Sometimes something just takes your breath away

Last weekend one of my student friends, Alison, got baptised at our church, and during the service she shared her story. It was only a couple of minutes, but as she looked out at her new church family and spoke you could tell it was right from the heart. I found it deeply, deeply beautiful. See what you think...

"Hello.

Christianity is just something people used to believe, right? It’s not something we need to think about anymore, and the people who do would believe anything they’re told. That’s the attitude I had starting from about age five when my mother told me that Jesus wasn’t really the son of God. For me and all the other default agnostics surrounding me, it seemed we had figured out one key truth about the universe – that there was no God – and everything else, like the terrifying finality of death and the implications of living in a universe without good and evil, could be left to look after itself.

When I reached university, I didn’t want to push those questions aside anymore. It seemed like there was no purpose or direction in the world, but everyone was making things up as they went, and I didn’t want the universe to be like that. Thanks to some persistent inviting by my friends, I started going to Christian Union events where they were actually addressing the issues which everyone else was ignoring. I went in expecting to disagree with everything that was said, but to my surprise found that the Christians had thought things through. They pre-empted a lot of my objections and gave me some of the evidence which I value as a history-slash-literature student. It was news to me that it’s possible to be both a Christian and a rational thinker.

This began a process which lasted several months. First, I wanted to get at what Christians actually believe, separate from the vague impressions I had absorbed growing up. I began reading the Bible and other Christian books, and talking through my objections, and even went to church to find out what it was like – then kept going back. Bit by bit, I became convinced that there was a God. Not only is the historical evidence for the events at the cross pretty good, but more importantly, this feels like a universe where things like love and justice exist, and those things don’t make any sense without something that exists beyond and outside of us. But it took a long time to admit that out loud, and even after I did, I was determined not to become a Christian.

It’s been almost a year since I finally gave in. No-one ever promised this would be easy, and in some unexpected ways it’s made things harder. When I’m with my non-Christian family or friendship group, there’s a contrast between the inside of me where God is increasingly becoming the centre of the universe, and the outside where he isn’t even real at all. But his existence isn’t dependent on our attitude to him. He’s there, which means that I don’t exist at random, and that is so precious and exciting that I have no choice but to give my life over to him. There’s no part of myself that I don’t owe, and there’s nothing else that could be worthy of giving it to."

Cleaning Our Windows Two Years Late

The other week we got our windows cleaned. For the first time. In two years of living here. It took about 45 minutes, cost £15, and it was like magic. It’s amazing, it’s like being in a different flat – the rooms are brighter, the outside world is a different colour!

But the funny thing is, before they got cleaned, as much as we knew they were a bit gross, we didn’t think it was making that much difference. We mostly didn’t think about it all. That was just what the windows were like, that was just what the sunshine was like, that was just what colour the outside world was. It was just normal.

And so this grime-based window episode has reminded me that just because something is normal, doesn’t mean that it’s right. Just because something is normal doesn’t mean that it could be wonderfully different. Just because something is normal doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem that needs to be solved, and really can be solved.

Tonight at my church a friend of mine was baptised – she’s a student who grew up agnostic/atheist and while at uni actually started asking the big questions of life, is there any meaning to it all or is it all just an accident? Is there such a thing as good and evil, and if not why does it feel so much like there is? And she became convinced that actually not only was there a lot of good reasons to believe that Jesus was real and he had come back from the dead, but that actually Jesus and the Bible made tonnes better sense of the real world we live in than the vague ideas she’d grown up with. And looking back on it, she said something I found really interesting, she said, “I and the other agnostics I was surrounded with had realised one great certainty about the universe, that there was no God, and decided that all the other big questions, how life wasn’t pointless if it was all an accident, how there could be real good and evil, could look after themselves.”

And what I thought was really interesting about that is that I bet if you’d asked her back then, she’d have never described it quite like that. Most people in our particular corner of white Western culture decide that life’s big questions can look after themselves, and assume that there is no God, without ever really doing those things consciously and carefully – that’s just the obvious assumption. That’s just what the windows have always been like. To stretch the metaphor, it’s like the windows are so grimy we can’t see anything outside, just enough light gets through for us to get on with, since we’ve got plenty of led screens inside anyway, and so we get by on the assumption that there isn’t actually anything much worth bothering about outside, and not asking too many questions about where that dim glow is emanating from. And everything on the shining screens that fill our every spare moment is designed to keep us occupied, keep us entertained, and keep our eyes adjusted to their artificial light and unaccustomed to the sunlight we’ve never properly seen.

But just because that’s normal doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because that’s normal doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be wonderfully, wonderfully different.

This is why I love talking to people about Jesus, because I get to tell people the truth that the world is so much brighter than we assume it is. That life is a gift from a God who loves us. That we are not accidents, none of us. That our lives are not meaningless or even just average, but suffused with infinite and glorious significance. That we are not unimportant or unloved but that the Creator of a billion galaxies has crafted us in his image, to reflect his glorious nature, and even though we have ignored and avoided him, turned on each other and destroyed his world, he cares about us so passionately that he came as human being and died an agonised and humiliating death to suffer himself all the pain and shame that we’ve created. That we can know the God who made us, and be a genuine part of what he’s doing to redeem this broken world and right every wrong. That ultimately love will overcome hatred and loneliness, that ultimately life will overwhelm death, and that ultimately light will outshine darkness.

Maybe you’ve always assumed that’s rubbish and wishful thinking. I’m just saying that it’s normal to assume that. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s right. Why not take a look outside?