Month: March 2014

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

So here I was, a new “former-Atheist” gravitating towards a particular world religion without yet knowing, at least consciously, just why it was happening. With the hindsight of 23 years I now realize that it was because of something deeply compelling in the thought that the same God who made the universe, a Deity that was by definition infinitely greater than His creation, might have once chosen to take on the form of that creation. The wonder of God becoming man is the central proposition of the faith once known as “The Way” and today known as Christianity.

Beyond this, as I read the Gospel of John it became clear to me that the God described there was willing to undertake this unfathomable condescension only because it was somehow the only way He could save people like me from the all-consuming darkness that then possessed and was destroying me.

What kind of love would compel such a being to do this? Moreover what kind of love would compel this being to be willing to then die at the hands of a creation that had decided he was such an imposition on their determination to have their own way at any cost that he must be murdered?

My imagination began to be captivated by this person I was reading about and what he did 2000 years before I was born. I can remember sitting in the hospital’s arts and crafts room and making copper-enamel crosses. Most of them were grey with a sprinkle of bright gold at the center. The grey, I think, was a representation of how my soul remained, for the time being, darkened and lost. The gold sun in the middle symbolized what was about to happen to that soul. It could only have represented hope, something I had not really known for a long, long time.

Around this time my mother, an Atheist herself and my spiritual model since childhood, was called in by my doctor for a one on one counseling session with me. It went down hill just about from the moment it began. Without warning I found myself spiraling into a rage against her unlike any I had ever known. I screamed and cursed at her for what I now knew was a train-wreck of a life caused by my embracing her worldview, a worldview that I now knew ended in hopelessness and despair. It wasn’t necessarily her intention for me to take after her that way, but that is just what had happened. At the end of this horrible tirade I broke down and wept. My mother simply walked over, kissed me tenderly on my forehead, and walked quietly out of the room.

Shortly thereafter I returned to my bedroom in the in-patient psychiatric unit I was living on at the time. My roommate sensed I was upset and graciously slipped out. I knew the reason I had bitterly hurt my mom was to try to make myself feel better at whatever the cost to her. Her response was the true love of a mother for her son and I understood now that I was capable of evil and that this evil was somehow intrinsic. At that moment I found myself acutely aware that I was not quite the wonderful; worthy person secular psychology was every day trying to make me believe I was. What I really was is described by another word I never would have used just a few months before. What I really was, in short, was a sinner.

It was fall.

I walked over to the picture window and looked up towards the autumn sun. From somewhere deep within me I silently cried out for help, for solace, for some answer, maybe for some absolution. At that instant I felt myself being flooded by a light that did not originate from the sun. It was at that moment that I first knew the presence of God. I cannot completely describe it, but I’ll try. It was as if a Love beyond any human love suddenly flowed to me and through me. No earthly high, and I’d known a few by that point, could ever equal it. Ten seconds of this Presence was greater than anything I had ever known. The word “profound” is inadequate to describe what happened to me that day. I have never been the same. I would not want to be.

Soon thereafter I found myself calling my mother, tearfully asking for her forgiveness, and telling her how much I loved her. I felt cleansed of anger and touched by hope. Not very long after that day I was released from the hospital.

But, as you will soon see, my journey to true faith was not yet over.

To be continued…

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

In the first part of this story I detailed what it was like to be an Atheist at the end of his rope, a man caught in a “perfect storm of the soul” who was beginning to wonder if his despair would only be made permanent through self-destruction. I also described the process that led me to finally consider if the only one who could save me was not only the God whose existence I had denied, but the God of a specific faith whose more orthodox adherents I had for years delighted in mocking.

As my desperation for a way out of my monstrous depression increased I finally came to the decision that I would suspend my “official disbelief.” At that point my Atheism morphed, almost overnight, into a searching Agnosticism. Now at the time I was a newly minted college graduate. In fact I had been an honor student and one who considered himself well-read and both intellectually and culturally sophisticated. So it might surprise you that at 22 I had yet to crack open a certain piece of literature, a book upon which it might be said that Western civilization was largely built.

I am referring, of course, to the Bible. You see the psychiatric institution I was a “guest” at permitted an old Baptist couple from a local church to hold a modest little Bible study every Thursday night. One evening I dropped in and I was soon the owner of a free copy of the Gospel of John. For those of you who might not know, John is one of the four gospels that begin the New Testament and tell the story of the life of Christ. I’m fairly certain it was that night that I began reading something that only a few months earlier I would not have been caught dead with in public, a biblical text.

Up until this point I had mostly thought of Jesus as a “great teacher”, although I must admit that in earlier years I also had a certain respect for him as a historical figure who seemed somehow unique. But as a “Card-Carrying Atheist” I suppose I held the stock opinion that his story had been hijacked by religious fanatics. These poor, benighted souls had then turned him into something he was not, some kind of All-Powerful Judge, who they then proceeded to use to lay hyper-moral guilt-trips on the rest of us. I associated the religion that now bore his name with arrogant, self-righteous hypocrites whose primary obsession was to keep me from being free to do whatever I rightfully wanted to do.

But as I came to be acquainted with the Christ of scripture I began to realize, albeit slowly, that I had never really had a clue as to what I was talking about. I suppose that was the first manifestation of a new and crucial humility in my consciousness. It also was the start of something that tugged at the deepest part of my so recently cynical heart. Maybe, just maybe, that heart silently told me, I might find out that this Jesus had more to do with the God I was beginning to consider then I had ever imagined.

I think it was at this point that things really started happening to me. You see, all one has to do is slightly crack the door to belief. It only takes that much for someone Very Big to make himself known.

To be continued…

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It was while in the midst of a deep clinical depression 23 years ago that I first started to realize my long-held refusal to even consider the possibility that God existed might be a dead-end in the most profound sense of the term. Unsuccessfully battling what had become a life-threatening emotional and psychological crisis, a kind of “perfect storm of the soul”, I began to realize that that all the many and sincere efforts of human beings on my behalf at the time to restore me to mental health were not enough. I had already come to know that I could not simply will myself back to any kind of life that was worth living in my own strength. Now I was discovering that the rest of the world did not have any definitive answers either. To say this was terrifying is an understatement.

Beyond this I had the growing sense that the usual way out for an Atheist in despair, self-destruction, might only make the terrible space I was occupying a permanent address. It was my first inkling that human beings might actually continue to exist beyond physical death and that what we are at the time of our death might determine what kind of an existence that might be. It was the unpleasant opening of my eyes to a spiritual truth that, just weeks earlier, had not been something to which I had ever given any real thought. Spiritual things, in fact, were pretty much not on my radar screen, nor did I want them to be.

So here I was, realizing that maybe the word I had used all my life as a casual curse or as the venue of uncounted bad jokes might actually be a real place, and one I might be heading for if I acted on those thoughts of self-destruction. At that moment Hell became very, very real for me and such a place did not seem like a very desirable place to end up. It began to occur to me that, if there was a God, He might be the only person who could keep me out of there.

When people who cared about me began to catch on to my “spiritual awakening” some of them suggested that I begin to explore my religious options (I had, you see, been raised in about as close to a totally non-religious home as I think can exist). So for a short time that is exactly what I did. I can remember checking books on world religions out of a library and reading about the core beliefs of each one. As I did this something was simultaneously becoming clear to me. My condition needed to be utterly transformed; in fact I needed to be utterly transformed if I was to stay out of a permanent darkness I sensed waited for me on the other side of death. Some self-chosen, a la carte philosophy or religious system was not going to be any more effective in achieving that in me than the psychiatrists and medication and group therapy had already been.

If a God existed I needed one who could do something for and in me that would fundamentally alter the deepest part of who I was. The only religion that offered such a God was the one which said he had once shown up “in the flesh”, so to speak, and had walked the earth telling people like me that he and he alone, was capable of doing just that.

Even a man like I was at the time, one who not long before had gleefully referred to the adherents of this religion as “Bible-Belt Bumpkins” knew who this particular God’s name was.

To be continued…

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The Bible speaks of hungering and thirsting after righteousness as a cardinal virtue in the Christian life, and a defining mark of the true believer. To be a child of God is to share in the righteousness of God through his Son. Jesus died for us so that we might, through Him, have such righteousness.

The problem for many of us who bear His name is that we think the thing we are supposed to be hungering and thirsting after is perfect performance in keeping the law and avoiding sin. Of course the earnest Christian desires to do both. A lifestyle of lawlessness and transgression is part of what we were saved from when we cried out to Jesus and put our faith in Him for our salvation. Striving for moral excellence is a good thing if we strive for it in the strength of our risen Savior. The problem is that a lot of us strive for it in the power of the flesh and have come to believe that perfect ethical performance is what it means to be filled with righteousness. Actually such performance, if it stems mostly from human effort, is inevitably wedded with self-righteousness. Such “righteousness” is a lie and an abomination to God.

That we do this, even as professed Christians, should not come as a surprise to us if we know something about the nature we are all born with. All human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong. This is a function of being created in the image of God and existing in a moral universe. We have a similarly innate sense that we do not measure up to the right and tend inexorably towards the wrong. Be it on a conscious or unconscious level we cannot escape this truth. Our perhaps equally sinful instincts, as fallen, morally compromised beings, are either to try to be “good enough” to rate acceptance by the One who sets the standard or to ignore the standard and hate Him who set it. This instinct does not necessarily disappear at conversion although Christians, of course, tend towards the former sin rather than the latter.

So what, then, does it truly mean for a believer to hunger and thirst after righteousness? It means to deeply desire God and His righteousness and to understand that He gives us a good heart through our faith in His perfectly good Son. We do not have a good heart and we cannot give ourselves one. Christians must give up both of these illusions completely. To do so is only to take God at His word. The Bible makes it clear that only our Lord’s shed blood makes us righteous and then only as we put our faith Him to receive that righteousness.

When a child of God comes to want the righteousness of Jesus Christ above all else he or she will be filled with that righteousness. True moral and ethical excellence will ensue because God will give to His child of His own nature. This is perhaps the greatest miracle of all and it is the fulfillment of the deepest hunger and thirst of the redeemed human heart.