I’ve often been asked how I became a Christian, and here in Berkeley of all places–a college town known less for its spiritual community than for its spirited competition, radicalism, and liberalism. Growing up in this environment celebrated for its progressiveness and freethinking, the sort of Christianity portrayed in the media represented all that I was opposed to, with its constraints, intolerance, and closed mindedness. Indeed I dodged and avoided Christians as best I could, feeling alarmed at the determination with which many tried to convert me, wondering more than once whether these “believers” had a quota.
Yet in a way I always knew there existed a God whom I didn’t comprehend. Perhaps a precocious youth, I had long reasoned that the abundance of life, the intricacies of both the human brain and that of inter-human relations to be too formidable to be the stuff of happenstance, or a series of chance occurrences as purported by evolutionists. I found the prevailing arguments supporting a non-divinely coordinated formation of the Earth to be at best, unpersuasive. Holding such a belief, I sought after God. In junior high, my buddies roundly suggested that I like them should try a brand of Buddhism practiced by many Chinese, a faith retaining its Indian namesake, but is really a crossbreed of Siddhartha Gautama’s more traditional teachings coupled with strands of Confucianism and Taoism. My friends maintained that practicing would potentially allow me to accomplish superhuman feats and the mastery of almost anything. After all, the question was raised, “how did I figure those martial arts warriors on TV engage in swordplay in midair and emit electricity through the palm of their hands?” So began my ill-fated two-week stint as a Buddhist. I got a rubbing bracelet and started to pray and meditate, but shortly thereafter I began wondering why my friends didn’t demonstrate any superhuman traits themselves. They were to be sure, further along in their practice but I earned better grades and proved more athletic than they were. But perhaps more significantly, I didn’t derive any feelings from the Buddhist experience. My prayers felt like a continual appeal to deaf ears, and I became convinced that Buddha was neither God nor embodied any divinity. I didn’t give up my search for God though, but frankly I didn’t try all that hard either.
Life was good. I had no need for Him…or so I thought.
Slow to learn perhaps, it wasn’t until high school that I began to realize that people aren’t uniformly kind or nice. Suddenly I became aware of the zero-sum-game economists often babble about. In most contexts, not everyone can earn an “A,” nor make the cut for athletic teams, and my winning or attaining would necessarily mean that another loses or doesn’t attain. Darwinism and survival of the fittest, so we were taught and subsequently lived out, dictated to whom goes the spoils. And it was far from pleasant. Some classmates became bitter rivals, and such innocuous conversation openers as “so how’d you do on the test” would occasion wary stares and deep-seeded suspicions. Soon, I accepted that life was just that—cold and detached.
In college the competition only grew more frenzied, but by that time I was an old hand at it and such rivalries no longer fazed me. But some weeks into my first year my cynical view of the world began to fade. Strolling by Sproul Plaza one day, I received a leaflet inviting me to go to Crossroads, our college fellowship here. “Oh no,” I remember intoning. I was being hounded again. Yet this time around, before tossing the flier as I had done so often before, I decided to give it a chance for reasons which are inexplicable even today. Possibly it was because I have always prided myself on being open minded, and my complete disavowal of the faith without actually giving it a fair shake would make me just the narrow minded person I didn’t want to be.
In any event I went, and I was by turns humbled and surprised. To start, not only were my preconceived notions of Christians swiftly quashed, but I realized that not unlike our other prejudices, my fear of Christianity was based purely on ignorance. The people I met were oddly nice and didn’t judge me because I was unfamiliar with their faith, timid, kept to myself, and dressed or looked differently. Uneasy and skeptical as ever, I methodically studied them from every single angle, attempting to identify the “catch” or how they stood to benefit from engaging me. These people were definitely different, and I wanted to know why. In subsequent visits and in reading the Bible I began to see. I realized I was “hounded” neither because I delivered rejections with such eloquence nor because these individuals stood to gain in any way, but rather because they had found something good and worthwhile. So much so that they felt prompted to share it with me.
Now, like them, I too have finally found Him. Today I declare my faith in God. Through fellowship with other Christians, worship of Him, and in reading the Bible I have seen my life change in profound ways. The very knowledge and faith that Christ Jesus had given up His own life to save me, while admittedly baffling at first, came to make sense when I sought out the truth in earnest. I asked questions constantly, pored over the Bible, and gradually became convinced. I found the consistency within the Bible most compelling, both in the accounts and the message of faith among its many “books,” despite different authorship and the 1,500 years it took to compose the compendium. In my mind, the continuity, robustness, and integrity of the work proved too coordinated of an effort to be some charade that took more than one-and-half millennia to draft and compile. This to say nothing of how the Bible continues to be doggedly defended, and often to the point of martyrdom!
True, troubles haven’t simply washed away since my becoming a Christian, but what has changed is that I had never known the joy and peace I feel today in recognizing that life is more than the cold world of fending for oneself to get into the best schools, securing a lucrative profession, procreating and dying. I realized that meaning in life is in acknowledgment of Him, following Him and faith in Him. I recognize now that I’m not alone but in His presence and He carries my every burden, for as we’re instructed in scripture, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6).