My Epilogue

July 1988. Dusk or a little after. I’m alone in one of my favorite places, the city park in my hometown of Herrin, Illinois. At least I think I’m alone.

I have come to the park to be alone as I muddle through an existential crisis. A spiritual crisis. I don’t know it yet, but my spiritual wanderings are about to come to an end. From now on, I will still be moving but not wandering. I will be moving in a new direction.

For the last several years I have been moving away from my childhood faith in Jesus and Christianity. I have been dissatisfied by what strikes me as an anti-intellectual rigidity in the Southern Baptist church of my youth. I’ve realized that I’m not cut out to be a fundamentalist—I ask too many questions for which there are no easy answers.

Questions such as: why is Jesus the only way to salvation? Why would God punish billions of people with an eternity in hell simply because they believe in God in a different way? Is “because the Bible says so” a good enough answer? Don’t these other people have their own sacred scriptures that tell them their way is best? How does one discern which path is true?

Other questions arise from these: can I trust the Bible as a source of truth? What about evil in the world—doesn’t that argue against a loving, all-powerful God? What does Christianity have to commend itself as a faith to live by? Am I a Christian simply because that’s the tradition in which I was born and raised? Come to think of it, am I a Christian at all? Do I even want to be one?

Suddenly I see a man standing a few yards away, looking up at the trees. I don’t recognize him, and I wonder how he managed to come up so silently. There is something familiar about him, but I’m not sure who he is. He seems to notice that I’m staring at him, and he looks over and smiles mysteriously. “Hello,” he says, then goes back to his contemplation.

“Hi,” I say, embarrassed for some reason. It’s not as though I was thinking out loud. So why does this guy have such a knowing look on his face? I try to shut him out of my awareness and go back to my own ruminations. It occurs to me that the key to all my spiritual issues is Jesus. If he exists, I will have to sort through all these questions about the Christian faith, the Bible, and so on. If he doesn’t, I will be free to continue my quest for a satisfactory religion or philosophy to live by. The second option sounds more appealing by a long shot. All I have to do is to convince myself that Jesus is not alive and real. Simple.

Only it’s not simple at all. Every thought, every path I pursue, comes to a dead end, blocked by a barrier that reads, “Jesus.” It’s as though I am in a maze, and I am being pushed in the only direction that will lead me to the exit, only I resist going that direction every step of the way. It occurs to me that I am having a significant spiritual crisis—this is a watershed moment in my life. The answer to this vital question will in large part decide my future. I need to get this right.

At this moment the man starts walking toward me. I think, “Not now, pal. I’m in the middle of something important. I don’t have time for chit-chat.”

I’m about to say something along these lines when he stops and holds up his hand, palm outward. He smiles again, no less mysteriously this time, says simply, “I am real,” and walks away. I watch him, dumbfounded, as he moves off and seems to disappear into a mist I had not noticed rising up over the great lawn where I am seated. A chill runs down my spine, and I hear an echo in my heart of an old, nearly forgotten line from the gospel of John: “It is the Lord!”

I have had an encounter with the risen Christ, though I do not know it at the time. All he says to me is, “I am real,” but that is enough. I have found bedrock; I can stop digging and start building.

From that time to this, I have striven to live a life of intellectual and spiritual integrity. This means that I don’t brush aside the questions. Rather, I explore them thoroughly, even when they raise even thornier questions, which they invariably do. I struggle with Jesus, I argue with him and wrestle with the implications of his reality, but I seldom doubt that reality. I can always go back to that night in Herrin City Park, to my contemplation under the trees, and to those three words that changed my life forever: I am real.