The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

by Andrew Klavan

But there was no system of thought attached to the practice, no church, no documents of any authority—nothing even particularly supernatural, if you except the presence of God himself.

God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don’t believe, no evidence can be enough.

How then? How could I reclaim the world and my life in the world? How could a person free himself from the prison of his own consciousness in order to know the beauty of the world as it existed only within his consciousness?

The truth remains true no matter how or why we come to find it.

It was stories. It was literature. He came to me that way.

The things we can’t face come back and back to us, shaping our actions, getting bigger and bigger, until finally we either face the cause of them or they destroy us.

You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world.

Anyway, I wasn’t interested in reciting other people’s prayers, no matter how time-tested or beautiful they might be. If I was going to talk to God, I wanted to talk to him directly and in my own way.

The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can easily outrun its own lies. It can use even meticulous honesty as a form of dishonesty, a way of saying to God, “Look how honest I am.”