Bob Hazen Testimony

My Testimony, Part 1 (1951-1978)

by Bob Hazen

Chapter 1: Phoniness and Pretense

I was born and raised in the moderate-sized town of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Up through my high school graduation in 1969, my family and I attended church every week, and if anybody had asked, I would have said I was a Christian. During my junior year of high school, I even tried to start a chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes at my high school, but for reasons I can’t completely remember, this never went anywhere. But looking back on this now, I realize I wasn’t a Christian in terms of various basic points – I vaguely agreed with the ideas that God existed, that Jesus was a special person who apparently was both God and man, that the Bible was some sort of record and guide – but it was all more a kind of vague, nonspecific background to what church was – a weekly get-together, with concern for doing right, for helping others, and for acknowledging this vague God. 

Looking back on my church attendance, I don’t recall ever hearing the Gospel laid out clearly – despite lots of sermons, open Bibles, readings from Scripture, and congregational prayer. When I was confirmed in 9th grade (when 9th grade was still part of junior high school), I had this nagging awareness that I didn’t really know what becoming a member of the church or what being a Christian was supposed to be. I didn’t know the Bible, I didn’t read it with any regularity or depth, I didn’t understand the little that I did read, I didn’t really know who God was, and I didn’t know much about Christianity. At the end of the confirmation process, we were each assigned to meet one-on-one with a church elder. This made me nervous, because I was sure the elder would ask me questions about my faith, which would expose the fact that I knew so little. This wasn’t even an issue of whether I believed – it was the fact that I knew so little about being a Christian and so I was incapable of explaining the Bible, much less defending it. 

So when the meeting time came, the elder simply said to me, “Now I'm not going to have you recite in order the books of the New Testament because I know you know that…” – although I didn’t – “…so I just want to welcome you to the church and …” I remember sensing, even as a naive, uninformed 9th grader, “What kind of phoniness is this? Why ask me to recite the order of the books of the New Testament? What does knowing the order of those books have to do with being a Christian? But why aren’t you asking me the order of the books in New Testament? If I’m supposed to know that, then why aren’t you holding me accountable for that? But isn’t determining for your sake and mine whether or not I’m even a Christian far more important than the order of some books?” At some deep reactive level that I couldn’t even articulate for years and years, I had a sort of subconscious gut sense that there was something seriously phony going on here. I wanted to say, “Wait a minute... Are you not asking me anything meaningful… because you’re afraid that you’re going to find out that I know hardly anything about being a Christian? Are you not asking… because perhaps you yourself don’t even know what being a Christian is? This is phony. Is this how adults act? Is this how Christians act? Is this what Christians believe? Is this what Christianity is? Is being a Christian just a matter of pretending? – pretending to believe things you’re not sure are true? – things that might not even be true at all?” 

This was extremely disappointing to me. I was longing for something firm to build my life on, and here this elder wimped out by not passing on to me anything of lasting value. Perhaps this elder didn’t know the gospel either. For whatever reason, I got the impression that what you believed wasn’t as important as that you believed – believed something, or believed in something – never mind whether it was true or not. The believing itself was apparently what was important, not what you believed in. The believing per se was apparently what faith was, even if you were believing in something that is false or phony. 

But I knew from high school mathematics that lots of consistent things could follow from a premise that was false, so I was suspicious and disappointed. Was this what Christianity and the Bible were? – believing something whether or not it was actually true? Believing something even if it were flat out false and fictitious? This was my first encounter with relativism: that even if something were objectively, historically, scientifically, logically false, it could still “be true for you.” The problem was that this never made sense to me. I was pretty demanding in my search for truth, even in junior high and high school. I wanted to know what was objectively true, and then I would build my life upon that. In retrospect, Christianity and the Bible at that time were beginning to seem weak candidates to me, although I should add that I was not at that age consciously aware of or able to articulate much of what I’ve just described. But this dynamic of doubt was there, deep inside of me – percolating, waiting to emerge, waiting to be tested. 

Chapter 2: Beginning the Descent

So when I went off to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in the fall of 1969, I had no anchor, no foundation, no grounding to prepare me for what lay ahead. Unfortunately, what was coming down the pike at full speed was the turbulence and turmoil of the counterculture movement of the 1960’s that was questioning everything. At college, I met professors who argued convincingly that God didn’t exist. I made friends and met peers who claimed that the Bible was wrong and old-fashioned and that truth was whatever we made it out to be for ourselves. I read books that pointed out the phoniness of certain parts of society – of marriages, of churches, of government. It reminded my of my confirmation meeting with the elder who was rubber stamping the pretense that I was a Christian and who was also apparently just pretending that Christianity was true, as opposed to being convinced that it was true. 

After a semester of college classes and lots of conversations about life and meaning, I had been intellectually exposed to other religions, such as atheism, existentialism, materialism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and pantheism, including “new” ideas regarding reincarnation, relative morality, the implications of particles–to-people evolution, and the nature of God (if God even existed). Out of sheer intellectual fairness, I realized that I should really take another look at the Bible. So I decided to take a course from the Macalester College Religion Department on the Bible, and I registered for a class called Old Testament Survey. Both from the professor’s lectures and in all the readings we had, the one consistent theme I kept encountering was skepticism – Isaiah himself probably didn’t write this, we’re not really sure if Jesus said that, Moses may not have even known how to write, etc. 

Little did I know that what I was encountering in this class wasn’t historical Christianity. It was modern liberal Christianity of the 1900’s and late1800’s. Of course, the skepticism I encountered with this professor was a very warm, personable skepticism. He was a kind, encouraging, and friendly older gentleman. His warm, patient, but firm skepticism was about whether the Bible itself could be trusted, about who exactly Jesus was (other than a great teacher), and about whether “God” really existed. But there was one thing he never seemed skeptical about: his own skepticism. So his questioning never spilled over to its logical conclusion, which many of my generation reached, but not always consciously: the philosopher’s famous adage, “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permissible.” If God doesn’t exist, then there is no compelling rationale for being warm and kind, except for personal preference. If God doesn’t exist, then nothing has any lasting, transcendent, eternal value. Moreover, in this class we were never exposed to authors or scholars who presented evidence or arguments that the Bible could be trusted. So in the naiveté of my early college perspective, I reached the barely-conscious conclusion that there simply was no historical, philosophical, evidentiary, scientific, or logical support at all for the position that the Bible was true. 

One day I reached a turning point in class. We had been reading from the book of Exodus about how the ancient Israelites escaped from Egypt. There really is a verse in the Bible (Exodus 14:21) which states, “The LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.” The professor explained that what happened was that God sent a strong east wind to blow back the waters, allowing the Israelites to escape by this parting of the Red Sea. He commented that was probably best explained by the strong wind exposing a sand bar in the waters, which allowed the Hebrews – who were all traveling on foot – to cross, while the Egyptians with their heavy chariots and horses would have gotten bogged down in the wet sand. At some point, the professor continued, the wind stopped after the people of Israel had crossed, and the waters surged back over the Egyptians, drowning them in their cumbersome battle armor and weighty chariots. 

Then the professor went on to say that this parting of the waters may have been merely and only a happy coincidence of nature for the Israelites. But whether it really was God himself – I remember him saying, “the finger of God” – parting the waters or merely a happy coincidence of nature, the professor said – and I remember his exact words – “The important thing was that the Israelites believed it was the finger of God.” The most important aspect of this incident, according to this college teacher, was not whether God really existed, or whether this really was an act of THE transcendent Creator God of the entire universe – the vital thing was that the Hebrews believed this was an act of God. The Hebrews believed this was God… even if it really wasn’t, was the silent implication. The important thing here wasn’t objective reality – the vital issue was what you believed in your mind, according to this learned instructor. 

To this day, I still also remember the exact words of my own reaction. I said to myself, “That’s bunk. If that’s all that this Bible is – a bunch of auto-suggestive, psychological tricks in which you assume or pretend to be true things that very well may not be true at all – then I’m not interested.” As I walked out of class that day, I remember thinking, “Well, cross Christianity off my list.” Of course, I had no idea for another 6-8 years that what I was rejecting was not Jesus himself, or Biblical Christianity, or historic Christianity – I was rejecting a watered-down, liberal, pretend version of Christianity. I was rejecting the scholarly, academic equivalent of the same phony junior high school experience I had, in which people find some sort of “spiritual” significance in things that probably weren’t really true in the first place. 

So for this naive college freshman, I thought that I had examined the Bible and found it wanting. I had reached a crossroads, and with increased intellectual confidence and a bit of disappointment, I turned away from the Bible and started down this new road of having to figure everything out myself, apart from God – this Creator God who apparently didn’t exist, or was not capable of or not interested in communicating with me. It was years before I was able to see how steep this downward path was about to go. 

Chapter 3: The Descent Brightens

During my first few years of college, I had begun dabbling in casual drug use and in Eastern religions and atheistic philosophies. After all, there was no reason not to do drugs – there was no God, so why not? At the time, I didn’t know I was personally beginning to live out that philosopher’s adage, “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permissible.” I had read about expanding the mind with hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and even “casual” drugs  like marijuana. In those heady, confident days of the counterculture, many drug users innocently (and naively) saw their drug use not so much as the mere seeking of pleasure or fun or escape but as a significant part of a serious philosophical search for truth. I had friends who had taken LSD and, as the gurus and shamans had also reported, some of them had found LSD to be a religious experience. Some of my friends even claimed that they “had seen God” while tripping on LSD.

So over the time from about 1970 to 1974, I gradually had become a long-haired, dope-smoking, acid-dropping, draft–dodging, radical leftist, atheist hippie – and for much of that period, I was also a happy pagan. Convinced that God didn’t exist, that the Bible was simply mistaken on basic issues, that Jesus couldn’t possibly be who he claimed to be, I happily entertained other religious views such as reincarnation, Buddhism, cosmic humanism, and atheism. In other words, I was New Age before the term New Age was even being used.

Along with this immersion into the drug culture, I was exposed to intelligent–sounding defenses of Eastern religions and atheism. The two factors of the drug culture and these new religious ideas combined to take me further and further away from Christianity and any belief in God. Even at the time, while I was excited about the limitless possibilities in front of me (since God didn’t exist), there was also some minor disappointment. Way in the back of my mind, I still thought Jesus was who he said he was – the son of the Creator God who had become a man, had taken on human flesh, had risen bodily from the dead and thereby conquered death, and was coming back again one day. But since there didn’t seem to be any credible, intelligent, rational reasons to believe this, I simply began to let those ideas of Jesus and God slip to the same corner of my mind where I held warm memories of Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and all the magic of early childhood. What I had to do now was move down the path of life and embrace adulthood. This was the path to enlightenment. Apparently. 

Chapter 4: The Brightening Demands Reflection

In the background of all this, I intellectually wrestled – very quietly and almost entirely on my own – with the barely noticeable but correct philosophical conclusion that in the grand scheme of things, I myself had no particular value as an individual. Even though I may have been a unique, one-of-a-kind collection of molecules, that uniqueness did not necessarily carry with it any intrinsic value. Of course, there was value that I myself might assign to something or someone, or that someone else might assign to me. But I kept bumping up against an amoral barrier: logically, if God didn’t exist and particles-to-people evolution was true, then there was nothing in this physical universe that made me (or anyone) have any intrinsic, transcendent, inherent, unchanging, eternal, objective value. According to what I thought was true, since there was no Creator, then particles-to-people evolution was a blind process based on chance and necessity, completely amoral and lacking any kind of universal morality or purpose. Joni Mitchell captured this implication in her song “Woodstock” –

   We are stardust (billion year old carbon)

      We are golden (caught in the devil’s bargain)

   And we’ve got to get ourselves

      Back to the garden.

Particles-to-people evolution was true – we were just collections of stardust atoms, caught in this world of confusion. It wasn’t that we were rejecting God. It was that God didn’t exist. How can you reject something that doesn’t exist? So it was up to us to save ourselves. There was nothing really wrong with us except ignorance. We weren’t sinful – we were golden – and ignorant. It was up to us to get ourselves back to the garden of peaceful, harmonious existence. Nobody else could do this for us. The universe was devoid of deity. The house not only had no builder, it also had no owner – and so there wouldn’t be any such thing as an owner’s manual either. There were only minuscule inhabitants like us puny humans and maybe some other races of aliens somewhere else. We were alone in a cosmos that belonged to no Creator, no God. In other words, “there was no one home in the universe.” 

So, I concluded, I was merely the product of a chance collection of atoms and molecules that would one day stop functioning and merge like a water droplet back into oneness with the ocean of the universe. This particular product of chance evolution called “Bob Hazen” was no different and no more valuable than any other product of this mindless process of matter + energy + time + chance + nothing else. So I accepted the starting point that matter, energy, time, and chance are the only factors – the only factors – in the equation of existence and life. From that premise, I realized that concepts like “value” and “morality” may be helpful conventions and nice ideas – but they were not an intrinsic part of ultimate reality. I concluded that we apparently live in an ultimately amoral universe – a cosmos that is utterly indifferent to our quaint notions of right and wrong. Even though we might choose to live by certain “moral” principles, they too were merely products of chemical reactions inside our minds and didn’t hold any transcendent significance. 

In effect, I had started to agree with poet Sara Teasdale’s view of humans in her poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” about the aftermath of nuclear war:

   And not one will know of the war, not one

      Will care at last when it is done.

   Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

      If mankind perished utterly;

   And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

      Would scarcely know that we were gone. 

As beautiful as nature and the cosmos was, with flowers and mountains and stars and sunsets, I concluded that apparently humanity in general and I myself in particular had no lasting, special, lasting, transcendent value in the grand scheme of cosmic existence. Eastern religions promoted the apparent factuality of particles-to-people evolution as the basis for the unity of all of existence – that I was one with the stars and the clouds and the birds and the animals and the rest of humanity. Initially, this perspective was positive – I belonged to the universe. I was a part of all of life itself. There was a certain sense of satisfaction from the unity of that outlook. 

Chapter 5: The Cracks Start Appearing 

But after this initial positive blush, what began seeping into my consciousness was the logically correct conclusion: if I was one with everything else – in a universe that existed apparently only because of blind, amoral particles-to-people evolution – then I also had no more value than a tree, or a fish, or a clump of grass, or a pile of dung. In fact, value itself was an illusion – and so was that sense of satisfaction at being “a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars.” Both value and satisfaction were merely and only a human convention, resulting from some sort of collective social agreement based on chemical reactions going on inside our heads. The only difference between me and a clump of grass or an animal was that I as a human was more complex than all those other things. But I myself had no more intrinsic, eternal, transcendent, objective value than a pile of dung or a dead sparrow or an ocean wave or a stillborn baby lion. This conclusion was inescapable, for the simple fact was that there apparently were no intrinsic, eternal, transcendent, objective values at all.

This apparently factual conclusion was summarized in a brief but profound poem, written by the poet Paul Goodman, which I encountered in 1972 while I was on my obligatory trip to California, the Mecca of the counterculture. I happened upon this poem while spending an afternoon killing some time in a local library of a small town south of the San Francisco bay area. Of all the libraries I could have visited, of all the books I could have opened, of all the poems I could have come across, this is the one that I found on a shelf in the library of a sleepy California town. It immediately grabbed my attention, and I memorized it with little effort. The poem encapsulated the entirety of my philosophy at this time – a philosophy that I was convinced was objective truth:

   The crashing waters

      of the same falls,

   the falling leaves

      of the same forest,

   the leaping voyage,

      home at last,

   the red salmon

      spawn

         and faint

            and fade.

This poem summarized what I had come to believe was the whole process of existence in a universe in which there is no Creator God - in a cosmos summed up by the explanatory formula that accounted for everything in existence: matter + energy + time + chance + nothing else.  Like salmon, we are driven for inexplicable reasons to strive for certain goals that appear to be transcendent and lasting. But in the end, we merely and only spawn and faint and fade. We die like the salmon, perpetuating the endless cycle of birth, life, and death, with the entirety of life itself utterly devoid of any objective, lasting, transcendent, ultimate value. We leap and drive and fight, only to spawn and faint and fade – nothing more. 

For several years I had been able to live happily with this philosophical notion. But even while living happily with this philosophy, this overarching idea of ultimate meaningless was a nagging and disappointing backdrop to all of my own experiences. It clouded my enjoyment of the good and beautiful things in life. The exquisite beauty of romantic love, the beauty of a sunset or painting, the delicious taste of chocolate, the sweet smiles of children, the personal warmth of close friends, the kindness of a stranger, the love of family – in the grand scheme of what I thought was truth, all of these things ultimately had no lasting value - because nothing whatsoever had any lasting value. Every single thing - every experience - every moment was ultimately meaningless. Everything in the end would inevitably spawn and faint and fade like the salmon. 

The anguish of this philosophical position was that while the good things in life were so very, very beautiful, they also were apparently just ultimately purposeless. Every single instance of beauty, every act of goodness had a permanent tinge of sadness and even tragedy. I had this deep awareness of both the inevitable demise and the ultimate insignificance of every positive virtue of life. I remember listening to the wonderful strains of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, surely the most beautiful piece of music ever written. As I would listen to Pachelbel’s Canon, I was deeply moved by how achingly beautiful this piece of music was. 

But as I listened and enjoyed this Canon in D Major, I was also aware of how my philosophy interpreted this entire experience. Enjoying this beautiful music was merely and only the physical excitation of air molecules vibrating in my eardrums, creating certain chemical reactions inside my head, which my mind interpreted as “beauty” and “pleasure.” But the overarching view of the apparent truth of particles-to-people evolution meant that there was no Creator God. This universal acid of the unguided process of chance interactions of matter and energy over eons and eons of time had corroded and gutted the hope that there was anything of lasting, positive, eternal, transcendent, objective value in me, in life itself, or in anything. 

So for how marvelous this piece of music was – it meant nothing. It had no lasting significance. It was just one more product of mindless evolution that merely appeared to have meaning. That the composer Pachelbel could create such apparent beauty also meant nothing. Moreover, even my sheer enjoyment of this music meant nothing. And finally, the fact that all of this meant nothing – was something that itself meant nothing. So in listening to the sweeping, moving grandeur of Canon in D Major, I would weep for the sadness of how all this beauty meant nothing – and weep again, realizing that even my weeping meant nothing.

Chapter 6: The Far Shore Seen from a Distance

So I had become convinced of this truth of ultimate meaninglessness. In facing what I believed was true, I thought I was being brave and courageous – some sort of cosmic underdog, a noble fighter reaching for meaning in a cold, indifferent, and machine-like universe that had no intrinsic or transcendent meaning at all. Is it any wonder that so many thinkers of my generation described themselves as alienated? We were alienated in the most fundamental sense from the universe itself, for we acted and lived as if meaning and purpose and truth and love were real – when in reality, according to what we thought was true, the evolutionary universe was utterly indifferent to these pretensions of emotions, purpose, and meaning. A deeper alienation is hardly possible. The phrase “rage against the machine” went far deeper than a response merely to certain impersonalizing effects of technology, culture, and society. This rage was a rage against reality itself, for while so many people wanted to live lives of purpose and meaning and value, the “facts of science” told us that the universe was coldly uncaring about such lofty aspirations. In this cosmic sense – as a popular book title from that era summarized – each one of us indeed was a “stranger in a strange land.” 

Somehow I managed to live with this schizophrenic philosophy for quite some time. The schizophrenia was not just an aspect of culture or a sign of the times. It was a fundamental contradiction. And this is what the playwright Henrik Ibsen’s “lie” was: we live as if life had meaning, but we’re only pretending, since life had no meaning at all; we live as if non-material things like love and hope and eternity are real, when they really are just passing illusions of chemical reactions going on inside our heads. I myself found love – in novels, in friendships, in romance. Yet always lurking in the background shadows was the never-ending whisper that all these noble aspirations were just ultimately false pretensions. 

Then in June 1974, I graduated from Macalester College. I was more or less a happy pagan – but a happy pagan who was starting to experience personally the logical, inevitable outcome of the philosophy I had embraced. Here I was bravely facing the ultimate truths of life, carrying on stoically in enjoying the good things of life, in spite of the overarching blanket of philosophical meaninglessness. 

It was at this time that my life began to fall apart. 

Chapter 7: Crashing and Burning on This Distant Shore

In June of 1974, I was now done with college, which was difficult, since I didn’t have any idea of what to do with myself or my life outside the campus. Life as a whole seemed pointless, even though I still thoroughly enjoyed things along the way. My last semester of college had been spent in Europe, vagabonding through the continent with college classmates, studying both in London, England, and in Florence, Italy. My return to American life in Minnesota was a culture shock, plus I didn’t have a place to stay, plus I didn’t have a job, plus I didn’t know where I was going with my life. But at least I had my girlfriend, plus I had a best friend with whom I had been through thick and thin since 1970. Also, in September, I joined a small weekly men’s secular support group and I was becoming acquainted with a handful of interesting guys. Even though existence seemed meaningless, I had the idea that perhaps with some help from these three different sources – my girlfriend, my best friend, and my men’s group – I might be able to figure out about what to do with my own life. 

Then in late October 1974, my almost two-year-long relationship with my girlfriend deteriorated to a final traumatic separation. At the time, I thought I was going to spend my life with this woman, so this breakup was extremely and heartbreakingly painful. I was devastated and could barely cope with the pain, rejection, and failure that I felt.

In my grief, I naturally turned to my best friend. We had forged a deep friendship over the previous four years. Moreover, he and I had some experience with what I was going through: a year earlier, his wife had left him. He was deeply hurt by this, understandably so. During those ensuing months that previous fall, I went out of my way to be there for my friend – helping care for his toddler daughter, sharing meals together, talking and listening long into the nights – just being there, being available, being a friend, as he processed the painful demise of his own marriage. 

So the devastating emotional pain from the ashes and ruins of my love life was tempered ever so slightly by knowing that I had an intensely deep friendship I could turn to. My friend would surely be there for me, just like I was there for him a year earlier. And I could also turn to the guys in my men’s group, too. 

But two very unexpected developments were about to unfold. 

At the very next meeting of our men’s group, the leader said, in a uniquely worded manner, “I feel a need to put closure on this group.” I surprised myself in realizing immediately that this was just a fancy way to say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Much to my shock, all the rest of the guys around the room nodded in agreement. What I thought was going to be a source of support for me vanished in an evening. The group dissolved before my eyes. That was our last meeting, and I hardly saw any of them again in any meaningful way. 

Then things with my best friend went sour. Our friendship fell apart in the subsequent weeks and months. As I turned to my buddy after the painful crash-and-burn of my love life, I was expecting to find empathy, encouragement, understanding, acceptance – the kinds of support one expects of a close friend. Instead, I was blindsided by what I kept encountering: criticism, impatience, harshness, and emotional distance. Despite my having been there for him when his wife left him a year earlier, he simply wasn’t there for me, and I never understood exactly why. I’m sure that I myself was not the easiest person to be around during this time – hurt, bewildered, and lost, and surely needy and self-absorbed as well.

But whatever the dynamics were at that time, I kept coming back to the bottom line: when his marriage was falling apart, I was there for him, and even he had acknowledged that. When my life was falling apart, he mostly criticized me. Several mutual acquaintances even asked me, “You were there for him – why isn’t he there for you?” It was a baffling and unexpected twist – and one more deep wound at what felt like the very core of my being. It was also the first occasion in which I realized that there are times when a person’s actions carry far more weight than any subsequent words. After a while, I came to realize that I simply couldn’t trust him any more. Something had died. In the ensuing months and over the following several years, we’d see each other from time to time, but our friendship was never the same. 

In the space of a few weeks, I had lost the two people in the world that I loved most. The transition from happy pagan to miserable pagan had begun. 

Chapter 8: Alone in the Universe

So as the year of 1974 came to a close, I felt completely abandoned and personally rejected from the loss of my two deepest relationships. The resulting emotional turmoil combined itself with the philosophical alienation and loneliness of cosmic existential meaninglessness to leave me at a personal and practical dead end of despair. Feeling so rejected twice over was a trauma of overwhelming devastation, and I felt like a total failure in my own life. I saw the ugliness of my own selfishness, self-centeredness, and thoughtlessness, and I hated the jealousy, resentment, and insecurity I saw in myself – each of which had contributed to the failure of my love life. 

What was worse, I just couldn’t seem to do anything about all my character flaws. Repeatedly, I would resolve to stop being so insecure and resentful. Then without any apparent conscious decision on my part, my resentments and insecurities would leap out. So I’d try even harder to not be insecure; I’d resolve not to be resentful. Usually far sooner than later, my insecurities and resentments would pop up again – and again and again. I was both frustrated and baffled. Why couldn’t I change myself? 

Then my thoughts took a further downward turn. Okay, so I couldn’t find within me the capability of changing myself in any substantial way. Okay, so my own two best friends - who had gotten to know me so deeply over the previous several years - had rejected me and given up on me. Okay, so if they had gotten that close to me and then turned away, who was I to try to fix myself on my own, all by myself? Who was I to even say they were wrong? I hated myself for all the ugly things I saw inside me, and I felt trapped within my own being, unable to extricate myself from the pit of my own personal shortcomings. There were weeks and months of devastating pain, gut-wrenching heartache, much loneliness, many tears, increasingly suffocating misery, and greater and greater despair. Many mornings I awoke from sleep already in tears, bleeding profusely from the wounds of the personal pain I was going through. 

Convinced that life had no meaning – and yet not liking that apparent truth – I was at a very black period of my life. I remember doing so many things alone during that time – going to work alone, coming home alone, living alone, shopping alone, doing laundry alone, going to movies alone, spending weekends alone. I had a few other friends, but there was nobody I could bring myself to talk with and pour out my heart to about the deep and traumatic personal heartache I was having. Several friends like Dan and Phil would have been more than willing to hear me out. They knew the broad outline of what I was going through with the loss of my girlfriend. But it took me years to realize that I was so fearful then of any more rejection that I simply couldn’t trust myself to tell anyone about the emotional turmoil and despair I was experiencing. So I never poured my heart out to Dan, or Phil, or anybody then. My heart was broken, and the two people I loved most in the world had abandoned me. How could I trust any other human being with what I was feeling? 

In addition to not being able to talk with anyone about the personal dead end I found myself in, it never occurred to me to discuss the philosophical dead end I was at. I was convinced that what I believed was simply true – as true as water being wet or gravity working. How could one complain about the truth of reality? Existential meaninglessness was a fact, I had concluded. People that I knew and saw who were living as if life had purpose and meaning – they were simply mistaken. Although they were clearly happier than I was, I was convinced that I could not turn my back on this truth I had discovered – the apparent truth that life was meaningless. This dark, black place I was at was something I would simply have to deal with, in some way, even though ultimately this darkness all around me also had no ultimate meaning either. It just was. I had to cope.

In some ways, I did muddle through with some coping mechanisms. Dan and Phil and some other new acquaintances joined me at my apartment to watch the Vikings lose the Super Bowl for the third time, and the group of us spent several weekends cross country skiing at Dan’s cabin north of the Twin Cities. Even these warm times were difficult: every moment that even approached happiness ran smack into how heartbroken and devastated I was. It felt impossible to get beyond my own pain. On top of this, these warm times for me still always stood in stark contrast to two dynamics pressing on me, one conscious and the other barely so. On a conscious level, I couldn’t bring myself to talk through the heartbreak I was going through over the breakup of my love life and the loss of my best friend. On a deeper and much less aware level, I wasn’t able to even articulate the profound philosophical hopelessness that I was experiencing. 

Chapter 9: The Darkness Closes In

After weeks and months of this personal and philosophical anguish and despair, I began to reason logically that if life were meaningless, and if all that I was experiencing was unhappiness and pain, then why go on? Why not just die now and get it over with? Why not just kill myself and end this meaningless misery – and this miserable meaninglessness? So suicide started to perch in the back of my mind as an option for dealing with the misery I found myself in. 

Then early in the winter of 1974-75, I had a phone conversation with my former best friend. This was only about a handful of weeks after my girlfriend and I had separated, and my broken heart was still bleeding profusely. In spite of the dramatic deterioration of the friendship with my buddy, I was desperate enough to still try to find some sort of comfort, or assurance, or counsel with him. But that evening was a dark night. My friend again spoke bluntly over the phone of how self-centered he thought I was. He said that it was hard for him to be around me, even saying at one point something more or less to the effect, “I think I understand why she left you.” 

Hanging up the phone, I was stunned – and devastated all over again. For some reason, I had hoped to salvage something from the remnants of this long and deep friendship, but I couldn’t find any solace or support at all from my buddy. My head was hanging low as I stood in my kitchen, staring blankly at the floor, numbly processing everything. I remember thinking, “What’s the use? Why go on? Why bother?” That night, I decided to stay home from work the next day and kill myself. So the following morning, I began my suicide attempt, complete with suicide note. 

But even in that dark, desperate hour, one of the things that kept me from killing myself was the thought of how it would impact my younger sister Polly. She and I had become very close during college. She was in Germany at that time for a year of study. If I killed myself then, in early December, I realized that she would probably have to come back for the funeral. Even in the darkening midst of the self-absorption of my own anguish, I remember thinking that my killing myself would mess up her Christmas. She’d have to come home for the funeral, which would complicate her studies in Europe. So in the end, I pulled back from the precipice of death, in part because of my sister and in part because I realized I didn’t feel strongly enough about ending my own life. It seemed like I was “backing into” suicide. Many years later, I asked Polly if my killing myself in December 1974 would have “messed up her Christmas.” She replied, “Messed up my Christmas? – Bob, it would have messed up my life. I’d still be crying about it today.” 

• For anyone who is thinking about committing suicide: my own deep misery of 1974-75 had made me so shortsighted that I could only see that killing myself would mess up my sister’s Christmas. I was incapable of thinking ahead more than just a few short weeks. I couldn’t see ahead in months and years and decades to the devastation that my own suicide would have had on those admittedly few people in my life who still loved me. Misery and grief had blinded me into such an emotional nearsightedness that I was incapable of seeing beyond my own condition. 

So after pulling back from suicide, I realized that I simply had to do something – something just had to happen to change me. My life could not go on like this. If something didn’t change soon, I’d be dead before long, as I realized I wouldn’t always be able to hold off the whispering siren call of suicide. 

Chapter 10: Renewed Searching to Another Dead End

So a few days or weeks later, I wrote out on the back of an envelope a list of everything I could think of that could change me. The first three options were suicide, therapy, and Transcendental Meditation. Much to my own surprise, I realized that in honesty and fairness, I also had  to consider a fourth option. I found myself adding “Jesus and the Holy Spirit” to the list. 

Then I started evaluating each option on my list, complete with the pluses and minuses of each option, in two column form on this scrap of paper. Suicide still appealed to me, but in sheer and sober honesty in the aftermath of my own suicide attempt, I sat back and began to think through this option more carefully. On the plus side, one advantage of suicide seemed to be the both the immediacy and the finality of it all – just get all this anguish over with now and be released permanently from this heartache and despair. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to die, but if this misery, loneliness, and pain were almost all that my life had come to, then why go on? On the down side, however, I reasoned that if reincarnation were true, then suicide didn’t solve anything at all – it merely threw me and my condition into the next life as a slug or a worm or another miserable human wretch. But there was another down side to suicide. While I still didn’t think the Bible was true, at the same time, I realized that I couldn’t be really sure of that. Moreover, if I was wrong and the Bible was true, then suicide would make things far worse, because I would go to hell. So in an act of sheer, logical will, with a mixture of relief and a bit of disappointment, I crossed option number one of suicide off the list. 

The next option of therapy was not realistic, because the only therapy I thought might help would have cost me about a year’s salary at that time. For a recent college graduate in the days before easy credit cards, this particular therapy was an option that I simply couldn’t afford. So I crossed option number two of therapy off the list. 

The third possibility was Transcendental Meditation (TM). TM is an Eastern religious program in which the TM trainer imparts a short, one- or two-syllable word called a mantra. This mantra was supposedly a meaningless sound, uniquely designed for each initiate, and focusing upon this mantra was supposed to bring you peace as you meditated upon and silently repeated this meaningless special word over and over again. But as I thought about TM and their fee of about two days’ wages, I realized I was suspicious of anyone who charged money for what they claimed was truth. So I crossed option number three of TM off my list. Several years later, my suspicions of TM were confirmed. I read some semi-scholarly critiques of TM and learned that every “meaningless” mantra that TM gave their initiates was actually the name of a Hindu god. So meditating upon this mantra was in fact repetitively calling upon a spirit being. TM was not what it had claimed to be. 

So the only option remaining on my list was this Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Despite my previous rejection of God and the Bible, deep down I actually had always thought that Jesus was who he claimed to be – but I had never seen or heard any solid, credible, objectively verifiable reasons for believing that. No Christian in my entire life had ever said anything about there being some objective evidence that the Bible and Christianity were true. Based on the courses and professors I had taken, the books, magazines, and articles I had read, and the friends, movies, and subculture with which I had lived, all that I had ever heard, read, and seen led me to the conclusion that the Bible was full of errors and couldn’t be trusted, that particles-to-people evolution had proven that God was at best unnecessary and at worst non-existent, and that Christianity’s claim of Jesus being the only way to “God” was bigoted and irrational. So these intellectual reasons for rejecting God combined with my own sinfulness to lead me confidently away from Christ.

But by this time of my life – late January of 1975 – I was at the end of my rope. Even if I couldn’t intellectually believe the Bible and the claims of Christ, I essentially said to myself, “What have I got to lose by trying Jesus now? Even if Christians are wrong, at least they’re happy – and perhaps I can find some happiness and some relief from all this pain. And just maybe I’ll find that Christianity is true.” 

Several years earlier, in 1972, I had read the book The Cross and the Switchblade, about a young minister’s work with gangs of New York City in the 1950’s, in which gang members, addicts, thieves, and killers had had life-altering encounters with Jesus Christ that had dramatically and powerfully changed them for the better – sometimes overnight. One passage in the book that stood out was the minister’s practice of “laying a fleece before the Lord” in order to obtain God’s guidance. This phrase about the fleece was based on the Bible passage in the book of Judges in which Gideon lays the fleece of a sheep on the grass overnight and twice asks God to guide him by whether the morning dew appears on the fleece or on the grass. The first morning, there was dew on the fleece but none on the grass. The second morning was the opposite – there was dew on the grass but none on the fleece. I have since learned in studying the topic of Biblical guidance in general and the Gideon passage in particular that “laying a fleece” is not a reliable form of guidance. But in the dark desperation of that bleak winter, I was a severely wounded and bleeding combatant in a foxhole, and God must have taken that into account. 

So I opened up the yellow pages of the telephone book to the section on “Churches.” Then I closed my eyes, put my finger down on the page, and called the phone number of the church my finger landed on. A minister answered the phone, and I asked him if he knew anything about this “Jesus and the Holy Spirit stuff” like in the book The Cross and the Switchblade. To my surprise, he said he didn’t. But to his credit, he had the integrity to refer me to someone he thought would know – a minister at another church named Dick Blank. So I called Dick and we talked for a few minutes on the phone. He invited me to a prayer meeting at his church on Thursday night and arranged to have someone pick me up. 

In going to the prayer meeting, I expected – since these were Christians and since I was obviously someone who wasn’t – that I would meet some friendly interest and genuine warmth on the part of these people. After all, Christians are supposed to be kind to strangers, right? I was mistaken. Nobody showed any interest in me. Nobody asked me anything beyond perhaps my name. Nobody made any effort to get to know me. Despite this, I went back the next week, but it was the same collective disinterest, indifference, and distance. Perhaps I was so fierce-looking with my long hair and beard that I unwittingly intimidated people from approaching me. Maybe I was so needy that I scared people off. 

But what I came away with from those prayer meetings was, “Those Christians don’t care about me at all.” When I got home from that second prayer meeting, I remember thinking, “Well, if that’s Christianity, I’m not interested.” So for the second time in my life, I crossed Christianity off my list. 

Now I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do. There were no more options on my list. Apparently, I’d come to another dead end in my life. 

Chapter 11: An Unexpected Turn

But a few days later Dick called me back again. My first thought – which I didn’t say out loud – was, “Stop bugging me, preacher.” But he went on about wanting to see me again and wanting to talk, and somehow - out of nowhere - I had the completely unexpected thought, “Why not? What have I got to lose?” So we agreed to meet at my apartment near the Governor’s Mansion in St. Paul. 

By the time we met on a snowy Tuesday night in February 1975, I had decided to be completely honest with this minister, and I told him all the things I wasn’t very sure about: whether Jesus really was God, how Christ could be the only way to God, if the Bible really was true, whether Satan was real, what was wrong with other religions, and so forth. Candidly, I told him that I wasn’t at all interested in being a Christian – I just knew that I was miserable and that I had to change, and that if I didn’t change soon, I was going to be dead before long. He replied, “That’s okay – if you’re sincere about inviting Jesus into your life, then he’ll honor that and come into your life, and he’ll also show you the answers to all the questions you have.” 

Once again - somehow out of nowhere - I had that same unexpected thought: “Why not? What have I got to lose?” Much to his surprise – and to my own surprise as well – I turned to him and said, “Okay, right here, right now, I invite Jesus Christ into my life.” Then I had another unexpected thought that came out of nowhere: I immediately added, as my own laying of a fleece, “And if this is real, then I want my friends from Iowa to call me…” – I paused and thought for a brief moment – “…before the weekend.” It was a Tuesday night, and I figured that I was being pretty generous to “God” by giving him three days to answer this prayer.

My friends from Iowa were my hometown minister and his wife, John and Susie Shew, from Grand Forks, North Dakota. They had moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa when I went away to college. They had become a second family to me, welcoming me with warmth and open arms as I hitchhiked down to their Cedar Rapids home 3-4 times a year for the previous five years. During all my college years of philosophical wanderings, they were a steadying influence in loving, accepting, and affirming me. I remember realizing that John and Susie lived as Christians what they believed as Christians, and their consistency and love was the one reason over these years that I had always been reluctant to completely reject Christianity and the Bible. But I knew the fleece I was about to lay down – for them to call me by telephone – was a safe fleece, because in all those previous five years of my traveling to Iowa to visit them, John and Susie had not even once ever telephoned me. They were busy running their church and raising four kids. On top of that the minister, Dick Blank, who was with me that snowy night in February 1975 in St. Paul knew little about my personal background, he didn’t know my friends in Iowa, and he didn’t know where exactly in Iowa they were. 

What I meant by saying “...if this is real…” was that I wanted to be sure that “God” was an independent, self-existent entity – not merely a type of “higher self” or some sort of psychological, auto-suggestive trick I was playing in my own mind. Recalling the religion class in college, I didn’t want whatever happened to be merely and only my own “just believing it” in my heart – I didn’t want to “believe” something that very well might not be true at all in the first place. I wanted objective, independent truth that was distinct and separate from me and my situation. I reasoned that if Jesus really was the Creator of the universe and the overcomer of death – as I knew the Bible claimed – then he could also arrange to have my friends call me. Years later, Dick told me that he swallowed really hard when he heard me say, “…I want my friends from Iowa to call me before the weekend.” But as I said all this, I was in a very desperate place. It was Tuesday night, and I figured giving God till the weekend was pretty big of me.

Well, Susie did call me. The next morning. At work. I was absolutely blown away. My prayer had been answered – I was stunned, ecstatic, and thrilled, and I disbelieved for joy. God existed!? Jesus was real!? God answers prayer!? God cares about me?! As I stammered and babbled incoherently through those first few moments of complete shock on the phone with Susie, she realized that something weird was happening on my end. So she asked me what in the world was going on. She had no idea about the previous night – she was merely calling because she had been thinking of me. So I explained briefly about my decision for Christ and about my fleece. She was equally amazed, as she was completely unaware of anything on my end at all. 

But my fleece had been in the plural: for my friends – plural! – from Iowa to call me. Later in the day, while I was out of the building for lunch, John called me, again at work, without having spoken with Susie. [I find it very amusing that I was literally and figuratively “out to lunch” when John called.] While he wasn’t able to speak with me by phone that day, I realized later that my prayer had been that my friends – plural! – from Iowa would call. God had answered the prayer: both John and Susie had called, even though I only spoke with Susie.

So I had this dramatic answered prayer, that February of 1975. But what did it mean? It seemed like I was on to something – or that Someone was on to me – but all I knew was that something dramatic had happened. I had heard and read about people who had had dramatic experiences in other religions, and I wasn’t quite sure what this dramatic answered prayer meant. So for the next year and a half, I had a lot of basic questions about what I was getting into – normal questions about the Bible (could it be trusted?); about Jesus (why did Jesus have to be the only way to God?); about other religions (what about other people who had also had dramatic experiences in a different religion?); about the apparent scientific truth of particles-to-people evolution (didn’t that contradict the Bible's flow of history?); and so forth. So I would ask these questions, but I was consistently told by the Christians whom I had met that winter that I was asking too many questions – that I had to “just have faith.” 

Fortunately, I found this answer completely unsatisfying. I reasoned that if God objectively existed, if God was the creator of everything in the universe from stars to humans to subatomic particles, and if God had communicated to the human race in the record of the Bible, then all of that should hold up to scrutiny – to some legitimate poking and prodding by little old me. At that time, I didn’t know that there were Christian authors, writers, and thinkers who addressed the questions I was asking. Unfortunately, it took a while before I started to get serious about God and realize that I needed to carefully check out this Christianity – to give myself a chance to know God better and at least give God more of a chance to change me and to do what he wanted with my life. 

Chapter 12: Hearty Food for a Starving Man

Then in September 1976 – a year and a half after this dramatically answered prayer – I came across a church that addressed the questions that were still at the forefront of my thinking. Hearing my questions being intelligently addressed was tremendously helpful and enormously encouraging. I realized it was okay to ask and wrestle with the questions I was asking. Furthermore, I also discovered some of the great defenders of the faith – C.S. Lewis, John Stott, Paul Little, Francis Schaeffer, Henry Morris, Brooks Alexander and the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, Os Guinness, and many others. For that previous year and a half, for lack of knowledge, I had had to wrestle with my own questions all by myself. I was fearful that there weren’t solid, objective answers, and I was afraid that I myself – and each of us – simply had to live within the realm of subjective personal beliefs. 

But now explanations and truths that I found in these authors were like food to a man dying of hunger. I inhaled these books. Moreover, I was happily stunned by what I found. There was objective evidence that the Bible really was trustworthy and simply true? – historically true, philosophically true, scientifically true? I could simply believe it and trust it? There were scholarly reasons to believe that Jesus really was who he said he was? There were intelligent arguments that God really exists whether I believe it or not? There was scientific evidence that particles-to-people evolution theory is not as sound as most people think? There are solid historical, scientific, documentary, scholarly reasons for believing the Bible and creation and the resurrection – not just believing in them but simply believing them to be true? So I wasn’t a product of mindless interactions of matter and energy over eons of time? I was a person made in the image of the infinite-personal Creator of the universe? This Creator valued me so much that he came to earth to die on a cross – even for me? So trees and rocks and reality itself were not, as Eastern religions said, merely things for which I had to see beyond and transcend all dualities to discern what the tree or an emotion or a person “really” was? Reality was the real creation of this real Creator God who really existed? Reality was not just the vivid dreamlike state that Buddhism claimed?

This was not just good news – this was great news – this was stupendous news. I felt so very relieved – relieved of the burden of figuring everything out – having to figure out all of reality, all by myself. Things around me were real, because they were made by this Creator God who objectively existed whether I knew it or not. I myself had value because I was made in the image of this Creator who was both infinite and personal. Moreover, for wretched little ol’ me – who for so long had felt so rejected and scorned and insignificant – something deeply profound was starting to seep into my consciousness: while I may have become unimportant to certain people in my life who had wounded me, I was still of great value to God. God loved me, God valued me – even me. Jesus Christ died on the cross for me because he valued me so highly. I had value – objective, eternal, real value to the one thing – the only thing – that was more real and more eternal than anything else: this infinite-personal Creator God. 

So I started attending a church where the minister really understood how the Bible spoke to this generation of mine that was so influenced by the counterculture of Eastern religions, skepticism, atheism, and drugs. He understood the saying, “The heart cannot rejoice in what the mind cannot accept.” The next two to three years were times of tremendous grounding for me – getting grounded in the truth of the Bible. I began to examine Scripture seriously and immerse myself in God’s word – memorizing it, meditating on it, reading it, studying it. Also, I read everything I could find on science, comparative religions, philosophy, culture, history, psychology – to clear my thinking to the point where my mind could intellectually believe what my heart wanted so desperately to accept: that there was a Creator who made both the cosmos and me, that this Creator was a personal being rather than some impersonal energy force; that the infinite had become finite – that God had become a human being; that he had taken on human form and lived on earth; that sin was more than just guilt feelings but was real and important; that Jesus had died on a cross to pay the penalty for my sins; that God called me by name and wanted to guide me daily; and that this God-become man Jesus was coming back again one day in space-time history. 

Chapter 13: My Life Starts Over 

This was also a time of healing for me – making new friendships; getting painful memories healed in deep prayer; forgiving those who had wronged me; cleaning out my mind from the strains of irrational, illogical, and deceptive thinking induced by drug use and Eastern religions; finding acceptance, wisdom, affirmation, conviction, meaning, and purpose in Christ himself. 

As my walk after Christ continued, I heard a speaker in late fall of 1976 address three things that in retrospect really helped me get healthier: forgiving those who had wronged me; asking forgiveness from those I had wronged; and memorizing and meditating on Scripture.

The first thing I addressed was the issue of memorizing and meditating on Bible passages. Memorizing Scripture, the speaker said, was like taking vitamins. These Bible passages were the very thoughts of God himself – the life-giving thoughts of the Creator God. In memorizing Bible passages, I realized that I was training my mind to think like God’s mind – internalizing God’s perspective, God’s wisdom, God’s insights which were written for humanity about life and purpose and relationships and conflict and sin and redemption. Meditating on these passages was simply focusing and redirecting my mind and my attention to dwell on the meaning and application of these truths. Meditating on Scripture, I soon realized, meant I was studying and focusing and mulling over the Owner’s Manual of life itself. I was thinking God’s thoughts after him.

The second thing I took up was the issue of forgiving others. The speaker recommended making a list of every single person who had done me harm and every single situation in which I had been hurt, criticized, rejected, made fun of, or laughed at – and then one by one, telling God that I forgave them. Although this was a daunting task for me – I knew my list would be long – I also immediately sensed that this was the way to go. So I began to write my list.

As I did so, I was surprised at not only how much resentment I had but also the sheer number of individuals against whom I still held some form of grudge, whether small or large. There were literally dozens and scores of grudges, filling several pages in my notebook. While I knew I had already forgiven my ex-girlfriend – that was the big one – I still found grudges strewn throughout the course of my life – both large and small, both major and understandable, as well as minor and surprising: my dad who was so verbally abusive to and critical of me; the childhood friend when I was 5 who thoughtlessly broke my favorite toy; the teacher who humiliated me in front of the whole music class one day when my adolescent voice was changing and cracking; my older brother’s friends who made fun of me; the many cruel things that peers, siblings, parents, teachers, and coaches had said or done that had cut and hurt. Line after line in my notebook became filled with this delineation of my own emotional record-keeping system.

So I began to forgive. One by one, I began to forgive them all, in the privacy of my own room, in the quiet of my own heart, often on bended knee, always talking to God about the process. “Lord, I don’t deserve your forgiveness for the wrongs I did to you, and in the same way, this person who hurt me doesn’t deserve forgiveness either. But if your forgiving me was undeserved, then my forgiving this person is also undeserved. They don’t deserve forgiveness, that’s true. But I choose to forgive this person, to no longer hold this against this person.” Time after time, I prayed words like this, going through my list one name at a time, one incident at a time, crossing them off one at a time. It took a while. 

Like going in to get a toothache fixed, this was something that was painful beforehand, and the fixing had its own new pain – but, wow, did it feel better afterwards. Some things were easy to forgive, while a few very painful things were much more difficult. But as I did that fearless and searching inventory, I found release, and peace, and freedom. Like after having a toothache fixed, I was shocked to find that so much of the pain was simply gone – some sooner, some later as time went on. So many resentments, so much bitterness, so many grudges were simply and marvelously gone. They were gone because I made a decision to forgive – a decision of my will to no longer hold a grudge. As a Christian teacher had written somewhere, I came to grips with the reality of forgiving someone else: that I could say to God in the privacy of my own thoughts, “God, even though this person clearly did harm to me, I forgive him – and to the extent that if I stood next to you in your judgment seat and you were to turn to me and ask if this offense should be held against this person, I could and would say, ‘No – while there may be things outside of my control that others might hold, please don’t hold this offense against this person anymore on my account.’ ”

For many situations, the release and freedom I felt was immediate. For other situations, and for certain people, it took a while for my emotions – how I felt in my heart – to come into alignment with what I had decided in my will. But this freedom was freeing and so very, very relieving. I began to get free from the weighty burden of unforgiveness in my own heart. I found myself less focused on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that had burned and scarred me throughout my life. In turn, this meant that I was beginning to focus more on the present and the future. It also meant that I had started to turn my focus away from the scars and wounds of my life and onto the blessings I had. I began to appreciate more deeply what I did have – a great mom, a loving sister, a brother with whom I had so many things in common, some good friends, good health, a good mind, and the countless daily blessings of beauty and simple pleasures.

The third item I realized I needed to address was to ask forgiveness of those whom I had wronged. This list was also a long one, and in making this list, I was also surprised at how long it was. So I set myself the work of making amends – to my mom, my sister, and my brother for things I had said and done; to old friends and roommates; and even to a previous girlfriend from my freshman year of college. This went well, and like forgiving others, it was also so cleansing and relieving to admit my wrongdoings to those I had wronged and ask their forgiveness.

Chapter 14: The Hardest Thing, the Most Helpful Thing  

But from the start of this third process, I instantly knew the most difficult thing of all – and probably the most important as well – was to go back to my old flame and ask her forgiveness for the wrongs I had committed in our relationship. When God first convinced me deep in my heart that I needed to do this, I objected. I had suffered the far greater harm, I protested. In addition, I didn’t want the humiliation that would come with admitting to her my own wrongdoings. In fact, I had even forgiven my old flame already. So I even tried to bargain with God – “Lord, I’ve forgiven her already – isn’t that enough?”

But I knew my forgiving her wasn’t the same thing as my asking her for forgiveness, and so I continued to fight God on this issue. I simply dug in my heels and refused to do anything about it. For the next year and a half, I resisted and resisted, praying to God, “Lord, I will do anything other than this.” I even once said to God – in complete sincerity – “I would even rather spend ten years in a Siberian gulag instead of asking her for forgiveness.” But God was patient with me, and over the period of a year and a half, other things were going on, too. I was finding rewarding friendships with other Christians. I had started memorizing and meditating on passages from the Bible. God’s Word – the Bible – was starting to transform me – my mind, my thinking, my heart, my attitude. I was learning to own up immediately to mistakes I made and to things I did wrong. I was learning how to ask forgiveness and keep short lists. I saw fellow believers come to me to ask me for forgiveness for unkind remarks or thoughtless actions on their part.

Then one morning, in January 1978, it just hit me that I was ready to do this – to see my old flame and ask her forgiveness for things that I had done wrong. So I double checked my list of all the wrongs I had committed in our relationship. Of course, I can’t remember all of them now, nor would I want to. But I wrote down everything I could think of – great and small, embarrassing and understandable, known to her and others or unknown to anyone but me – because I wanted to come completely clean, and I for sure didn’t want to go back a second time for something I left off my list. I wasn’t expecting her to do the same in return; I was doing this to take care of my own conscience – nobody else’s. From my study of the issue of forgiveness, I also knew there was one thing for me not to bring up: that I had already forgiven her. Unrequested, unsolicited forgiveness is often not well received.

So I contacted her and made arrangements to meet at a local restaurant. As I prepared myself for our meeting, I was still nervous. Immediately before leaving for our meeting, I was on my knees in my room in the dark of the early winter evening, praying for help and strength to do what I knew I had to do. I remember telling Jesus, “Lord, if you can get me through this, I know I will never be afraid of anything again, for this is the one thing I fear most in my life.” As I prayed, suddenly a Bible verse that I had memorized came flooding into my mind and into my entire being. It felt like the whole room was suddenly filled with life and warmth – and a presence – the presence of something far stronger than me. The memorized words of Isaiah 41:10 came pouring into my mind: “Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you, with my victorious right hand.” These were not just words in my memory – this was the presence and power of the infinite-personal God, speaking to me vividly and powerfully through the vehicle of this memorized Bible passage. But this wasn’t just my mind shouting something really loud – this was something from beyond. I was ready now – ready now to do what was the most difficult and fearful thing I had ever done in my life.

We met at a restaurant near the University of Minnesota. I explained to her that God had convinced me that I needed to make amends to people I had wronged by admitting my wrongdoings and asking for forgiveness. Her first response was to say, “I don’t think I have the power to forgive.” I had anticipated this (I had really done a lot of study on forgiveness!), and so I explained, “Look, I know can’t turn back the clock and un-do the wrong things I did and said back then. I also know there’s nothing I can ever do today to un-do those wrong things. What I’m saying is this: I want to simply admit that the wrong things I did really were wrong, then tell you I’m sorry, and then ask you not to hold those things against me. That’s what forgiveness is. Can you do that?” She nodded yes, and so I got out my list and began.

A famous evangelist once said that our sins were committed one by one, and they need to be confessed one by one whenever possible. So I admitted to her each of my sins against her, one by one. Then I asked one by one, “Will you forgive me?” With some understandable leeriness (why was this guy really doing this?), she nodded and said yes. I  continued through my list, mentioning not merely the obvious wrongdoings she knew of but also other things she wasn’t aware of. When I was done, she asked me if I expected her to do the same thing in return. I had anticipated this also, and I simply said, “I came here to take care of my baggage.” 

So our meeting was over, and as I made my way home that night, I realized how free I felt – free of the weight of my guilty conscience, free of not being able to look this particular someone straight in the eye, free from the burden of avoiding what I knew I ought to do, free from fighting God. It was so refreshing to own up to my own wrongdoings. Although there had been an initial few moments of embarrassment as I began my confession, that had soon been replaced by relief and freedom. The boil had been lanced. The broken bone had been set. The abscessed tooth had been pulled. I had done what was supposed to be done, and now it was over. The most difficult thing I had ever done turned out to be the most helpful thing I had ever done. Since that day, I haven’t spoken with or heard from her at all. It was so nice to get on with my life with no dangling complications or lingering guilt pricking at my conscience.

Chapter 15: Existence Becomes Life

So I continued immersing myself in Scripture – memorizing helpful verses, studying various books of the Bible, reading through Scripture, and becoming familiar with Bible history. One passage that stunned me was Isaiah 53 – the suffering servant passage. Written some 700 years before Christ, the passage nonetheless describes in detail various aspects of the life and death of Jesus, including verses that were so personally meaningful to me. Isaiah 53:6 says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” It was true – all of us have gone astray. I myself went astray from God, turning to my own way. Yet here in Isaiah, this document written some 2,700 years before my own birth, was a description both of my own condition – “gone astray” – and of God's remedy – the Lord laid on Jesus both my iniquity and the iniquity of us all. I was simply stunned and fascinated by this passage – both its historical significance as well as its personal application to my own situation. This was also the first lengthy passage of Scripture I memorized, for I read it so many times, that I memorized it almost without even realizing it. 

As I began to understand the Bible, I began to realize something of immense importance: that what I was finding to be true about God and the Bible and Jesus Christ did not rest on this admittedly very dramatic conversion experience that I had in 1975. Those February morning phone calls from my friends in Iowa weren’t what convinced me that the Bible is true, that Jesus is who he claimed to be, that God does exist, that miracles do happen. Those February morning phone calls were a shot across my bow, a tap on my shoulder, a flash of light in the darkness, a sign post along a path in the wilderness. In the fog of the overcast darkness of my life at that time, those phone calls were the sun in all its brightness breaking through an opening – no, making an opening – in the overcast cloud cover.

But after that dramatic flash of light, the clouds quickly closed up again, and I was left in the dreary darkness once more – until I began to not so much simply read the Bible but much more to study the Bible. In studying the Bible, I began to see its truth. In reading the great defenders of the faith, I began to understand more – about comparative religions, about science and the scientific evidence against particles-to-people evolution, about the danger of drug use and  religions, about why Jesus truly is the only way to the Father. In prayer and faith, in confession and repentance, in study and discussion, I began to see the wisdom and life-changing power of the Gospel. I began to see that the Bible was objectively true, whether I believed it or not. My own believing did not make the Bible true. My own dramatic conversion experience did not make what I believed true. It was true before I believed it, it will be true whether or not I believe it, and it was true whether those February phone calls had come or not. The phone calls were real and dramatic, yes – but they were simply attention-getters. God got my attention with those phone calls, but my attention was eventually directed to the wealth of material – documents, critiques, authors, defenses, explanations, lines of reasoning, and other forms of analysis and examination – that convinced me that the Bible was true. And if the Bible was true, then God was real, and Jesus was who he claimed he was. What had happened to me in February 1975 was not just a subjective religious experience – it was the tip of the iceberg – the tip of infinity – of this objective, universal truth of the infinite-personal Creator God.

The subsequent years have not always been easy. But they have been much brighter and lighter than those months and years of dark despair. I still stumble, I still sin – yet I now keep coming back to God based on his invitation to me and to each person: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest,” as Jesus said in Matthew 11:28.

In retrospect, I can now see part of what was going on in 1974 for me. Convinced then that a Creator God simply did not exist, I had experientially arrived at certain conclusions: if God didn’t exist, then this implied that everything good about life meant nothing whatsoever in any transcendent eternal sense, and that the individual as well as the cosmos had no intrinsic value at all. I had in 1974 arrived experientially at the philosopher’s conclusion: that the only honest philosophical question was whether or not to commit suicide – if God didn’t exist. So looking back on the bleak darkness of the years leading up to the fall of 1974 and winter of 1975, I could see now that God took everything away from me – friends, love, and even meaning itself – so that I would have nowhere to turn but, eventually, to him. I have seen where a universe without a Creator leads – to meaninglessness, despair, darkness, and death. But I also have the fortune of being a man that Jesus Christ pulled back from the edge of the abyss – and being now a man that Jesus Christ put back together: healing my emotions, bringing forgiveness to my heart, clearing my mind with his truth, and setting my feet upon his path – his path of life – of life itself in all its fullness. So here I am, saved for a purpose. How great God is.

But I urge anyone reading this to realize that you don’t have to go through the trauma that I experienced. There is a God – an infinite, personal Creator who made the stars and the earth and each one of us – and you. This infinite, personal Creator loves you and wants you to know his love for you. You don’t have to wander in the darkness like I did. This infinite, personal Creator became a human being in space-time history, and he died on a cross in order to pay the price of bringing all of humanity – including you and me – back to him. The familiar verse of John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world, he sent his one and only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” – is far more than a nice idea or a soothing comfort. It is a profound claim about the nature of ultimate reality.

Ultimate reality – the origin of the universe – the farthest thing back in time – the uncaused Cause for which I searched so much of my life – turned out to be far different than I had originally expected. Ultimate reality is not just matter and energy, nor is it a philosophical system or a set of propositions, nor is it a fog of vagueness and uncertainty – that cloud of unknowing, as Zen calls it. Ultimate reality is this living, infinite-personal good being who is the Creator of all of reality, both seen and unseen, both physical and spiritual – and who is intimately involved with – and yet distinct from – the created order that he sustains moment by moment. Ultimate reality is a Who, not a what, and as it turned out, it wasn’t so much that I had found Ultimate Reality, but that Ultimate Reality had found me. This Who, this Person, this Jesus had come after me. I once was lost, but now I'd been found.

This good news of John 3:16 is based upon the bad news that we individually and collectively have profound moral shortcomings, as witnessed by wars, lies, pain, betrayal, petty attitudes, resentments, cruelty, selfishness, and other moral imperfections both great and small. This bad news is something we ratify every day of our lives in our own falling short of what we know we ought to do and ought to be. But this bad news is itself based upon a previous good news – that a living, infinite-personal Creator-God really does exist – one who created the stars and the atoms and you and me – one who knows each one of us and calls us by name – one who has not left us on our own but has entered the stage of human tragedy and pain – one who has come not in spite of you and me but has come precisely because of his love for you and me. 

If you are not reconciled to your Creator, you can be right now. By recognizing that what the incarnated God, Jesus of Nazareth, did on the cross to deal with our moral shortcomings is so far greater than anything you or I could ever do – that we can choose the only proportionate response available: to do nothing but simply accept what God has done for us, for me, for you. That is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting our shortcomings against us. I beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Jesus himself said, “Truly I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life; he does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.”

Eternal life is offered to each one of us. Notice what Jesus said – “...he who hears... and believes... has eternal life.” Put your trust in that one great act of sacrifice that Jesus did on the cross for us – an act so great and so complete that all we have to do is hear and believe – and accept. Accept this gift from from the infinite personal God. Come to the truth. Come home to the truth.