Confessions of an Ex-Atheist, Conclusion

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

In the last installment I shared with you the moment in my life when I came to know the presence of a God who only several weeks earlier I still dogmatically claimed did not exist. By the time this moment arrived my Atheism had effectively crumbled into dust. It was no longer a question even of Agnosticism. I now knew God existed and that He was capable of opening up to me a realm I had never remotely known before, the realm of His Spirit, where the sheer reality of His being overwhelmed everything else I knew or thought I knew.

It is a strange thing to have your eyes opened this way. Once you have gone from not believing in a Deity to being personally touched by that Deity it is not easy for you to return to your former unbelief. Some might become resistant to God as they go forward into this new place of knowing, but pretending He does not exist basically ceases to be an option. Others might even reject His presence in their lives, but I doubt very sincerely that they could simply reject the fact of His reality once that reality has truly touched them. I believe the sheer power of how human hearts are opened to His existence tends to preclude that from happening.

As I mentioned in part III of my story soon after my experience at the window of my psychiatric unit bedroom I was declared healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. I somehow intrinsically knew upon returning home that I needed to find a place where others were who had experienced what I experienced. I knew this meant a church, because by now I had come to identify the God who had revealed Himself to me as the same God I was being drawn towards as I read the Bible, specifically the New Testament.

After going to one building that had a cross on it, but absolutely nothing redolent of the God I had encountered, and another with people who spoke more believingly about Him, but did not seem to be able to understand my journey in the slightest, I found a congregation in which I immediately sensed the same Spirit I’d tasted of in the hospital. So there I stayed (I ended up, in fact, staying there for 17 years). This was in November of 1990.

Christmas was coming.

On the night of December 24 I attended the Christmas Eve service at my new church. It was moving, but it was not until after the service ended and I was in my car on my way to join my family for the holiday that God decided to pull out all the stops, as it were.

As I drove down the dark New Jersey highway I was listening to the U2 album “The Joshua Tree.” The song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” began to play. A little more than half way through it Bono, the Irish band’s lead vocalist, sings this lyric:

“You broke the bonds and you loosed the chains,
Carried the cross of my shame…of my shame,
You know I believe it.”

At that moment I believed it too, for myself. At that moment I accepted what God in human form had done for me two-thousand years before on a cross outside Jerusalem. At that moment I knew I was redeemed from the nature I was born with and had excused for 22 years. I knew I was re-born. I was a Christian. I wept so hard I almost had to pull off the highway. It was, and remains, the greatest night of my life.

He was now more than a presence. He was my Rescuer, the One who had given me a reason to live that I had never known before, the One who in the last four months of 1990 had transformed a suicidal Atheist into a child of God.

No one was more surprised than me at the time.

So for all of you out there who do not believe as I once did not believe I’ll leave you with this: The God you don’t believe in may, Himself, one day change your mind. Call it the divine sense of humor, but I think He especially enjoys shocking Atheists to the core by opening our eyes to His existence. In fact I suspect there may be divine laughter in Heaven every time it happens.