Hey, You Annoying Christian, How Can You Believe?

I was employed at a company that did spot drawings for the yellow pages, a frustrated young man, miserably chained to a drawing board in a tiny cubicle, hunched in a cloud of cigarette smoke (second-hand, not mine--- this was before no-smoking laws reigned in buildings). I worked across the aisle from another artist named Ron. What we had in common was that neither of us contributed to the bar-like air of the art department. But we had one radical difference that I had a real problem with.

Ron was a Christian.

On his cubicle wall, Ron had tacked a bright and colorful poster of some guy majestically flying through the mountain air on skis. There was a caption that read: Those that hope in the LORD will renew their strength and soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint, a quote from Isaiah 40:31.

Man, that ticked me off.

What was it about Ron and his stupid poster that irritated me?

Ron seemed happy. I mean grin-on-the-face-nice-to-everybody-happy. Yuck.

And there I was, a miserable wretch of a man. I hated that job, which was just an extension of the life I hated. I was a random accident of a hostile universe and my purpose was to survive. As you can imagine, I was Mr. Bright 'n' Cheery to live with. 

Ron would do weird things like join a buddy from another department on his lunch hour and read and discuss the Bible at a nearby park. Ron called his wife during his break every afternoon from the boss’s phone (before cellular phones were common) and induced me to nausea with his gushy banter.

Even at the times when it was clear he was a little stressed by a heavy workload, he never complained. He had one of those “let’s make lemonade out of lemons” personalities. It seemed he had this crazy thing called FAITH. His life was much more than his work. 

I had faith, too, in one thing: Life is tough.

Didn’t this fool know that? Was he blind to the hardness of life, to the bleakness of existence? Hello, Ron!

So one day, when it was quiet in the art department, I mustered up the nerve and, as casually as possible, asked him, “So Ron, why do you believe in God? How can you be sure he is real?”

Looking back, it is clear that Ron was no theologian, but he did his level best to make a decent argument for belief in God, all the while smiling. When I pressed him, unconvinced, he finally took refuge in that all too common response of Christian “sinners against reason.” He didn’t stop smiling, but his eyes became intense, his demeanor took on a certain gravity, and he leaned forward, closer to me. He said quietly, “Because I just know. I know it in my heart. I have experienced Him in my life.” Then he shrugged.

Grrrrrrrrr!!!!!

That “inept” answer gave me the excuse I wanted in order to dismiss him as a religious kook, a well-meaning, kind-hearted idiot.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I had my own encounter with the Living One.

I came into the Church almost nineteen years ago. The journey since has been a humbling struggle to authentically live the love I first encountered at a Franciscan mission to the poor in Mexico.

When someone asks me why I believe, I try to explain, without embarrassing myself by my ignorance, the reasons it is more reasonable to believe than not. After all, we cannot really prove anything in life, but we may have reasonable certitude based on evidence. The evidence for the truth of Christianity is overwhelmingly convincing. It is far less reasonable to reject Christianity than it is to accept and profess it. To my mind, the evidence for Christianity is certainly most compelling if one gives it a fair hearing.

But ultimately, for me, it gets down to a Man. When Philip asked Jesus to reveal the Father, Jesus answered without any ambiguity: “Have I been with you all this time and you still don’t know me, Philip? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father (cf. John 14: 8-9).”

The Man Jesus Christ is a compelling figure. He isn’t easy to dismiss if you spend any time with Him. Not a few saints credited their conversion to a reading of the Gospels. Once encountered, Jesus Christ is hard to let go of, to walk away from.

Recently, a dear friend confessed that she struggles to believe in God because she can’t perceive Him with her physical senses. She has struggled with this for a very long time. She desires to believe—I can see that clearly.  She probably wants to ask me, "Why do you believe?" If she asks, I will, perhaps having shared some of the traditional “proofs” for the existence of God, have to finally resort to something like Ron’s argument for God, but I would make it my own: “It is simply something I know in the depths of my heart. I have met Him, I have experienced His love, and I have experienced the joy of living in His love. I have encountered, time and again, His divine mercy. Jesus Christ is Risen, and I have certitude about that, because, not only is the evidence abundant, I have experienced His Presence in my life.” 

And for me, that is enough.