That night, before I went to bed, I made the following prayer: “God, all my life I’ve heard about Jesus, but Jesus has been forbidden knowledge to me. If it’s really possible to have a relationship with you and if the only way is through Jesus, then show me how to do it. I know nothing about Jesus. A little second grader in Sunday School knows more about Jesus than I do and I’m almost 20 years old. I have many questions about this controversial person. I don’t even understand who he really is in relation to you. Please give me some answers.”
Never before had I opened myself to such a new way of thinking. Growing up in America as a Jew with mostly Gentile friends, I had been exposed to Christian terminology all my life; words such as sin, savior, atonement, even the title, “Son of God.” I really didn’t understand what any of those “spiritual” phrases meant. And frankly I hadn’t cared enough to ask. But now I did care. Now I was seeking God desperately.
Well, what can I say? God honored the prayer. In fact, He didn’t even wait a full 24 hours!
The very next day, after classes were over, I was sitting on one of the campus lawns close to a tree, sipping a can of Coca Cola. Two guys came by with notebooks in their hands. I had never seen them before. They claimed they were taking a religious survey. I was not that stupid and I didn’t believe them for a second. I knew this was going to be some kind of presentation about religion. The survey was an excuse to bring up the subject in a more tactful way, kind of a “non threatening buffer zone.” As I said before, my encounters with pushy Christians in the past were brief and marginal, but I could smell them a mile away. I must admit, I admired their ability to do it with a little tact this time but I still wasn’t fooled. On the other hand, this stuff had actually been on my mind as of late. Indeed, it seemed quite a coincidence that they should come along on the heels of my prayer from the previous night. I thought it might just be interesting at that, to talk with these characters a little. It was the first time I could ever remember actually being interested in chatting with a couple of flaky Christians. Peter, from the day before, had been the first to get my attention but even then, our conversation ended abruptly after he mentioned Jesus. Anyway, I pretended to go along with their “religious survey.” I agreed to speak with these college age gentlemen who introduced themselves as Roger and Jim. I began answering their questions about my own religious views and philosophy of life. Once again, I knew nothing about religion. Once again, that didn’t keep me from speaking anyway and I shared my bird brain viewpoints for an hour and a half! I would love to go back in time, be a fly on that tree and listen to what words of ignorance proudly poured from my big, clueless mouth.
This is not to say that all of my rhetoric was pointless. I do remember one or two honest and truthful commentaries about life. In the year before, completely separate from any thoughts about God or religion, I made the observation that I was not a very good person. This was a new and disturbing discovery, as I had certainly grown up thinking of myself as good. After all, I never broke the law and I had no desire to do anyone any harm. But I really didn’t care that much about people either. I was fairly callous and apathetic to the feelings of others, outside my own small circle of friends. Back in High School, there had been a girlfriend whom I thought I loved. But after she went away to see the world (college in Portland, Oregon actually but she might as well have gone to the other side of the world) leaving me behind to attend some stale Junior College in the dismal city I grew up in, and after she wrote that Dear John letter,(OK, mine said, “Dear Bob,”) I discovered a thin wall between love and hate. I was more unhappy with myself than her because I had been sure I loved her. Now, I didn’t know if I was even capable of love. I wondered if I truly cared about anything or anybody aside from myself. Even when I did good deeds, they had selfish motivations. While going through the checkout stands of supermarkets or drugstores, staring at those little gumball type machines where one could drop in a few coins to cure cerebral palsy or something just as crippling, I would put in some money and pat myself on the back. Moments later, I asked myself if I really cared about the people I was helping or if I was merely trying to make myself feel better. Even in the sanctuary of a college world, I could not forget High School. Back in my freshman and sophomore years, I hated it when people put me down or made fun of me. Not being very good at sports, I was an easy mark. I tried to compensate with an involvement in theater where I participated in a few school plays. My involvement with drama did serve to make me a tad bit more popular than I had been before, not so much for acting but because I also displayed a talent for writing plays. In time, a fair amount of people who might never have “hung out” with me before were becoming friends. So what did I do after achieving a modest degree of acceptance? I started making fun of those other “wierdos” who were not accepted. I treated people the way I had once been treated. In the back of my mind I knew this was wrong but in High School it is more important to be popular than to be ethical. Now, over a year removed from High School, my conscience had somehow magnified. I felt horrible about my hypocrisy. I did not feel like a very good person at all.
My exploration into human nature was not limited to myself. I came to the conclusion that this negative side of my psyche was a flaw with human beings in general. My writing and my reading keyed in on this theme. I discovered why classic playwrights such as Arthur Miller achieved their well-deserved designation, genius. They were honest about human nature.
I wanted to write a play of my own, perhaps the first real play, perhaps the first play where I truly had something to say. And so I did. The play was born from my own pain. I called the piece, Eternal Reach. It’s theme: Human nature and the meaning of life. I wrote this drama because I did not know the meaning of life and I wondered how I could have lived almost twenty years without even once stopping and asking the question.
Each individual needs a feeling of superiority…competition…the knowledge that your best friend wishes he were you…a false self-respect, created by traditions that have been drained into our culture. Actually, every person cares about himself and no one else. Acts of KINDNESS and CHARITY serve the giver’s conscience more than the receiver’s needs. Nobody really gives a hoot about his fellow man. Nobody really wants to work for another person. Nobody really likes to say and do things, which he feels, are ridiculous tools that contribute to senseless rivalry. But we do it anyway because of sensitivity to our social status which civilization has labeled, “important”.
From Eternal Reach, the character David Miller, 19 years old and loosely based on myself.
Not that I had come to the conclusion that humans were exclusively evil. Actually, it seemed to me as though we had two natures, an evil one and a good one. Later on in my play, the message became more optimistic:
David, we’re talking about human beings. Mysterious people…Special creatures…All the world has obviously been given to us. Sure the world is terrible, but the world is also wonderful! Both sides were evident for a reason. On one hand, life has the appearance of paradise. In nature, we see sunsets, seashores, snow capped mountains…I could go on forever. But somehow this paradise has been invaded. Earthquakes, hurricanes and disease display an incomprehensible dichotomy. It’s like a beautiful beach, destroyed by an ugly tidal wave. The dichotomy is also evident in the make up of our very being. Look at the raw, gut level emotion. Okay, we have hatred, greed, selfishness, envy…But we also have music, poetry, senses for pleasure and a mystical sixth sense: One that contains a conscience, our built in awareness of right and wrong….One that searches for fulfillment. We fill the empty vacuum with temporal things, but what if it was meant to be plugged into something eternal? Something, which makes perfect sense? Something , which completes our thirst for value? Something, which reveals the secret of our very existence?
From Eternal Reach, the character of psychologist, Dr. Edmond Hoffman
Yes, I was ignorant about religion, but I had made a few painfully honest observations about life itself in the past year.
Anyway, the two Christians with the survey listened patiently and they seemed to be paying honest attention with considerable interest. When I finished, they asked if they could share with me what they believed. Well, what was I going to do? They’d been polite enough to listen to me for 90 minutes.
“Sure,” I said with a smile. “I knew we were going to get to that sooner or later.”
At this time, in a friendly, logical manner,(far more logical than I would have expected religion to sound) they shared with me how I might enter into a relationship with God, through Jesus Christ. They explained to me that this darker side of my nature, this flaw in human beings which I’d spent so much time thinking about, reading about and writing about was a nature the Bible called sinful.
I asked many questions. Their answers did not persuade me. Nevertheless I was amazed that they even had answers. They spoke as if this stuff were true. They did not sound like men who had made a blind leap of faith. I agreed to visit one of their on campus Bible Studies and that was pretty much that. Or so I thought.
This next part will sound totally bizarre but it’s absolutely the truth. After they left, I was bombarded by a supernatural presence. This was so unusual and so personal it is difficult to put into words. Suffices to say, I was aware that an intelligent entity of some sort was making contact with me, filling my body and soul with feelings of warmth and love. Since this came in the context of a discussion about Jesus, I wondered if I was experiencing the Spirit of God whom I had heard about. Could this be what people meant when they claimed “Jesus had come into their hearts:?” All at once, I thought about the prayer I had made the night before. How could I have thought about today’s encounter so casually if it were a coincidence brought about by randomness and chance? God had answered my prayer. Jesus had made contact with a Jewish skeptic who just the day before complained about how much he hated Christianity.
At first, I said to myself, “Wow! This is great. Jesus died for that selfish part of my nature which has plagued me this past year. It all makes sense now. Now, I’ll just continue with my life and my plans, but I’ll always have an inner peace.”
Unbeknownst to me, this was only the very first short chapter to a wild adventure. Little did I know my life was about to morph in directions I could never even dream. I was about to experience that first line from A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Within only a matter of days, my life would never be the same again.
Note: On Dec, 3, 2007, The 700 Club broadcast a dramatic re-enactment of this story. It was somewhat fictionalized but true to the spirit of what happened and the essential details of the incident.
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