5 - The Brick Wall

At seventeen years old, I was becoming enlightened. I knew, as Socrates knew, that I didn't know anything, and the more I learned, the more there was to know. The process invigorated me, and I wrestled with questions that people have wrestled for ages: free will, existence of reality, and eventually identity itself. I’d spend hours just sitting and thinking, praying and thinking, and I had no idea what I was getting into.

Most of this philosophical journey unfolded inside the framework of Biblical Christianity. Even though I toyed with ideas like "maybe reality is some sort of dream," my core beliefs, by which I functioned on a day-to-day basis, remained intact:

The Bible was the infallible Word of God, and I, a depraved sinner, had been saved by the grace of God, through Jesus Christ. It was impossible for me to do good works, because of my sinful flesh; only Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, could do good works, and I prayed that He would work through me, and that I, a lowly sinner, would not get in the way. Any time I did something commendable, it was God. Any time I did something sinful, it was me. All of my actions, routine or unique, fell into one of these categories: spirit or flesh, Christ or me.

And I continued thinking.

The belief in a sovereign God gave me permission to question everything, including Him. And I finally did it, too. As I tested the stability of the framework by which I saw the world, parts of it proved to be structurally weak, and eventually the whole thing collapsed.

Every week, I attended a high school guys' prayer group, called Cornerstone. We met at my friend Jeremy's house. I had helped start the group a few years earlier, and I was among the handful of members that kept the group going through high school - in many ways, the group helped me through high school as well.

One week at Cornerstone, though, everything felt different. Cornerstone was the same, but I was different. That night, Jeremy was my prayer partner, so he would pray for my requests, and I would pray for his.

We were sitting on his living room floor, talking. There were about ten of us there that week.

“I’ve been thinking at a million miles an hour," I said to Jeremy, "and this week... I hit a brick wall."

Jeremy nodded, listening. There nothing else I could say. Jeremy shared his requests, and we bowed our heads in prayer. I went first, praying for Jeremy's relationship with his girlfriend and his performance in classes at school.

And then it was Jeremy's turn. “God, I pray for Will, God. He says he’s been thinking a whole lot lately, and God, he just, he feels like he’s hit a brick wall... And Lord I just pray that You’ll be with him in this time, that…” And that was it. Cornerstone went on, nothing had changed. I’ll remember that moment for the rest of my life. My entire life had changed, but I could not communicate it to anyone.

Jeremy had no way to understand what I was talking about, and I had no way of explaining it. Whenever I tried to begin, I'd get lost in questions that I may or may not have known the answers to - I mean, I thought I knew the answers, but I didn’t know any more… Is the Bible true? Am I still a Christian? Am I going to heaven? Haven't I already doubted and questioned enough?

The brick wall was this: I had been getting to know a lot of nonbelievers, and I learned that they weren't very different from me - even though I had the power of the Holy Spirit, and they supposedly didn't. I asked myself:

What if everyone is exactly the same?

What if Christians are no different than non-Christians, and

What if everyone is just acting selfishly?

What if Christians just think they can love with the love of Jesus, and

What if that includes me?

3 more questions are scrawled on a note that I wrote to myself, sometime that week. It was one of those "distillment moments," when a hundred things had been boiling in my mind for hours, then I picked up a pen to write, and everything that remained poured out. three questions:

• DOES THERE EXIST SOME NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CHRISTIAN AND A NONCHRISTIAN?
  
• BETWEEN A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY AND A SECULAR ONE?
  
• DOES A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY EXIST?

The answer, deep in my heart, was no.

I could not ignore it.