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

by Andrew Klavan

Living within such a spiritual sanctuary has an effect on you over the years. Just knowing such a marriage can exist refashions the way you look at life. For me, it put limits on what I could call illusory or meaningless. Other men could believe that subjective experience is by nature relative and unreliable. Other men could reason from suffering to nihilism. Not me. Our marriage gave undeniable substance to the inner experience of true love, and true love in turn shone a light on the redemptive possibilities even of tragedy. Even the kingdom of evil came to seem to me like only the empty space where true love might have been. And when, over time, I had reasoned my way to God, it was our marriage, in part, that made me trust my reasoning. I trusted myself because I had recognized love when I saw it, and it was the fact of our long love that had slowly revealed to me a greater love than ours, the love that was our love’s source and inspiration. It was as if our marriage had guided me through my days from a realm beyond the ordinary, the way a lodestar shines from deepest space yet nonetheless leads you home.