense. You were able to see all of these things coming together, like you say, the world around you and the experience of your own life, that the Christian worldview is, like you say, coherent. It’s comprehensive. It seems to connect with what we experience in reality. What a beautiful story you have!

I do have a question, a couple of things with regard to your wife. One is that you resisted the mocking, the ridicule of the Christian, and I wonder if some of that had to do with the fact that you knew Christians personally easy to have an us/them mentality. It’s easy to dehumanize or degrade the other, but when you’re actually married to someone who calls themself a Christian, when you have friends, like you say, that are intellectual, that are loving, that actually belong to you, I think that that’s not an easy determination, in terms of, “I’ll just ridicule and mock and dismiss.” You can’t just do that because you experientially know differently. And so I wondered if you could speak to that.

And I also wondered, with regard to your wife, because I know that people listening have a spouse or someone they love who does not believe, who sees things quite differently, I wondered how your wife’s response to your disbelief affected, not only your perspective about Christianity but your willingness to come back to it.

Yeah. It wasn’t easy. I think when it first became clear that I was having doubts about my Christian faith and particularly through the period where I made clear my intentions to leave church and not believe anymore, I think the initial response from my wife was… She was shocked, and she was concerned. And rightly so, because faith is really important, and we met as believers, and we had shared a common love for God and each other. We’d got married under covenant before God. And so all these things were important. And I wasn’t naive to the impact that this would have on Liz, and so it was absolutely right that she responded initially with that shock and that concern, and you know, “What does this mean for us? What does this mean for our marriage?” And I tried to assure her that, “Look, we’ll find a way to carry on, and we’ll just have to kind of get through things.

I think probably the biggest challenge for Liz and the thing that she struggled with most was just kind of knowing how to respond around me. Knowing how to not push too hard. She certainly didn’t want to stop going to church herself, and she didn’t want to stop taking the children to church, and we agreed fairly early on. I think actually she was quite firm on that. She said, “This is your journey, but I don’t want this to result in the kids not going to church,” and I said, “That’s fine.” And I think probably, if I’m honest, I said, “That’s fine,” and then behind the scenes, whispered, “Don’t worry. I’ll get them somehow. They will hear what I have to say on this by some other gratuitous route.” So I think that was the initial response to that, and it was difficult. We had to kind of work things out. And there were difficult conversations. There were awkward moments. I think I probably said some things that were just a bit insensitive, really, that was just me blurting out kind of different, new feelings and thoughts that I’d had about the Christian faith.

So we had to wrestle with that and work it out, but I think, underneath that, what mattered was… She was definitely determined to keep her marriage intact, and so was I, and I had no doubt that Liz wanted me to believe again, of course, and that the people in the church would want me to believe again, but after a couple of years, things just kind of settled down.

I think from Liz’s point of view, I know she was praying for me, and I know that she prayed, “Lord, may it only go so far and no more,” because part of the—and I guess this is something that perhaps Christians do wrestle with, is, if you don’t have an objective morality, then where’s that going to lead you? Where does the buck stop? Where do you get your boundaries from? And thankfully I was really keen to make sure that there could be no accusations made against me that I’d suddenly gone from this life of being a Christian to a life of doing all the wrong kind of things and a life of depravity and so on, so I was really keen to make sure that, just because I don’t believe anymore doesn’t mean I’m going to go away and get drunk every night and do drugs or whatever. I still feel that there are boundaries in life, and I want to honor those.

And I think, once we’d kind of had that period of time where we both got that assurance that our marriage could keep going and that we could still relate to each other, albeit with this change in belief that I’d had, we just kind of got settled into normal life. But I think—it has to be said. I know Liz would say to someone who has a spouse who doesn’t believe, is to be gentle, to not push too hard, and to keep praying. I remember Liz actually—this is the year leading me up to me coming back to faith, Liz invited me. She’d gone to a new church by this stage that I wasn’t familiar with, and she said, “Oh, we’re having a picnic on a Sunday afternoon. Would you like to come? You don’t have to. It’d just be really nice if you could be there because it’s a nice sunny day.” And I said yes. And I said yes because I was not in that stage of being really defensive, so I thought, “Okay, why not?” And it was just a picnic. There was another Sunday afternoon where there was a barbecue at someone’s house, and I came along, and if I heard a conversation where people got onto the God stuff, I’d walk away and mingle somewhere else, but I remember having a conversation with somebody about music for quite a long time, and it was a really lovely conversation. And so I think that epitomizes where I was at. I’m prepared to just meet with people. And that really helped, I think. Just being able to connect with people. And I think that helped Liz as well, to kind of see that I was willing to do that. So yeah.

I think that’ll be very helpful. Jim, as we’re winding up here, can you speak to the curious skeptic who might be reflecting a bit, perhaps? Or curious. Just about their own beliefs. Perhaps thinking about the meaning and purpose in their own life or wherever it is they are or perhaps thinking that there is no intellectual substance to Christianity. There’s a lot of things that you can speak to. What would you tell someone like that, who might be listening?

The one thing that I do feel passionately about is this view that reason and rationality and logic are devices that are solely for the use of atheists and skeptics and nontheists, and that belief in the God of Christianity, is a belief that you can reach that is completely consistent with your ability to reason and to think. I think the idea that reason and rationality is not available to the Christian, or that the Christian faith and belief in God cannot be supported rationally, I think that’s the one thing that I would say I really would like to challenge people on. There are people of all backgrounds, people of all levels of education, from Nobel prize winning physicists to sports personalities to former terrorists, in every different country, all forms of culture, all different types of culture, throughout history, in different times in the timeline of human history, who have found a reason to believe.

And I think, for me, the encouragement that I would give is to make a distinction between teasing apart the arguments and trying to understand difficulties and finding answers to these questions and try and see that as something that is important, but it’s not the whole picture. There’s a really interesting introduction in a book called Basic Christianity by John Stott, and he talks about how a young man in his congregation was having questions and met with him and said, “You know, I just don’t think I believe anymore. I’m going to be leaving church,” and John Stott said to him, “If I was to answer all of your questions to your intellectual satisfaction, would you change the way you lived?” And the look on the young man’s face said that he wouldn’t. And so it kind of begs the question, so is it just about intellectual thinking or is it something else? John Stott said that this man’s problem wasn’t intellectual. It was moral. if it’s with your heart that you believed, is it not also the case it’s with your heart that you don’t believe?

And I think that’s the thing that I would put out there. Take yourself away from all of the noise of the debates for a moment. Go and sit on a hillside. Go and take yourself away to a quiet place. And give yourself that room to examine yourself and to think about, “What is that point that I would get to where I say, ‘Okay, I’ve answered enough. I’ve searched enough. I’ve discovered enough. And now is a time to make a decision.'” Because if you do that and you find that actually the answer is, “Well, there never will be,” then you have to ask yourself the question, “Is it really an intellectual reason why I don’t believe in God? Is that really the barrier that’s preventing me from making that decision?”

I think that’s really excellent. Very challenging. Like you say, challenging and encouraging, I think, for all of us, in terms of why we believe, what we believe, and what we tell ourselves about why we believe what we believe. Sometimes those can be two very different things.

Yeah.

If you were to speak to the Christian who really has a heart for those who don’t see Christianity as true or good or real, what would you say to them?

I would say don’t put up artificial barriers to someone coming to meet and be a disciple of Christ. the advice would be be gentle, be respectful, always give a reason for the hope that we have but do it with gentleness and respect, and all of those things. And that’s probably the advice a lot of people would give. But I think my biggest thing would be that, if we make coming to God really difficult for people, we shouldn’t be surprised when people find it really hard to come to faith, and again, as I mentioned earlier, if we insist that the only interpretation of Genesis, for example, is a six-day creation and the 6,000-year-old earth—and I’m not getting into that debate—I’m just saying that if we make that a condition, or any other doctrinal point a condition, other than the core doctrines of the Christian faith, if we make that a condition of belief, then we’re just making it really, really hard for people to see the invitation of God. And so I’d say just reflect on that. And pray for people.

A lot of people were praying for me all the way through, but I mentioned that I spent a year in Kenya after university, and I spent a year there with a chap called Philip, who was from a similar place in London where I lived, and we got to know each other throughout that year and became really good friends. He went on to do mission work in Tanzania, and after I had left faith, I had just lost touch with him, so I’d not spoken to him for about 10 years at the point that I came back to faith. I didn’t know that he knew that I’d fallen away. So I kind of reconnected with him on Facebook, got his email address, and I sent him an email and I told him my story. And I said, “I hope you’re sitting down, but nine years ago, I abandoned my faith and became an atheist, but recently I came back to faith.” And he was studying in the US. He got his doctorate in New Testament Studies, and he was supervised by someone called Craig Keener. I don’t know if you know of him.

Yes. Oh, yes.

And so Philip was studying for his PhD, and he’s a really great guy, very faithful, very British. He described himself as so British that even British people think he’s British. And not one to exaggerated, but he emailed me back, and he said, “Jim, I was really thrilled to hear from you. By the way, I actually knew that you’d fallen away because word had got around the grapevine, and I was really shocked back then, especially given your experience of being a Christian and all the reasons why you were a Christian, and I prayed for you, but over the years, apathy set in and I forgot and time moved on.” And then he said, “Until recently, a few months ago, you were in a dream, and after I had this dream, and it wasn’t a very specific dream, but you were in it, and I woke up with a strong sense to pray for you every day, which I did, at least every day, if not every week, from that time on,” and he said, “So I was thrilled when you reached out to me soon after and even more thrilled to find out that you’d actually come back to faith when I was hoping that you would just be reconsidering God again.” And this just knocked me for six, because I just thought that moment that he’d had that dream, the moment that he’d had that conviction to pray for me, thousands of miles away, with ten years of silence, that very moment that he decided to pray for me was the moment that I started to consider God again.

And so the message is just don’t forget that this isn’t just a physical kind of thing that’s happening here. This is spiritual, and prayer is important. Keep praying for people. And don’t give up hope. Again, that’s not to suggest that it was only Philip’s prayer of course. Because I know a lot of people were praying for me, and I really appreciate that, but I just found it remarkable that I really felt that prompting to pray at that time was specifically the right thing for that time as I was going through that journey of rediscovering God.

That’s extraordinary! And it is truly a word for all of us, how, I think as you spoke of earlier in your story, there’s a sense in which Christianity can become too ordinary for us as Christians, and it can become less and lesser and less related to our daily lives. But you are a vivid reminder that that—it’s really not a good thing for many different reasons. First of all, just the fact that those who really appreciate that the Christian life is extraordinary and it is supernatural and that there is a God who oversees and superintends and engages in, as you said at the very beginning, in your journeying to God for the first time, He’s a Person. A Person who we can know. A Person who knows us and loves us infinitely. And so much so that He listens to the prayers of His people and that lives are changed.

What a beautiful portrait that you have painted of your life, both towards God, away from God, and then even more robustly toward this beautiful and full relationship with God that is not only intellectual but existential and makes sense of your life and makes sense of all of reality, even. So thank you for spending the time. I think it was well worth spending this time to hear your entire story. So thank you, Jim, so much for coming on board.

You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to speak with you, and just thanks for the opportunity to share my story.

You’re so welcome, Jim.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Jim’s story. You can find out more about the resources he mentioned in the episode notes listed on the podcast page. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at the [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

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