Joy in Christ

 I remember long ago standing in a snow-covered meadow at night and seeing that God had used a full moon to turn that meadow into a field of sparkling diamonds and I heard Him whisper, “I made this for you.”  At that time the right side of my brain was alive and well and I was experiencing joy in the presence of my Creator and his creation…it didn’t last.

I began to conform to the culture in which I was growing up, that included learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution. I joined the ranks of academics who, at that time were saying that Darwin had eliminated the need for a creator to explain how we got here.  We just evolved from lower forms of life by a process of chance variations and survival of the fittest. The left side of my brain was developing rapidly, at the expense of the right side! I loved studies in science and philosophy and wanted to impress my teachers with my sensible logical mind. Eventually I made my way into a Ph. D program in Philosophy at the City University of New York. I had hardened my heart against God and “religion,” in fact against anything “spiritual.”

Recently I noticed the author of Ecclesiastes reached the exact opposite conclusion from the one I was espousing at the time I am telling you about in my own life. He writes “I have seen all of the things that are done under the sun (that is in the physical realm); all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind… Here is the conclusion of the matter. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind” (Ec.1:14, 12:13). Unlike the author of Ecclesiastes, I had concluded that everything “spiritual” is meaningless!

I thank God he didn’t leave me in that sad confused state. After chasing me for years, while I was pretending He didn’t even exist, I began to “hear” faint whispers saying, “May, you are wrong.” I began to look back and evaluate the meandering path of my life and the thought came to me that maybe we don’t need God to explain how we got here, but could there be other things we need God for?  I was having faint memories of a moon-lit meadow and a “voice” … But no, for years I had disciplined myself to reject such thoughts, they were just products of a child’s imagination, myths and fairy tales! I continued to work on my dissertation, in which I was trying to show how we (mankind) could have developed our systems of morality without the concept of God as a law-giver. I did believe in a universal conscience that every human in every culture is born with, but I rejected the idea that it was “God-given.” My thesis was: our conscience is a product of our evolution, mankind is just more highly developed in this area than other animals.

God was working to convert me but I was stubborn. Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again” John 3:7b, God was telling me the same thing.  The only difference between me and Nick was in the walls we had built. His wall was the Pharisees’ religious legalism that rejected Christ, mine was a theory of Naturalism that rejected God altogether, but especially as a law-giver. Neither of us was experiencing joy in the presence of God and his creation. A few years after I got the Ph. D, God demolished the wall I had erected between him and me. Once again I was experiencing joy in the presence of my Creator and his creation. Jesus is now the joy of my life!