Testimony at Easter Services at HCC 2004

When Rebecca Crow asked me several weeks ago to tell my story about my journey to Jesus, and Scott asked me several days ago to tell it at the Easter services, I had serious doubts. First of all, I wasn’t sure that I’d have the courage to do so. Even though. over the years of my career as a scientist, I’ve given many, many professional presentations and lectures, speaking to a congregation with many who have far more experience and wisdom on faith than me seemed like a whole different ball game. And second, my journey was one largely of the mind, with no dramatic experiences or momentous events, so I wondered whether there would be anyone interested in hearing my story. But, at the same time, I did have some faith that it would work out, and though that perhaps some would see some value in my story. So, I engaged the doubts and faith, I spoke with my wife and with friends, and I knew the Holy Spirit would help me out. So, my faith grew, and in the end faith won the day, and here I am. I mention this because this was a very important process in my journey. First there was doubt; then doubt and faith co-existed; and finally, faith won the day.

So, let me turn to my story. I suppose one should start at the beginning, but I’m not sure just where the beginning was. Probably it was the day when my mom sent me to Lutheran catechism class. I can’t remember the family ever going to church, but mom thought that her kids should have a Christian education. I didn’t relate much to what was taught in the catechism. I was raised in a Swedish-Norwegian family with a strong moral code. Honesty and integrity were highly valued. I couldn’t see a need for religion to be a good person. Sometime later following catechism, I did read the Bible as I wanted to find out for myself what it said. I remember I found the prose beautiful, and it contained a lot of great teachings. I wished that all people would live by these teachings.

The next step was to Gonzaga University where I enrolled in chemistry. As most of you know, Gonzaga is Catholic Jesuit University, so I took a serious look at the Catholic religion. Eventually I decided this was not for me for a number of reasons.

The next step was to Purdue University, where I got my PhD in Analytical Chemistry, and after two postdocs, one at UCLA, and one in Denmark, I went to work for Shell Oil Co. During this time, I did think about the existence of God, and I was interested in things spiritual. I learned the technique of TM, which is a very fascinating experience. I looked into the beliefs of a number of religions, but eventually became an agnostic. Now, as most of you know, an agnostic is not an atheist. An agnostic believes that there might be a God, or there might not be, you cannot prove it one way or the other. My view was that there was about a 50% probability that there was a God, based on the evidence of at hand. And that was my view for over 40 years. During that time, I still held the view that one didn’t need religion to be a good person. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if the Holy Spirit wasn’t with me even during that period. I can picture Him saying, “I can have some patience with this guy, he just needs more time”.

In 92’, I retired from Shell after 30 years of service, but after a couple of months of retirement I had had enough, so I founded a one-man technology company which I named Global FIA. In 95’, I moved to Gig Harbor, and two friends with professional career backgrounds similar to mine joined my company as partners.

About this time, my views on the existence of God began to change. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, new discoveries in science, in particular in the sciences of the cosmos, and in microbiology, were creating a body of evidence that pointed to an intelligent designer, a creator of the universe had. This caught my attention. I started to pay more attention to new discoveries and give more thought to their meaning and this brought me closer to the truth about the existence of God. The probability of 50% that there is a God that was in my mind began to climb to higher numbers. The second reason I attribute to one of my business partners, Graham Marshall, who is also a scientist, and a deeply religious person. Graham and I always love to discuss science, and inevitably the discussions often extended to science and Christian beliefs. These discussions got my mind engaged even more intensely with the question of the existence of God and other matters of faith, and they helped me a great deal in my journey to God. Graham introduced me to an organization called Reasons To Believe, which was founded by an astronomer, Hugh Ross, and has the mission to collect and evaluate scientific discoveries for their harmony with Scripture and communicate this to the public. RTB was an immensely helpful resource for me in my journey.

To make a long story short, I eventually arrived at a point where I saw a compelling body of evidence that God does exist. You are probably wondering, what is this body of evidence. Well, it’s more like a mountain of evidence, and it’s impossible to describe it in the few minutes that I have available today. To give you an idea of its size, Jay Wiley and I have been teaching a class here Tues. evenings on this topic, called Harmony Between Science and Scripture, and the class runs 12 weeks. But I would like to give you a peek at the evidence which I believe will capture its essence.

I’m sure that most of you have heard of the Big Bang theory. It is a scientific theory on how the universe was created, and it has been so well tested by measurements as well as theories of physics and astrophysics that it has been overwhelmingly accepted by scientists. And it turns out that it is amazingly consistent with the Genesis account of creation. It says that the universe had a beginning, as does Genesis. It says that time began with creation of the universe, as does Genesis. It says that the universe was created from nothing, as does Genesis. It says the universe is expanding as does the Old Testament; in the OT, it is called stretching of the heavens, in astrophysics it is called stretching of the space-time fabric, a striking similarity of terms, but I can assure you that science did not borrow the term from Scripture. The Big Bang created a universe with a high measure of design. It is a universe governed by a balance of a large number of constants of physics, I believe the number is 200, that are so finely tuned that if even one of them was off very, very slightly in either direction, the universe could not exist. Also, there is growing evidence that the universe was finely-tuned for the existence of complex life on earth.

This is but a glimpse of the evidence; if you look deeper, you will find God in the details.

Compelling as the body of evidence is, it is not an absolute proof of God. If we had absolute proof, everyone would have knowledge of God and we wouldn’t need faith. So, from this body of evidence, a leap of faith was still necessary to a belief in God. To me, it was a tiny leap of faith, but nevertheless, a leap of faith. I didn’t take the leap of faith at this time, for reasons I will give in a few moments. I was ready to launch into the next leg of my journey, an investigation of Jesus.

Here, I had many doubts, even doubts about my doubts. And the doubts led to lots of questions. So I engaged these doubts and questions, and began searching for information and evidence, both through reading and speaking with a lot of people. I wasn’t looking for answers at this point. Lots of people had answers to offer, but little or no evidence to support them. I spoke with my wife; she has been a Christian all of her life. I had a meeting with Scott; he recommended a book called, “A Case For Christ”, written by Lee Strobel. This was a great resource for me. Lee Strobel is an investigative journalist and was an atheist who set out to research a book to prove that Jesus was not God. Before he finished the book, he became a Christian because the body of evidence he found convinced him Jesus is God. I even contacted Lee Strobel by email and to my surprise he answered me, and I started an email dialogue with him. I spoke with Claire Bolender. My wife and I joined a bible study group hosted by Dale and Jane Kelley and facilitated by John Love. There I felt comfortable to ask a lot of questions and express my views and this was a great help to me. And I had many discussions with George Makari over an extended period of time. He was of great help in my journey. I couldn’t stump him with any question; he is a great scholar of Scripture. I also had discussions with my nephew, Dan, who is a born-again Christian.

Eventually I accumulated a compelling body of evidence in my mind that Jesus was indeed God. For me, the evidence had to be compelling; strong wasn’t enough. I was ready to make a leap of faith. There were still a few questions lingering in my mind, but I didn’t feel these were critical and that answers to them would come in time. So I was ready, as Mike said in last Sunday’s service, to lift my palm branch. What took him only 5 days took me a lifetime. I was ready to take both the leap of faith to God that I had put off earlier, and to believing in Jesus as my God and my savior. However, there was a problem. I hope this doesn’t sound strange to you, but I didn’t know how to take a leap of faith. In fact, I wasn’t sure what faith really is. Sure, I have known the word most of my life, and I could look it up in Webster’s, but I wasn’t sure what it is up here, in my mind, or here, in my heart.

So I sent an email off to Lee Strobel, thinking that since he made a similar journey, he might have encountered the same problem. His answer was “read my book, The Case for Faith”. He had, in fact, encountered the same questions, then investigated them, and wrote a book about what he found. He also gave me a prayer from the book of Mark, which was “I believe, please help me with my unbelief”. This prayer made sense to me. Unbelief is different from non-belief. Non-belief is an act of the will not to believe. Unbelief is saying, “I want to believe but I don’t know how”.

I read his book, and here are some of the things I learned about faith. A common thread in the book is that faith is based on evidence. I liked that because that is the path I had taken. E.g., according to Hebrews, faith is evidence of things not seen. A delightfully enlightening illustration of this meaning of faith and how it differs from opinion and knowledge is given in the book. Suppose that a friend whom you trust reaches into his pocket and withdraws something concealed in his fist, something “not seen”. He asks you what it is, and you make a guess that it is a coin. That is an opinion. He then tells you it is a quarter, and asks if you believe him. You reply that you do, based on your evidence that he is a person you trust; that is faith. He opens his hand, and you see a quarter. That is knowledge. God wants us to know Him by a leap of faith from the evidence.

The book also said that faith is about a choice, a step of the will, a decision to want to know God personally. That is what I needed to do, make a step of the will, and then act on it.

As I was pondering all of this, I came to realize that my leap of faith had already happened. It had sneaked up on me. Now, I knew I was where I wanted to be, and I decided to follow Jesus. I told my wife, I told Graham, I sent emails to Scott and George about my decision, and also one to Lee Strobel.

You might think that this was the end of my journey, but it wasn’t. I had faith in my mind, but I wasn’t sure that I had it in my heart. I felt I needed to transition faith from my mind to my heart, a sort of leap of faith from my mind to my heart... I was ready for this to happen, but I didn’t know how to make it happen. About this time Scott gave a sermon in which he touched on transitioning faith from the mind to the heart, and that helped. While I was pondering this, I noticed something odd had been happening to me at church services, at least odd to me. Sometimes when a certain verse was sung in a hymn, or something Scott or Mike said in their sermon, or some prayer said by a person, I would get this powerful upwelling of feelings in my chest, often bringing tears to my eyes, or it made me choked up. I wondered, what the heck is going on here. Then, I began to notice some people during some of the same moments uplifting their arms and I wondered, maybe this isn’t so odd, maybe other people feel this too. I mentioned it to George one day while we were having coffee at Starbucks, and asked him what he thought was going on, and he said, Aw, just let it happen. I think he knew what was going on but didn’t want to tell me. It brought to mind something I read, that with some people you can’t teach some things, you just have to help them find the answers within themselves. I’m probably one of those people. George, in his wisdom, probably knew that.

And I did find the answer within myself. I finally came to realize that my faith had already made the leap from my mind to my heart. And guess what - I didn’t need to make it happen. I think one of the greatest discoveries in my journey was that in matters of faith, some things you don’t have to make happen, you just have to be ready, and the Holy Spirit will be there to do the rest.

There is another delightful thing I learned about the Holy Spirit during my journey. If you have some doubts or questions, and you engage them seriously and search for answers, you will likely be visited by the Holy Spirit, and when you realize He has been there and provided you with some insight, or guided you to the right resource, or arranged events so that you will be at the right place at the right time to find the answer, then that is a moment of joy.

Looking back, I think the Holy Spirit may have been with me from the time I first read the Bible in my boyhood. When I came across the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible, I loved it so much that I decided to say it every night before I went to sleep. And I have done that. I don’t quite understand why I did that, especially when I was an agnostic, but perhaps I wanted some presence in that 50% probability side that there was a God.

Finally, I’d like to mention that my wife’s patience with me during my journey was of great help. I asked her when I became a Christian if that surprised her, and she said no, she knew I would get there someday and she had been waiting quietly for a long time for that to happen. Without that patience, my journey would have been more difficult.

That is my story. I know it is not the end, because I have a great passion to know all that one can know about God, and I will be on this journey the rest of my life.