My Testimony

Revised June 1, 2001

Starting out Adventist

A lot of things in the earlier parts of my life are vague, but I remember general trends and occasional incidents still stick out in my mind. While some of those incidents may seem trivial to the reader, they were very important to me at the time because they stick out like sore thumbs in my memory.

I grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) home. I'm a sixth generation Adventist. My Great-great-great grandfather Roswell Oatman who was born in 1820 became the first Adventist in my line. My dad was born into it and my mother was a convert. My mom and dad met at Andrews University (a SDA university) and were married shortly thereafter. My mom didn't finish school and dedicated her time to mothering and housework. While I understand why my dad was a SDA – it's very difficult to break out of the mold that upbringing puts you in – I can only speculate on why my mom became part of the church.

When you think about it, you realize that conversion to Adventism involves a fair amount of smooth talking, flashy videos, slide shows, a dazzling array of dates and oodles of Bible texts. For the new convert it can be dazzling and overwhelming at first. Volumes of information are shoved at you nonstop with nary a moment to digest it. Like a high-pressure sales pitch, after being razzled and dazzled you are pressured into making a decision for Adventism. Though I saw these types of things happen, none of them happened to me. I had been born into Adventism and none of this stuff was new to me so I was not razzled and dazzled. But of course I was safe from slipping away from the church because I was young and knew nothing but Adventism. It had not even occurred to me to question any of the teachings of the church – in fact such thinking was strongly discouraged.

I was sent through the entire Adventist systems of schools. Though I did spend one year in a public kindergarten, I spent first grade through my senior year in college in Adventist schools. I started out in a relatively large four-room school in Lansing Michigan where I really wasn't all that happy. Even in Adventist schools there are bullies – and I was a prime bully target. I went from there in my fifth grade down to the two-room Charlotte SDA school in my sixth.

It was at my one trip to nine-year-old camp at Camp Au Sable when I was eleven that moved me closer to Adventism. I had won the trip by having the most points in our local pathfinder club – I guess I must have been a pretty good kid. At the end of a fun week of camp there was a final meeting in which an emotional appeal was made and large numbers of kids went forward to accept Jesus. Somehow that speaker had managed to tug on my heart string and when I saw all the other kids going up it was easy to stand and move forward. I soon thereafter asked my parents if I could be baptized. They were of course happy but wanted to make sure I was ready. A revelation seminar was going to be held at our church in the near future and I was enrolled in the study. Shortly after the end of the seminar I was baptized into the church. Hmm, funny thing I wasn't baptized into Jesus Christ.

Being raised SDA had its good points. My parents strongly and sincerely believed in not just SDA doctrines but the entire Bible. I grew up with Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories and Maxwell's Bible Stories – the standard collection of books for most SDA families. And while I have since found minor inaccuracies in some of those stories, my knowledge of those stories is quite respectable thanks to those books.

The sense of community is tremendous. An Adventist can go anywhere in the world to another Adventist group and find someone who knows someone he knows. Staying overnight in stranger's house feels comfortable if they are Adventist. It is a tightly knit community in which people have common interests and can identify with each other. Being a conference worker's kid I can to this day attend a large percentage of the churches in Michigan, mention my dad's name and have someone know who I am.

For the most part we had a happy home – sheltered though it was. But the seeds of superiority had been planted. When I was just a young grade-schooler I used to spend a lot of time with my next-door neighbor. Krista was a girl about my age who belonged to a Christian, but as we termed it, Sunday-keeping church. Naturally, being aware of just how wrong going to church on Sunday is it was inevitable that I would confront her about it at some point in time. I remember dragging a Bible and a dictionary out to our favorite climbing maple prepared to do battle. I showed her the fourth commandment regarding the seventh day and then proceeded to prove – using the dictionary – that the seventh day was Saturday. Much to my disappointment she was not moved by so plain an argument and proceeded to inform me that she went to church on Sunday to honor Christ's resurrection – as if it was OK!

My parents would often speak of various people as slipping away from the church. My aunt and uncle were Adventists but a little on the shaky side. I remember often hearing about how terrible they were at keeping the Sabbath. Sometimes they didn't even go to church. Apparently they were beginning to slip away. My other uncle would skip out on church on occasion as well and even go to a Sunday church on occasion! I remember hearing about how wrong some Adventists were by playing football or baseball on the Sabbath. My Adventist grandfather was definitely on the road to destruction because he ate meat and occasionally even – GASP- pork. Talk like this from your parents leads you to believe that you are better than everyone else is. Everyone else is falling away while we continue to stand fast.

As time went on I learned that the Adventist church was indeed the one true church that had come down through all the centuries since Jesus' time. Surviving the persecution of the early Christians, and later on the persecution of other groups like the Waldenses the true church had now established itself under the name Seventh-day Adventist. We had THE truth and most everyone else was incorrect. Oh, there were groups like the Seventh-day Baptists or the Seventh-day Church of God who had gotten part of it right but nobody else had the entire Adventist package. In fact, we were the remnant church of the end time and everyone who was alive at the end of time would only be saved if they were Adventists. Being the one true church with THE truth, it was of course out of the question to question any of the truths. Such a belief evokes a strong sense of security but at the same time engenders a strong superiority complex.

Though I can't place a finger on when it happened – perhaps it was gradual – I grew into thinking that if something had not come from or been filtered through an Adventist source then it was likely to be incorrect, inaccurate, or just plain evil. As far as I can tell, this was and is a very common attitude for Adventists – particularly lifers like me. I vaguely recall several times when someone would mention that he or she had read something – something that differed slightly from the accepted view – from such and such a book. The immediate response to such a statement was the question, "is that an Adventist book?" The original speaker would sheepishly reply "no," and it was assumed by all that since the book was non-Adventist it must be wrong.

FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)

I think that perhaps it was the "cant's" that formed the first seeds of discontent in me. I once read a proverb in a fortune cookie that said, "Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation." I think that perhaps it was this discontent that eventually led me to where I am today. You see, Adventists are very big on "cant's." You can't eat meat. You can't play baseball on Sabbath. You can't go to movies. You can't wear jewelry. You can't drink. You can't smoke. You can't play cards. You can't eat mustard or pepper. You can't buy lottery tickets. You get the picture.

My favorite board game in late grade school (it still is) was chess. I taught many of the kids at school how to play it and we would play it anytime we had a free moment. Though of course none of us were very skilled at it at that age we did learn a lot. Apparently our love of chess became problematic after while because our teacher began to get a bit concerned. And though he had mentioned it earlier on, now was the time he began strongly thinking about Ellen White's words regarding the game of chess (and checkers and backgammon). Ellen eventually won out and chess became a restricted game. And though at times I thought I was severely restricted, I realized that I had it good because some of my friends' parents would not even let them ride their bicycles on the Sabbath and I could.

It was near this time that my teacher also began expressing concern about the reading material I brought to school. My rather eccentric uncle was obsessive with his books and that was what my sisters and I always got for Christmas from him – books. Though he was a professed Adventist (actually he had dragged my mother into it) he was fringy at best. He started me out with The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis and I progressed from there. In fact, those Chronicles are probably what made me into the avid reader I am today. Having had a small taste of fantasy and fiction I moved on to other books of the genre. I read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. While these were marginally acceptable, the books I moved on to after that in the realms of science fiction and fantasy were beginning to be seriously questionable – and rightly so, they encouraged thought and imagination. It was at this point that the hand of Ellen White fell upon me once again. As you will see through the rest of my testimony my reading material had a profound influence on the road I have traveled. While these books did indeed encourage thought and imagination, they also introduced me to humanistic and new age thinking. Perhaps my teacher was right in being concerned about my reading, but I don't recall being given reasons other than "Ellen White said?" Sitting down and looking at the material and pointing out the problems with it (i.e. critically analyzing it) would be much more beneficial. It's the discouraging of freethinking that disturbs me most here.

This same eccentric uncle of mine was something of a rebel and even went to see movies on occasion (gasp!) When E.T. first came out in the theaters he wanted to take me to see it. I begged my mother to let me go but she stood fast and refused. I balled my eyes out I was so upset. The funny thing to me was that my mother wouldn't let me go see this movie but at the same time she let me read all sorts of fiction without even knowing what it was about. This was strangely inconsistent. Do you know how after learning a new word or concept all of a sudden you hear it everywhere when before you hadn't even noticed it existed? So it is when you notice your first inconsistency.

Regardless of my discontent, questioning any of the teachings of the church had not yet occurred to me. In fact I knew that I needed to have a relationship with Jesus in order to be saved. I think procrastination must be a common problem with all young Adventists (and probably all young Christians) because those who taught us liked to hammer on the issue. Usually they liked to use scare tactics to push us toward Christ. Things like, if you were to get killed in a car accident tomorrow and didn't have a relationship with Christ you would be eternally lost. But usually that sort of thing doesn't happen and young people don't really take that kind of thought very seriously. More often the threats went along the lines of, if you plan to procrastinate for a while and figure you will eventually turn around in your twenties or so, by the time you actually reach your twenties you won't even be interested in spiritual things anymore and you will be lost. While these thoughts may have some elements of truth in them, they are nevertheless scare tactics and in my opinion not the right approach to take with young kids. Obviously they did not work with me because I was and still am a procrastinator in all things.

Being able to threaten youngsters with being lost if they did not do such and such does of course have prerequisites. The young person must understand the process of salvation and damnation or being lost or saved has no meaning. To me this had been fairly clearly laid out. I understood that in order to be saved I needed to have a relationship with Jesus Christ. It was also clear to me that such a relationship involved a number of different things – prayer, keeping the Sabbath, belonging to the SDA church, searching your soul for all your sins and asking forgiveness, paying tithe, etc. Oh nobody actually believed that you had to be an Adventist to be saved, but if you had once been an Adventist and then fell away from the church, or having once known the truth you turned from it, you would be lost. I had always been an Adventist and therefore if I didn't stay an Adventist I would be lost. On occasion I wondered why an Adventist would want to convert a non-Adventist if they could be saved without it. Introducing Adventism to someone seemed like a mean thing to do since if they did not accept it after it was presented they would be lost even if they had been saved beforehand. But I just assumed that my understanding was incomplete and continued to trust.

Adventists believe in a thing called probation. Probation is one of the scariest things in the world to a young Adventist. We were all told that Jesus was coming in our lifetime and that probation would close before he came therefore it was obvious that we would have to live through probation. The scary thing was that in order to be saved one had to have searched out all one's sins and asked forgiveness of them – and then quit sinning – before the time of probation closed! According to Ellen White:

Those who are living upon the earth when the intercession of Christ shall cease in the sanctuary above are to stand in the sight of a holy God without a mediator. Their robes must be spotless, their characters must be purified from sin by the blood of sprinkling. Through the grace of God and their own diligent efforts, they must be conquerors in the battle with evil. While the investigative judgment is going forward in heaven, while the sins of penitent believers are being removed from the sanctuary, there is to be a special work of purification, of putting away sin, among God's people on earth. – Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 17, 1907, paragraph 4

In essence you had to be perfect right before probation closed or you were forever lost. Unfortunately nobody would even know probation had closed when it happened. It could have already closed for all we knew and even if you died before Jesus came, probation for you was essentially closed. I remember hearing Your Story Hour stories about the end times with people agonizing over each sin and deathly afraid they had not rooted them all out. I remember reading the book The Appearing and being afraid I would not be good enough when the time came.

While these scare tactics sometimes have little or no affect on children, they can sometimes profoundly disturb a child. My friend Daniel who was a year or two younger than I was one of those. Dan was extremely concerned about his salvation and on occasion would wake up in the middle of the night crying because he was afraid that he wasn't ready for Jesus to come. When my mom told me this I was stunned. In fact I was so stunned that I was infected with the same bug though to a lesser degree. I began to worry about whether or not I was ready for Jesus to come. I was often afraid that no matter how hard I searched my soul I might miss a sin and then I would be eternally lost. But after while you get tired of worrying and end up just pushing it to the back of your mind. Adventist parents often wonder why their children don't look forward to Jesus' coming. It seems obvious to me that it is because they are scared to death of it.

I took all these things to be important but I felt like something was missing. Inherent in the word relationship was more than just belonging to a particular group and following a bunch of rules. It included knowing a person and regardless of how much I prayed I didn't feel like I knew the person on the other end of the line. In fact sometimes I wasn't even sure there was anyone there. I do remember one time I was lying in bed greatly disturbed and tried something I had not tried before. I prayed to Jesus and asked him to give me peace. It was amazing. A wave of peace just fell over me and I wasn't worried anymore. Unfortunately it didn't work the second time. Why? I don't know but I had at least had a taste of the peace of Jesus Christ.

Late in grade school the pastor who had baptized me got involved in some suspicious activities. My dad got a call from one of the church elders one Sunday and had to go away for the day. He came back late that day and wouldn't tell us kids where he had been. I later learned that the elder had arranged to hang out in the house just across from the pastor's house so they could spy on him. Of course on that day they saw nothing and pretty much just wasted a Sunday. But later on the truth came out and we found out that he had had a questionable relationship with a lady he had been giving Bible studies. I believe he eventually was divorced and ended up living with or married to this lady. Naturally he lost his ministerial credentials and consequently his livelihood. A friend of mine at school thought the world of this preacher and told me he thought he was probably perfect. My dad had sworn me to secrecy so I couldn't say anything, but I assured my friend that he was not perfect.

In seventh and eighth grade I was the only kid and therefore the oldest and biggest kid in school. Having size and strength on my side I ended up being something of a bully. One day I actually ended up punching a little kid because he was annoying me. The teacher really didn't know what to do with me other than to take away all my 'tokens'. I guess my parents didn't know what to do with me either because they arranged to have me spend some time with the pastor. They dropped me off at his house and I had to spend some time talking with him. I guess these techniques were at least somewhat effective if only for the shock factor.

When I was in ninth grade my dad got a call from the New York Conference of SDA. He was currently the assistant treasurer at the Michigan Conference of SDA and began to seriously consider taking this call to New York. I was having a great year at Grand Ledge Academy and was very unhappy when my dad decided to accept the call. On top of that when I found out that the recently elected Michigan conference president had strongly encouraged my dad to move and had even gotten a bit pushy about it I was even more incensed. Regardless of whether or not this church was the Lord's chosen church it was obviously run by men who had their own agendas. I convinced my parents that I really wanted to stay for the rest of the year and actually got one of my teachers to house me for the rest of the year. But I still was not happy to have to move out to New York at the year's end.

The months away from my family were for the most part good months. I had a few unsavory incidents including physical altercations during those months, but on the whole they were good. The most significant part of this time period was the fact that I discovered a new and secret sin that would plague me for years to come. The first time I did it I was scared to death, but as time went on I enjoyed it more and more and it became an integral part of my life – driving a wedge between God and me.

Off and on I would ask God's help in defeating this secret sin and I would have periods when I thought I had defeated it, but it would always come back. And when it came back and I realized how much I enjoyed it I would ignore God. When you think of something as a sin and you want to keep doing it you can't really look God in the eye without thinking about the sin and feeling the guilt. But I knew other guys my age had secret sins as well. I corresponded with a friend who laid his heart bare to me and hoped I would forgive him. He was stunned to find out I had a secret sin too. We both admitted that we could try our hardest to resist but we still just kept going back to it. We both agreed that we needed to ask the Lord's help to resist temptation. Unfortunately our correspondence dwindled and we eventually lost contact.

For the first two years of school at Union Springs Academy I was fairly bitter about the whole situation and place. I had been yanked away from all my friends and put in a strange place with a bunch of people I wasn't interested in meeting. And on top of that I had to wear a tie to church – it was a school rule. Lucky for me I did not live in the dorm and realized that I was quite a bit freer than the other students who did. I was quite proud of the fact that I was free and liked to flaunt it. I would go to church without a tie on and one of the teachers there who was particularly anal retentive about those sorts of things would confront me and chew me out. I would stand there and argue with her about how it was silly and no different than making girls wear jewelry. Obviously she did not see it that way. My parents ended up telling me I had to wear a tie. To this day I think such things are silly (though for my wife's sake I do wear them on occasion).

If the "cant's" had bothered me before, they had not come near the "cant's" that would inundate me at an Adventist boarding school. Being a "townie" I felt like an outsider looking in through a window. The "townies" were not often included in many of the activities because they happened after school during "rec" time. Actually I can say I was glad to be looking in from outside because I saw more "cant's" than I cared to think about. No radios or tape players, no holding hands, no crossing to the girl's side of campus, no card playing, getting put on social, etc. I ended up hanging out with some of the other "townies" who some considered to be distasteful. These guys went to lots of movies, rented lots of movies, read lots of sci-fi and fantasy and played games like D&D (Dungeons and Dragons). Having been somewhat sheltered most of this stuff was fairly new to me. I had never seen any Arnold Schwartzeneger, Sylvester Stalone, or other violent movies and I grew to like them pretty well. I began to read even more questionable sci-fi and fantasy books and really began to enjoy playing D&D. Once I got my drivers license and my parents gave me permission to use the car my friends and I had even easier access to the theater and the video and book stores. It was the hard-core science fiction that began immersing me in the theory of evolution. It was the fantasy that piqued my interest in the occult. And though at this time I never participated in any esoteric occult practices, the seed had been planted.

During our stay in Union Springs my sister became a good friend of the elementary school teacher and did some work for him. Mr. Dana was a very religious person and had somehow gotten entangled with the infamous John Osbourne. Osbourne ran an independent SDA ministry that many would call right wing. As far as I can tell today, Adventism has never really solved the issue of whether we are saved by grace or by works regardless of the official position. Within Adventism exists the entire spectrum from Calvinism to Arminianism. No Adventist likes to admit that differences of opinion on such critical topics exist in the Adventist church and often they will simply deny that such a thing can happen. This is the one true church, we have the truth, and therefore we must obviously all agree on it. Putting one's faith in the belief that Adventism has "the truth" rather than admitting the obvious existence of the conflict leads one either to deny that the conflict exists or to declare that whichever side one is on is the only correct one and the other side isn't truly Adventist.

This right wing independent was preaching that Christ's nature was completely human. The implications of this are tremendous. It means that Jesus, being completely human and not divine, defeated sin completely even though he had a fallen human nature. Consequently, in order for us to be saved we have to do the same. The orthodox Christian position on this is that Jesus was human and yet divine at the same time with an unfallen human nature. This is indeed good news because it means that we are not expected to become perfect.

My parents dragged the local pastor into the situation and tried to push my sister back toward what they thought was the "true" form of Adventism. These right wing teachings push one even farther toward the superiority complex syndrome. If one believes one is on the road to perfection and nobody else is then one begins to have a pretty high opinion of oneself. Fortunately my sister gave up this apostasy and came back to the fold.

In my senior year at Union Springs I started becoming interested in a girl by the name of Shari. She had been there since I had come in my sophomore year but we had not really associated together much. We were both near the top of the intelligence scale in our senior class and ended up enrolling in many of the optional math and science classes in which the number of attendees was relatively small. During these classes we got to know each other a lot better. While she insisted that we were never more than friends, I made sure that I ended up going to the same college she did – Andrews University. But by this time religion meant little more to me than a class down at the end of the hall. It's funny I didn't consider a secular university, but all I knew was Adventism and it didn't even cross my mind to look elsewhere.

Purgatory

Andrews University was a place where I would make some serious changes in direction in my life. I didn't know very many people there so I had to make a lot of new friends. It was there that I met several people who would have a tremendous impact on my life, and perhaps I theirs.

Scott was a red haired fellow like myself and we immediately hit it off well. He was majoring in physics and I in computer technology so we had a lot of math classes together. One day in the cafeteria we ended up talking about God and religion. He mentioned some questions he had had about God which I promptly admitted to having had as well. I don't remember know what the questions were, but true to my Adventist upbringing I told him that I didn't think those were the sort of thoughts I should be having so I usually repressed them. He said he knew that he shouldn't have them but he let himself ask the questions anyway. While this initially shocked me, it also opened up the door to free thought a crack wider than it had been before. It made me wonder why I shouldn't ask questions.

In my sophomore year I ended up rooming with a chap by the name of Hero. I had intended to room with the same fellow as the last year but at the last minute he ended up going to a different school. The year before I had asked Scott if he wanted to join us in the same suite and he had thought it was a good idea. We also asked a fellow by the name of Frank to join us in the suite. Hero was majoring in religion and Frank in computer information systems. That year Scott switched to Economics and I switched to computer science and mathematics.

While I was familiar with evolution from sketchy information given in some of my academy science classes, I was much more familiar than that because of my fascination with science fiction. In my junior year taking physics for scientists and engineers I learned a lot more about it including related tools like carbon-14 dating and such. Throughout my earlier years the theory of evolution had been nothing by maligned but all the adults I knew. It was strange then that many of the scientists who were my professors – Adventists no less – believed in varying degrees that evolution actually did occur. This attitude was new to me but my mind had already begun opening and I began to consider the possibility that they were right. I had always been good at mathematics and science, but the college level courses in calculus, algebra, physics, and programming helped to hone my logical and critical thinking skills immensely. Developing discontent, recognizing inconsistencies, and being introduced to free thought opened the door for me to apply my advancing analysis skills to my religion.

All four of us would get involved in fairly deep discussion about the nature of religion, reality, God, and politics. It was an interesting mishmash of thought. We had two computer guys, a physicist turned economist, and a guy on the road to the seminary. Oddly enough, more often than not we agreed on things even though we didn't fully realize it till the end of the discussion. Problems of definition and semantics were almost always at the root of our disagreements. Amazingly enough, between playing chess, discussing these issues, and getting in our worship credits we actually managed to get most of our homework and studying done. Well actually, I managed to do just enough work to obtain my goal of a 3.5 grade-point average.

Late In my freshman year I finally succeeded in conning Shari into dating me. It had been a long hard battle, but I finally won and she realized that I was the one for her. We spent our sophomore year together and Shari decided that she wanted to be a student missionary. We had gone on a Maranatha trip to the Dominican Republic in our senior year at Union Springs and had both agreed that it would be nice to do a stint as a student missionary. But once I realized that I would not likely end up in the same place as Shari I lost interest in being a student missionary. Shari continued to pursue it and landed herself a position on the island of Yap. We both agreed that we should break up for the year she was gone because it would be too hard to maintain our relationship over such a long distance.

My physics for scientists and engineers class was in my junior year and kept me a bit busier than I had been in previous years. In addition I had some more advanced mathematics and computing classes that kept me pretty busy. But without Shari around I had more free time with the guys and more discussions and thought and chess occurred. I met a girl near the beginning of that year and actually went on a double date with her, her friend, and Scott. We went out for donuts and bowling. It was a fun date, but oddly enough issues of religion and science came up early on in my conversation with her. I discovered that she was a very religious person and pretty close-minded about the topics of interest to me like evolution and I ended up deciding that I didn't want to invest a lot of time in that sort of relationship. That was my last date of the year.

Shari told me before she got back from Yap that she had decided that we should not get back together. I wasn't sure if I was happy or not but when I saw her again I knew I wanted to get back together. Over the summer we saw each other several times and at other people's weddings and ended up getting back together. It was at Frank's wedding that we ended up back together. I took her shoe hostage and actually ended up driving twenty miles or so before she actually stopped me and told me she really needed her shoe. That Christmas I asked Shari to marry me, though of course it was all according to her plan.

One of my strongest areas of interest as a computer scientist was artificial intelligence (AI). There are schools of thought that believe that human beings are simply very sophisticated machines and that when computer technology has advanced enough we will be able to design and build machines that are as smart as us. On the other hand there are schools that believe that such is not possible and we will only be able to build machines that duplicate small subsets of intelligent behavior. I began tending toward the view that we are just machines.

Interestingly enough this entire concept seems blasphemous to many Christians. A number of people, including my parents and Shari, were astounded that I took such a position. I questioned them as to why they believed it was not possible and try as they might they could find no Biblical reason. The reason most often proposed to me was that only God can create life. Unfortunately nobody was able to find any scripture that backed up this statement. Not to mention that at this point in time I was not even sure I believed in the Bible. But the simple fact that these people asserted something so dogmatically which they had absolutely no proof for disturbed me greatly. My experiences with the spiritual world would eventually change my views on this, but I was beginning to realize more deeply that most of these religious people didn't really have a clue.

I was also interested in paradoxes about God. Questions like, "can God make a rock so big he can't move it?" Or, "Can God make a square circle?" I asked my dad the second question once and he dogmatically answered yes. After all God can do anything can't he? I got the impression from someone that God could indeed make a rock so big he couldn't move it, but then he could move it after all, never mind that that violates the spirit of the question. I began realizing that these people believed what they believed so blindly that it did not involve any thought whatsoever. And many of the things they believed were not even founded on basic sources of evidence like the Bible. I lost trust in the thought processes of religious people and figured that if I wanted the truth I would have to go elsewhere.

It was in my senior year that I pushed off from shore. My friends and I had all been moving in the direction of quasi-agnosticism. For those who don't know, agnosticism is the belief that the human mind cannot know whether or not there is a God and is restricted to simply being able to know and observe material phenomena. I say that we were moving toward quasi-agnosticism because we did not necessarily believe that the human mind cannot know. We simply began to admit the fact that we ourselves did not know.

Inevitably these issues arose between Shari and I. Shari was very concerned about where I was headed and began to be less sure about our future life together. She asked me how I could not believe in a God and told me that it seemed like life would be pretty dismal without the hope of a God and that I must be living in deep despair. It was at this point that I realized that I was floating free in space with nothing to hang onto and indeed she was right – such a realization brings a great deal of despair – or even panic.

I agonized over this problem for long periods of time but could find no resolution to it. The foundation I had grown up living upon had crumbled underneath me and I had nowhere to stand. I did not feel familiar enough with the humanistic/scientific platform I was moving toward to know if it was a solid foundation. As far as I could see there was nowhere to land. Agnosticism in the sense I took it is a pretty dismal place to be and not a good place to spend the rest of your life.

I wonder how many Adventist and Christian men act the part for the sake of their marriage. I was pretty torn, but somehow I convinced myself that I believed in Christianity and Adventism because I was afraid that Shari would dump me if I did not. I don't think she was convinced that I was convinced and she was probably right. But having come from a family with a father who was not Adventist she fell into the same trap her mother had. She married me even though everything Adventist screamed not to. I pushed all my questions to the back of my mind and tried to ignore them.

After I graduated I found a job in Berrien Springs working for the dean of the school of Arts and Sciences in his small personally owned company. I had turned down an offer from a firm in Ann Arbor because it was closer to Berrien Springs where Shari would be working on her Master's degree and making up for the extra year she had spent in Yap. On the job there was a lady who was very health-minded and got me interested in health as well. The half year Shari was off doing her student teaching I tried out the lifestyle promoted by Adventism. I ate piles of whole grains, vegetables, fruit, and I cut dairy products. I had always been primarily vegetarian so I didn't really change anything by cutting out the meat. I also did a lot of exercise. I rode my bike about 20 miles every night at breakneck speeds and actually got into pretty good shape. In fact I did feel a lot healthier than I had before and came to the conclusion that the SDA health plan was in fact a good one. I did have a question or two though. My friend had said that the foods in the garden of Eden had been designed so that those that were largest were the ones we should eat most of and those that were smallest and hardest to get to like nuts were the ones we should eat the least of. The funny thing was that all these vegetarian diets had you eating piles of grains which are both very small and very difficult to harvest without sophisticated machinery. This was a very obvious inconsistency in the entire scheme. On top of that I wasn't sure I believed in creation and the evolutionary model seemed to indicate that early man did eat grains, but in small amounts. When applied consistently both models seemed to indicate that grains should be eaten in small amounts. But all the nutrition information I had read, whether from creationist or evolutionist seemed to emphasize the importance of eating large quantities of grains so I figured I must have missed something somewhere.

When Shari came back I gradually fell away from my extreme dietary regime. After Shari graduated she took a job in Terre Haute Indiana. I continued working for my current employer from a distance and took monthly trips back up to Berrien Springs. It was here that I began getting interested in thought and questions again. There was a Sabbath School class that was fairly open and thought provoking. Though it was relatively kosher it did once again pique my interest.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

During our year in Terre Haute I picked up a book that my uncle had given me years before entitled Ageless Body, Timeless Mind by Deepak Chopra. For those who are not familiar with that name, he is one of the most popular writers of new age/health books in the market today. In this book I was introduced to the concepts of the eastern cultures, primarily Chinese and Indian. The book strongly promoted transcendental meditation, which I became interested in. Having been introduced to magic and mysticism through the reading of fantasy I did not have far to go to become very interested in where meditation could take me. I looked up a lot of information on the Internet about transcendental meditation and discovered that it was a fairly large organization designed partially to teach meditation, but primarily to make money. It reminded me a lot of the SDA church and therefore I lost interest in that particular form of meditation. But that did not put me off the track, the transcendentalists certainly do not have a monopoly on the market. Going by what was in the book, various sites on the Internet, and Shirley MacLaine's 1987 movie, "Out on a Limb," which was the story about her spiritual awakening in which she had an out-of-body experience (OOBE), I began experimenting with meditation.

The first step in learning meditation is learning to relax. I began with simple relaxation techniques that I had already been familiarized with in my physical education classes at Andrews. One of these methods basically consists of mentally relaxing each part of one's body in sequence from toes to head. An alternate method is tightening all the muscles in your body at once and then relaxing. This helps to teach the mind the difference between tension and relaxation and either of these methods works pretty well. With a little practice one can learn to go from normal tension to extreme relaxation in a matter of minutes or even seconds.

Once your body is relaxed it is much easier to focus your mind. The difference between meditation and self-hypnosis is that hypnosis is the process of opening one's mind to be receptive to suggestion while meditation is the process of focusing one's mind intently on one thing to the exclusion of all else. I began by focusing at spots on the ceiling and essentially trying to become "one" with the spot. As you continue to focus on a single thing you need to try to ignore extraneous thoughts. One suggestion was to imagine a river flowing by and each extraneous thought that came would continue flowing on by. With practice you come to have fewer and fewer extraneous thoughts and come to focus more and more intently on a single thing.

While all this is going on everything but the item you are focusing on starts to become fuzzy and eventually you cannot even see it anymore. All but the focal point becomes swirling patterns of pretty much nothing and you loose track of where your arms and legs are and you begin to have feelings similar to what some might call vertigo. At some point here you begin to notice an increasingly rapid powerful beating and warmth in your chest and an odd tingling sensation through your entire body that slowly crescendos to an amazing peak which for me was only sustainable for a few seconds after which I lost it. Through all these sensations it is very difficult to keep focused. Not having felt these sensations before, you become very apprehensive or more accurately frightened by what is happening. Often times you can reach one of the points along the way and become so distracted that you pop out of your meditation. I'm not sure how far I could've gone if I had defeated the distractions but I eventually lost interest.

The year in Terre Haute was also the year I became interested in acupressure and acupuncture. Chopra's book had discussed acupuncture on a superficial level but had piqued my interest. I began looking for materials on the subject on the internet and found a few sites that provided a simple starting place. I ended up buying a book or two on the subject and started learning how it worked. This was the beginning of my growing interest in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Our year in Terre Haute Shari decided to get one the scales one day and got extremely upset at her weight. I got on as well and discovered that I had broken my previous record. So I figured I'd put us on a diet. I got out my old physical education book from college and looked up a system of calorie counting and low-fat eating. We figured out how many calories we should eat per day to lose weight and tried to eliminate as much fat as possible from our diet. Oddly enough nothing happened for Shari. I lost a little weight, but not what I had been hoping for. We cut out more and more fat and still nothing happened. We added exercise and still nothing happened. One day while talking to a lady from the local church, she mentioned a diet that had worked for her called The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet. Shari picked up a book about it and I picked up one on another diet called The Zone.

Both of these diets advocate reducing the amount of carbohydrates one eats rather than reducing the fat. Both also advocate reducing the amount of grains one eats. The carbohydrate addict's diet reduced the grains simply because the main macro-nutrient in grains is carbohydrates. The Zone diet actually classified carbohydrates into bad and good categories. Foods with high glycemic indexes were classed as "bad" carbohydrates and foods with low indexes were good. So potatoes, all grains, and a few fruits (bananas) were classed as bad and most vegetables, fruits and a few beans were classed as good carbohydrates. What struck me as funny was that these two diets had answered the questions I had had earlier about the large grain intake of vegetarian diets.

We tried out these diets and low and behold we started dropping pounds like birds doing target practice. Eventually Shari's weight loss slowed to a crawl and she bought a book on the Atkins diet which was a more extreme version of what she was already doing. This provided fairly consistent results for her. Needless to say we greatly increased our intake of meat. Later on I discovered a book called Neanderthin. This was a diet that was very similar to the diet I had thought would be as close to the original diet as possible regardless of whether you were creationist or evolutionist. It advocates large amounts of meat, vegetables, fruit, and nuts and no starches, legumes or dairy products. In my mind the discovery of the effectiveness of these diets punched a big hole in one of the key teachings of the Seventh-day Adventist church and its prophetess and at the same time punched a hole in the reigning dietary dogma presented by those who called themselves scientists.

Later that year we moved to Adrian, Michigan. Shari had absolutely despised her job in Terre Haute and I had been unable to find work other than my work for the company back in Berrien Springs. Shari accepted a teaching position at the Benedict Memorial School and I found a job in Ann Arbor at Mathematical Reviews.

The first year or so in Tecumseh was pretty much uneventful and we found we liked the people of Adrian. A two-church constituency ran the school and Shari was given the option of choosing which of the churches to attend on a regular basis. After visiting both several times we chose Adrian because of the friendly family atmosphere. We eventually learned that our decision had been something of a coup d'état for Adrian in the battle between the churches.

At first I was not too eager to get involved in church, but I found my niche running the sound system that nobody else seemed to know how to operate. I was satisfied with that since it allowed me to look involved without actually requiring me to talk to anyone about religion or be involved in decision making. It was in 1997 that things began to change.

One day on my way to work I had a very strange experience. Out of the blue my heart started thumping and accelerating and I started having a warm sensation in my chest. Of course I thought I was having a heart attack and pulled off to the side of the road. Fortunately when it reached its peak it dropped back down to normal and all was well. Now of course this entire episode was strangely reminiscent of my previous experiences with meditation, but before it had been in a controlled situation. This just happened out of the blue and was completely out of control, which disturbed me greatly. I had two more of them on the way to work and ended up going to the emergency room for fear I really was having heart problems. They did an EKG and told me there was nothing wrong. The next day I did some research and discovered that my symptoms closely matched what is known as panic disorder.

Being a member of an HMO, I had to make a follow-up visit to my primary care provider. He talked to me a little bit and confirmed that it sounded a little bit like panic disorder. He also said that some people have panic attacks once and then never again while some have them on a regular basis. He claimed that they were harmless but that if they got worse he could prescribe some drugs for it. He said they were caused by a minor chemical imbalance. I felt like I came close to having other attacks a few times but I gained some sort of control over them and was able to prevent them from coming on. But I'm not convinced they had a physical cause.

I had been in contact with Frank Dauns off and on through email since our college days and in one barrage of emails he mentioned that he now believed in Jesus Christ and essentially the fundamentals of Christianity. I was surprised at his sincerity and confidence, but Frank had waffled back and forth on religion before so I wasn't surprised that he had gone back to Christianity.

For a long time Sabbath School classes and the like had only frustrated me. I heard people talking and spewing forth cliché arguments and statements about issues that just didn't really make a whole lot of sense. I wanted to point out all the flaws not only in the stuff people were saying, but in the religion as a whole. But I actually liked these people and liked spending time with them. In order for me to get involved in these discussions I actually had to become interested in the topic. I think that perhaps this was one of the pieces that in some small way caused my wheels to start turning once again.

It was around this time that I once again realized that I really didn't know what I believed and I finally resolved myself to do something about it. I figured that the only way to really find out if this spirituality thing was real was to experiment with it. I started reading everything I could find about spiritual stuff including such things as shamanism, druidism, hinduism, Yoga, Qi Gong, Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, and others. At this point I was beginning to feel a sense of impending doom hanging over the world. I felt a pressing need to work out what I believed as quickly as possible. I started a journal about my experiences and wrote the following:

I have struggled much with all things metaphysical and have at times have considered myself agnostic, and still do to some degree. First I lost faith in Christianity, and my faith in science is waning. It is this lack of belief in ANYTHING that drives me to experiment with spirituality and hopefully find answers to some of my questions. I have decided that in order for me to believe in anything spiritual or religious I must have an experience.

I have been reading materials about various religions such as hinduism, druidism, wicca, christianity, shamanism, etc. It seems that there are common threads throughout all these regarding the spiritual world. They all talk about the spiritual world and travel in it or communication with those in it. It seems these religions are all talking about the same spiritual world, but may focus on one or more deities (or spirits claiming to be deities) in the spiritual world. Some do not even focus on a deity (ie. Budhism). There are various disciplines sometimes associated with a religion that provide methodologies for accessing the spiritual world. Examples are Yoga, Martial Arts, shamanism, etc.

The huge number of religions that follow this common thread lead me to believe that there really is something to the spiritual world, though much religious dogma is simply extra baggage. No doubt there is valuble information to be gleaned from various religious teachings, but sorting it all out is quite a task.

I read a lot of material about Out of Body experiences (OOBE) and discovered that the sensations I had previously encountered in my meditation sounded very similar to those described by people who had OOBEs. Following this path lead me to delve into some fairly esoteric material. I read about shamanic dream-walking, Yoga, and various other practices. Yoga describes the spiritual anatomy of the human body in perhaps the most straightforward way. Chinese Qi Gong and the Jewish Kabbalah also delve into this topic, but I am not as familiar with these probably because they are perhaps even more obscure than Yoga.

Yoga describes seven chakras or major energy centers in the body. They are located starting at the base of the spine and working up to the crown of the head. There is one at the very base of the spine, near the navel, sternum, heart, throat, between and just above the eyes (called the third eye), and on the crown of the head. I read material on how these chakras work and how to open the chakras to receive energy. I began regularly practicing raising energy up from the ground into my base chakra and gradually up through the rest of the chakras. I believe that I was able to open most of my chakras at least a little bit and actually felt energy flowing through my body. This stuff is not a joke – it is real.

In the beginning I had read about some techniques for spiritual protection. One important thing to do after activating your chakras was to close them all if you weren't going to actively use them. An open chakra was an open invitation for other spiritual entities to attach to it and drain energy. Another technique involved visualizing some sort of bubble around your body and a white light filling the bubble. Often they included sending a tendril of energy down from the base of the spine to the center of the earth to ground oneself spiritually. I regularly practiced this before performing any of the other activities I was engaging in. Better safe than sorry. Many of these techniques involved a lot of visualization. After practicing visualization a lot it becomes easier and much more realistic seeming.

One of the visualizations I used a lot was to imagine that I had a second set of spiritual arms that I could move separately from my physical arms. With practice these came to feel very real to me. I even tried to use them to perform such feats as telekinesis, which I was of course unsuccessful at. I began practicing some techniques for actually leaving your body. I used one technique called ROPE. In it you visualized, or rather imagined that you felt a rope in your hands. The idea was that it was much easier to imagine tactile sensations than to visualize something. One then concentrates on pulling one's self upward hand over hand with one's spiritual arms. This requires some fairly deep concentration to get it right. The first time I tried was simply amazing. The heart thumping, tingling, and vertigo came on suddenly after about three minutes of concentration and I felt like I was going to pop out of my body. That's the only way I can describe it. Not expecting it to have worked so well I was quite startled and in fact quite frightened. Not knowing what will be on the other side when you pop out and not knowing what it will feel like invokes a rather strong sense of apprehension and fear. At the very moment I felt I was on the brink of leaving my body I stopped my meditation. Sometimes I wish I had kept going because I have never again been able to get back to that point.

According to the material, a chakra that won't open can prevent an OOBE. Oddly enough I noticed that when I tried to leave I felt a strong pressure at the crown of my head. I assumed that this was my crown chakra holding me back. I proceeded to do more work with my chakras hoping to open them up and make OOBE possible.

In the meantime I read some material on a site that was Christianity oriented, but very spiritual as well. It was probably what some would call Christian mysticism. Ben Swett, the fellow who wrote the stories on the site, told about his spiritual journey from where he had started to where he was at now. He talked about playing with Ouija boards, out-of-body experiences, automatic writing and numerous other things. One of the things he talked about he called the act of blessing. He described it as sending a beam of light to another person. He told stories of himself blessing others in which after being blessed a person acting in anger would suddenly stop and realize how poorly he had been behaving and snap out of it. Or stories of sick people in pain being blessed and subsequently feeling better. I talked with him about these spiritual things and he seemed to think I should start with the act of blessing and leave the big stuff like OOBE for later.

Naturally I started trying to bless people. One night I knew that Shari had had a bad day and a headache to go with it. When we were in bed I decided I would try to bless her. I had never tried so hard before. I aimed my good intentions and my light at her and uplinked to what I presumed was either God or some universal power. What it boiled down to was that I was channeling some sort of energy through myself to Shari. I was feeling thoroughly energized and I suddenly felt the vibrations I normally felt when trying to leave my body. I immediately quit channeling. To my astonishment Shari said that she felt weird. I asked her more about it and she told me she felt like she was going to float away or something. The strange thing was that I hadn't told her I was channeling energy to her so she didn't even know. I was absolutely stunned and quite thoroughly frightened. I actually prayed and asked for angels to come and protect us that night and to chase away the evil spirits that might be in the room. I didn't sleep very well that night. If I didn't believe what I was dabbling in was real before I sure did now.

Concurrently with much of these activities I was also experimenting with what is called lucid dreaming. A friend of mine by the name of Ryan was also interested and we both tried some of the techniques. Lucid dreaming is a method of remaining conscious while dreaming. In other words, being aware that you are dreaming. Often times in a lucid dream the dreamer is able to control what happens in the dream and experience something akin to virtual reality. The method I tried involved leaving my arm, from the elbow to the hand, sticking straight up and down. The purpose of this was so that when I actually fell asleep my arm would fall and wake me up. This allowed me to get very close to the asleep/awake border without actually losing consciousness. Unfortunately I was never able to cross the line into conscious dreaming.

From what Ryan told me, he had gone a lot farther than I did, but of course I was spending half my time trying to leave my body. I think that working with your spiritual body is much like working with your physical body. If you exercise it, it gets stronger. Though I never made a direct pass over into lucid dreaming, a couple times I actually became aware I was dreaming while in the midst of the dream. Once you become aware, you should be able to take control of the dream. Unfortunately it is also quite likely that once you become aware of the dream you will suddenly wake up. Usually when I had actually started to do some things in my dream I suddenly woke up.

I continued to read a lot about spiritual phenomena and ended up reading a lot of stuff about alien abductions, remote viewing, conspiracies and the like. At this point I do believe that there is an actual phenomenon associated with alien abduction stories. Whether or not these so-called aliens are extra-terrestrials or spiritual entities posing as ET's I don't know, but something strange is going on. But I do believe that some of these stories reveal an amazing similarity in motive between these ET's and some unsavory spiritual beings mentioned in Genesis 6, 1 Enoch and a few other places. It's enough to make me suspicious.

Remote viewing is another interesting phenomenon. It is essentially a military developed method of extra sensory perception (ESP). Our very own military actually uses individuals trained in this art to gain information about remote targets including anything from individuals to rocks. Most sources claim 80% accuracy for remote viewing. I considered taking classes in this but they were all very expensive so I continued down the path I was on.

As I said, exercising one's spiritual body makes it stronger. It also makes you more aware of the spiritual world. Sometime during all of this I began to feel presences nearby. I could not really see anything but sometimes I just felt like there was someone else there in the room. Unfortunately this did not go away for some time and it was very disturbing.

Sometime during all of this I ended up talking with Frank about my search for truth and my experiences. It turned out that he had gone on a search for truth as well. And though he had not dabbled in the esoteric practices I was exploring, at the very moment he had reached the conclusion that there was a vast conspiracy greater than anything humankind alone could create he had felt an invisible presence that scared the tar out of him. Frank was definitely interested in helping me in my search for truth, but he understood that I had to find my path on my own just as he had and he didn't push his newfound faith in Christianity on me. I did think that it was more than just coincidence that had caused Frank and I to go on such soul journeys near the same time. I still felt the sense of impending doom hanging over the world and a need to flesh out what I believed.

I now knew the spiritual world was real and I thought that there was a creator. I read about the origins of many religions and about Christianity. I read about the differences between the religions. I compared and thought. I agonized. Frank told me about some Christian apologetics authors who built a strong case for the reality of Christ's resurrection. Frank also set up a web page that presented a lot of the ideas put forth by the apologists. It seemed fairly convincing to me. Most of you will think that this would have been enough to convince me that Christianity was the right answer, but the skeptic in me continued to reign. My thinking was that there are a number of spiritual entities or dieties out there, how do I know which side I should choose? For all I know Jesus Christ could have been an evil person posing as a good one. There are numerous stories about gods dying and coming back to life in mythological literature.

I woke up in the middle of the night one night to discover popping and crackling of energy flowing through me and felt as though I was being attacked by something. I immediately lashed out and attempted to protect myself using some techniques that I had studied, only to have the intensity increase. In an act of fear, I prayed to Jesus and it gradually subsided. It happened at least twice. The sad fact was that after the incidents I was not convinced that I was being attacked or was helped by God. During the incidents I was thoroughly convinced of what was happening but my mind always attempted to explain it away afterward.

I believe I eventually succeeded in opening my crown chakra (at least a small crack opened) for which all the other major chakras must be open to happen. I had been working at this for quite some time. As I mentioned before, after opening a chakra, it is very important to close it after you are done. I thought that I had closed it, but apparently had not. Ever since I had succeeded in opening it I had felt a ring around my head like I was wearing a hat (aha, it must have been my halo!) I was standing at the urinal and decided to ask Jesus to send angels to rid me of any evil spirits that might be plaguing me. I did this as an experiment, not expecting anything to happen, but I suddenly experienced a flash of light and a bit of dizziness and became very warm. I went for a short walk outside and came back in and sat down and felt unusually warm for a while.

One night I resolved myself to actually trying to see the spiritual world. I had done a fair amount of reading about the spiritual body and knew that what allowed one to see the spiritual world was the third eye – the spot between the eyebrows. I began meditating on my third eye and eventually felt it starting to open. I had never felt anything quite like this before and never have since. As the eye began to crack open I felt a surge of energy flowing into it and down through one of the energy pathways into the rest of my body. I had never felt so distinctly an actual energy pathway through my body. It actually felt like there was a tube going down through my body that was being filled with energy. As I had so many times in the past, I became afraid of what was going to happen and rather sharply slammed my third eyelid shut. Sometimes I feel like I was a chicken, but I can honestly say that I still don't want to see what was on the other side of that eyelid.

Hanging in the Balance

I tried experimenting with some techniques for "two way prayer" presented on Ben Swett's site. Many of the techniques I studied for practicing two-way prayer claim that it can be very dangerous, because if you are not "tuning your antenna" to the right frequency, you can end up communicating with some less-than-holy ghosts. The fruits of the spirit should always be used to test the answers you get back. I didn't receive any answers to the questions I asked, but several times I became impressed that I should make things right with my uncle who hadn't talked to me in years. I wrestled with this for a while and finally worked up the courage to try it. I sent my uncle a letter and we actually made up. This was probably the most genuine step forward I had made up until now.

One night I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the human body, and it hit me like a brick that it was simply ludicrous to believe that the human body evolved all by itself. Now the funny thing here is that evolution up to this point hadn't been a stumbling block for me and I had been able to accept both evolution and Christianity in coexistence. Actually, the idea that unguided evolution was ludicrous wasn't even important to me at the time. The thing that hit me was that I and the rest of humanity had bought into it and really believed it. It was like I had been under a spell and the spell had suddenly been broken. This was when I began to see what it was Frank had discovered when he talked about a conspiracy. But I don't think I reached this conclusion on my own. I think that there was an outside force presenting these thoughts to me. This is the way these things work. You can study and think about things endlessly and nothing clicks. Then an insight simply pops into your head and things click together. A psychologist will tell you that that is your subconscious working behind the scenes, but I would have to disagree. There is much more to the world than meets the eye or than science (if you call psychology science) can reveal to us.

Through all of this I had continued to struggle with the secret sin I mentioned earlier. Reading Ben Swett's web page had made me more aware of the possibility of being influenced by evil spirits and as I grew more and more aware of this I noticed an increased intensity in the number of temptations that came my way. The temptations grew stronger and stronger and at one point I could almost hear someone whispering words in my head. I think that they knew they were losing ground and were trying their hardest to cause me to fall back into their traps. But once I became aware of them I was able to call upon God for help and defeat temptation. Naturally temptation still wins out on occasion but my improved control over this sin was a huge step forward in learning to receive God's help.

I still had a strong distaste for what I had before considered to be Christianity. But I was beginning to realize that it was not Christianity I disliked, it was organized religion. It was the same with science. I still believed in the basic methodology of science – observations, hypothesis, and experimentation – but I realized that what was often presented as science was not really science at all. Proving something scientifically requires experiments to be made and one can certainly not devise an experiment to demonstrate that man evolved! Mankind has a tendency to look for a higher authority – someone with answers. I was beginning to realize that on this earth no such thing exists. All sources of information are flooded with misinformation. Adventists want to believe that they belong to the church with all the answers just as secular humanists want to believe that science can answer all their questions. But in reality we are all just humans on equal footing with every other human – even the "experts." We have nothing but facades erected round about us to make us feel that someone has a handle on things and is in control. My friend, only one person is in control and he is not on this earth.

I was beginning to migrate toward Christianity, but I still had some problems in my mind that I hadn't worked out yet. I couldn't understand why there had to be only one path to salvation and I figured that the probability of my having been born into such a singular path was pretty low. Dice don't usually work in my favor.

Let me diverge for a bit to explain myself. Having majored in mathematics in college I find that it is a very useful tool both on the job and even occasionally at leisure. Mathematics is a tool that is designed to provide theoretical models for real-world systems. An extremely simple example is that of the sharing of fruit. If I have five apples and wish to give two away I can use math to predict that if I give two away I will have three left. On the extreme opposite end I can also use mathematics to predict how much plutonium I need to collect together in one spot in order to produce a nuclear explosion. I can use math to predict how far I can go on one tank of fuel. I can use math to predict many things in the real world because math can be used to provide a theoretical mirror of the real world.

Even extremely sophisticated systems of mathematics such as those used to model fluid dynamics, nuclear explosions, the Hubble telescope, or the engine in your car can be boiled down to just a few (sometimes as few as three or four) basic facts that are called axioms or postulates. For example, in our everyday basic algebra that everyone knows and loves one of the most basic facts is that if we multiply any number by 0 we get 0 back. This is a basic rule that cannot be broken down any further. All of the tools we have available in algebra are based on a few of these simple postulates just like your car operates using a few very basic tools such as gears, levers, and pulleys. No matter how complex your car gets, it still depends on these fundamentals.

When you use mathematics to model systems in the real world you have to come up with a basic set of postulates that mirror the postulates in the real world. For example if we were to model the motion of objects being dropped through the air from a tall tower just as Galileo did, one of our postulates would be that no matter how much heavier one object is than the other they both fall at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time (try it sometime!). If we don't get this postulate correct then our entire mathematical model will never mirror reality and our predictions will fail.

When you meet a person for the very first time you get what we call a first impression. A first impression may or may not mirror the real world, but that is what we base our ideas about that person upon. If that person was having a bad day and snapped at us the first time we met it would be a long time before we could get that impression out of our thoughts and come to the realization that she really is a nice person. In this case our postulate about the character of this person would be incorrect and would in no way mirror reality.

When a meteorologist forecasts the weather using the mathematical formulas he has available to him he is depending on a few simple postulates about the way that the weather operates. Given the accuracy of most weather forecasts we have to conclude that those postulates do not closely mirror reality.

So what is a postulate in reality? It is little more than an assumption. In mathematics we have to make assumptions about how reality works and in the case of the mathematics of electronics we can be very precise and accurate and produce sophisticated tools like computers that work exactly how we expect them to. In meteorology our results are inaccurate at best. The accuracy of the results we obtain is directly dependent on the accuracy of the basic assumptions we make. The basic assumptions we make affect everything in our lives. Assumptions gleaned from first impressions of new acquaintances affect our relationships. Assumptions about what our boss expects of us at work affect our performance. Assumptions about how a potential girl friend feels about an interested young male affects his decision about whether or not to ask her out. Assumptions about religion affect our entire belief system.

What are the most basic postulates or assumptions that most Christians make? I believe that for many Christians (myself not included) there are as few as two basic postulates. The first is that God exists, and the second is that the Bible is the inspired word of God. But upon what are those two assumptions based?

Keep in mind that the set of postulates we hold to be true is the most important thing we can use to make our beliefs mirror reality. If we get them wrong, our views of reality are all going to be wrong. Just as a first impression has a huge impact on our assumptions about a person, the assumptions we are presented with early in life have the largest impact on what we believe later on. How do we know that these assumptions mirror reality? How do we know that God exists? How do we know that the Bible is the inspired word of God? Why do we believe that God exists? Why do we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God?

If you were born a Hindu and your first impressions were that of a Hindu, would you stay a Hindu or convert to Christianity? In all likelihood you would stay a Hindu simply because your first impressions are the most powerful. Do we believe that Christianity is the true religion simply because we were born into it?

Jesus told the story of a wise man who built his house upon a rock and when the storms came it stood solid. But there was also a foolish man who built his house upon the sand and when the storms came his house was destroyed. It seems to me that building our theological house upon the unfounded assumption that we were destined to be born into the one true religion is likely to put us in the same predicament as the foolish man. Are we leaving our destiny to chance? Robert Heinlein once wrote, "I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith – it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe."

Some readers will be a bit concerned that I am suggesting that we question even our most fundamental beliefs as Christians. Indeed their concerns are well founded for that is exactly what I am doing. It is my goal to uncover truth, not to maintain tradition, organized religion, or a comfort zone. I wish to unload the baggage of unfounded assumptions from off my back. I seek to build my faith upon the most solid foundation that I can find. In my quest for truth I hold nothing sacred, not my parents, my pastor, my church, or even the Bible. My faith lies in the assumption that that which truly is truth can withstand all scrutiny and assaults thrown at it from now till eternity and still maintain its integrity. I truly believe that the Persian proverb speaks the truth when it says, "doubt is the key to knowledge."

What I realized was that there are two types of religion, the ones that claim they are the only path to salvation (call them 1-path) and the ones that leave open the possibility that there are more than one path (call them n-path). There are quite a number of the n-path religions out there but very few of the 1-path type. Of the religions I am familiar with I can list Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I talked about this problem with Frank a bit and he had an interesting argument for me. Ultimately there exists only one true story about how we got here,

where we are going, and the nature of the spirit world, etc. Anything that claims that all religions or a set of religions is all the same in the end is false because each religion contains an explanation of the origin of man and other similar concepts. If you claim that the "true" story of the beginnings are lost (or any other key belief) then both are not true by definition. If you claim that the "true" beginning (or any other conflicting point) is known then only one can be right. The point here is that they are either all wrong or only one is right, middle ground is a contradiction.

It was a combination of experience, intuition, loss of faith in science, the 1-path vs. n-path argument, and the evidence for the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ that finally led me to my decision to accept the reality of Christianity. The last item that was a problem for me was the fact that I still wasn't sure that Jesus was the ruler I wanted to pledge my allegiance to. If Jesus' government was anything like what I had grown up with in Seventh-day Adventism I wasn't sure it was worth it to be on the winning side. This is what led me to begin my study of Christianity from the ground up. My first step was to buy a copy of the Bible on tape to listen to on my hour long commute.

Repercussions

Now that I was trying out Christianity again I began to notice gradual improvements in my daily life. I lost the desire to do some things and I gained a desire to do others. But I still maintained an interest in psychic phenomena and continued to study it. I read a lot about Qi Gong, Kundalini Yoga, and even Christian Pentacostalism. My reading on Kundalini Yoga and the phenomenon of "Awakening Kundalini" led me to wonder what the heck this whole thing is about.

Let me diverge a bit in case you are not familiar with this phenomenon. It is a supposed spiritual awakening. The thinking is that there is some reservoir of energy at the base of the spine which lies dormant in most people. By strengthening the Chakras and opening the "channels" one can awaken the Kundalini energy which "rises like a serpent up the main channel near the spine." There are numerous physical manifestations of this awakening, the primary one being the feeling of an intense fire traveling up the spine. Other things include a feeling of "electricity" flowing through the body (this I have felt), basic loss of control, groaning, laughing, bliss, etc. Note also that a Guru can induce the awakening of the Kundalini using his Shaktipat, which usually is induced by a laying on of hands upon the head.

I concluded that the best thing short of trying it myself would be to hear testimonials of individuals who had been through it. I read numerous testimonials of both a positive and negative nature. Unfortunately most of the negative testimonials are not really testimonials coming out of a mystical background. These testimonies generally come out of what is called the "Toronto Blessing" movement.

The Toronto Blessing movement is a Pentecostal movement in which large gatherings of people "receive the spirit." It is interesting to note that most of the physical manifestations of the Toronto Blessing are the same as those found in Kundalini Yoga, QiGong, and other practices.

In all my reading I have not been able to conclude that these occurrences are the same thing as demon possession. And yet, I have not been able to conclude that they are not induced by demons.

There are those who try to explain it away as a psychological/Physical phenomenon in which spirits excite the nervous system. But I can not buy this speaking from personal experience. As I related to you earlier, I was able to affect another person once through my channeling of energy. I don't believe that it was simply a physical manifestation.

In the "christian" settings in which these experiences happen (i.e. Toronto) the testimonies led me to wonder if these experiences end up being negative because they are taken in the wrong context. A brief examination of the symptoms will lead you to conclude that these experiences are not from the Holy Spirit. And yet, they could still be valid spiritual experiences of some worth. Opening of the third eye into certain of the spiritual planes could be quite traumatic for a Christian who is not expecting it. Who's to say that the Devil could not use a valuble aspect of a human's spiritual body to torment him and cause him to think it is evil.

I did not conclude that we should get involved in Kundalini Yoga and awaken our Kundalini, even in a proper (I.E. not-Christian) setting. I did not even conclude that this Kundalini experience is a valid spiritual experience. It very well could be a very damaging experience induced by evil spirits. It may not even be what the Yogi's say it is, but a deception. What I concluded is that I really didn't know what it is and the only way to find out is to try it – which I didn't have any plans to do at the time. Is the Eastern view of the spiritual body valid? I don't know. But I know that there is something more there than many would like to believe.

The conclusion I came to was, whether or not any of the underlying theories are correct, it can be used for evil.

After more reading I made some interesting observations. Some "New Age" people have noticed that Kundalini awakenings are occurring more frequently than they used to. In fact, in the past this experience usually required years of meditation or the interference of a guru. Not so anymore. Spontaneous awakenings occur more and more often in people who are not even spiritually active. Some spiritual help centers have noticed that Kundalini awakingings seem to happen in bunches. One night they will get a bunch of calls regarding this, and the next night it will be some other phenomenon. This phenomenon is spreading like wildfire, and there is a version of it for nearly every religion. In China Qi Gong has had a tremendous upsurge of practitioners. In India of course there is Yoga. In the US melting pot we have everything. Even in the Christian world we have the Toronto Blessing experience.

The eastern versions all seem to have the claim of "improved health," and sure enough, the Christian version has claims of miracle healings. In this world of degrading health (due primarily to dietary practices), this is a powerful tool in the hand of government. One of the primary benefits listed in most descriptions of Qi Gong is "Reduced Health-Care Costs."

The phenomenon seems to be addictive. Once you have done it, you want to keep doing it more and more. The easiest way to receive the experience is for a guru or "chosen" preacher to bestow it upon you. This ends up creating a hierarchy of leaders who all answer to the "top" whoever that might be. It seemed quite possible to me that this unusual increase in spiritual happenings was being orchestrated by some very unhuman beings.

What all this boils down to is that this studying changing my views very deeply in regards to spiritual practices such as meditation. I was not convinced that the Yogic view of the spiritual body is wrong, but I was convinced that I'd better be darn careful about it and maybe even hold off of it until I know more about it or even till the Lord comes. And more importantly I concluded that none of this stuff was caused by God or the Holy Spirit and if there was any external forces involved they were probably not nice.

It was fairly shortly after I came to these conclusions that I started having problems akin to the so-called panic attacks I had had before. It doesn't seem chance that this crisis occurred so recently after concluding that much of these spiritual practices were possibly of the devil. This time the feelings in my chest were much tighter and almost a cold feeling. I struggled many nights with this feeling and lost a lot of sleep. At times I thought I was really having heart problems and other times I thought that perhaps I was being plagued by demons. One night I could not sleep and Shari prayed for me and I actually felt better and went to sleep.

At an event at Benedict Memorial School Ryan and myself went into one of the classrooms where I had set up a computer game called Descent II. This is a game that can be head-to-head over the network. We got everything going and began to play. What a rush! I had never played head-to-head before and it was really exciting. However, I noticed that my heart rate was starting to accelerate and eventually it got to the point where I had to quit playing. I figured that it would just slow back down again and all would be well but it only got worse. I started feeling cold and clammy and my chest felt tight with an unsteady but strong thumping. I went over to Ryan's house for the remainder of the evening to relax. Unfortunately it continued to get worse. I got chills and I was afraid I was in trouble. I asked Ryan to take me to the hospital and we got in the van and went. On the way to the hospital I felt like my heart was going to stop and I was going to die. At the hospital I got hooked up to some monitoring equipment, had an EKG, blood tests, and even an x-ray. They could of course find nothing wrong and sent me home with some Xanax. By the time I left I felt like nothing had happened.

Knowing that western medicine had nothing to offer me I looked up a Chinese doctor and scheduled a visit. As you are aware, I have a strong interest in Chinese medicine from acupuncture to herbology and found this visit very educational. I received a couple acupuncture treatments but ended up discontinuing the treatment because of the cost. I was also beginning to realize that the experience I had had was not likely physical. Some experiences I had read about being plagued by evil entities had described similar occurrences and I ended up concluding that what I had experienced was a spiritual attack. Praise be to God that I have not had an experience like that since then. I believe that a major battle was waged that day and God won the battle.

The Home Stretch

I continued to study many things. I would often move back and forth between studying Chinese Medicine and Christianity. For the time being I'll focus on the Christianity thing. I read a history book to give me a good feel for how the Bible fit into history. And I read the Bible. I knew that God had helped me but I wanted to know more about him now and didn't think that what I grew up with was quite right.

I had begun attending prayer meeting on a regular basis by now and one day out of the blue Esther asked me to lead the discussion. I was completely surprised but I accepted and led the study. This turned into a weekly duty for me and I learned a lot and became even more interested in Bible study.

After much study and thought I realized that God wasn't the God I thought he was. He didn't demand perfect behavior and being a Christian was not something that should scare you. It should give you comfort. When I started out I had thought I had to work hard in order to make to heaven and now I realized that I had been completely wrong. All I have to do to be saved is to believe and trust in Jesus Christ and admit that I am a sinner in need of his help. That's it! Christianity is all about good news, not rules and regulations. I soon made my decision to accept Christ's sacrifice and pledge my allegiance to him. But even though I was now a Christian I still had a long road to travel.

Being a Christian I thought the next thing I ought to do was to investigate Seventh-day Adventism. After-all, I had grown up Adventist and I ought to give it a fair hearing before I wrote it off. Naturally the first place to start was the so-called prophetess Ellen G. White (whom I call Egg White after the popular abbreviation E. G. White). Having made some interesting conclusions about diet I was already leery of her writings. I actually spent some time and wrote a paper supporting my theories on diet from a Biblical perspective. I found several sites on the internet about Ellen that were none too positive and several documents arguing against Ellen White's inspiration. I eventually came across a book called The White Lie by Walter Rea. This book was a real eye opener and was the first and biggest step in forming my belief that Ellen was certainly not a prophet. The White Lie focused on Ellen White's plagiarism (which the estate does not deny) which normally would not have concerned me too much. But the large scale of Ellen's copying simply astounded me. Not only were even the pictures swiped from others, but the signatures of the artists erased to hide the borrowing! There is of course a refutation of The White Lie available from the White Estate, but I have found that as with many of their materials, they skirt the major issues and focus on the side issues. This is fairly effective on a large scale because most of the people who read the rebuttal do not actually read the original accusations.

Obviously the diet issue was important to me so I began investigating that. In hindsight, I realize that there really were no claims made by Ellen that her health message was unique in any way. But she certainly did imply that her message was inspired by God. Through my long involvement with Adventism I had been told that Ellen White's health message was a new revelation from God that nobody up until that time had known. I was led to believe that the Science of today was just now confirming that Ellen's health message was indeed the best way to live. After I studied the issues I discovered that that was far from the truth. Ellen was far from being original. In fact most of the material she presented had already been presented by various health reformers of her day. She was basically just reiterating their material. On top of that, the Mormons in 1834 had come up with a similar health plan long before SDAs even existed. Even if Ellen herself was not to blame for my faulty understanding of the situation, the church as a whole was beginning to lose my trust.

To me the most convincing argument against EGW was her support of the 1843/44 prophesy interpretation. Scripture clearly condemns setting the date for the Lord's return (Luke 21:8, Matt. 24:36) and yet Ellen White endorsed the 1843/44 date setting by William Miller and his followers. Not only did she endorse date setting contrary to scripture, she declared that God had purposely misled his people into misinterpreting the prophesies. The original interpretation by William Miller was that Christ would come in 1843. Later on a mistake was discovered (after the date had come and gone) that required revising the interpretation to October 22, 1844. In Present Truth, November 1, 1850 paragraph 10-12 Ellen attributes this mistake to God:

The Lord showed me that the 1843 chart was directed by his hand, and that no part of it should be altered; that the figures were as he wanted them. That his hand was over and hid a mistake in some of the figures, so that none could see it, until his hand was removed.

Then I saw in relation to the "Daily," that the word "sacrifice" was supplied by man's wisdom, and does not belong to the text; and that the Lord gave the correct view of it to those who gave the judgment hour cry. When union existed, before 1844, nearly all were united on the correct view of the "Daily;" but since 1844, in the confusion, other views have been embraced, and darkness and confusion has followed.

The Lord showed me that Time had not been a test since 1844, and that time will never again be a test.

Now I certainly find it hard to believe that God would deliberately mislead his people. But even more than that I find it strange that according to Ellen God said that he had made time a test. Now as far as I can tell the scriptures clearly indicate that date setting is wrong and therefore cannot be the criterion for any test. Ellen's claim for God clearly contradicts scripture.

Once Ellen White is discredited, many of the other church doctrines quickly fall apart. The first to go was the teaching that the SDA church is the remnant church. Much of the logic behind declaring the SDA church to be the remnant hinged on the church having a modern day prophet. Without EGW this entire doctrine falls apart. But my primary interest was in a different direction. My primary problem with Adventism while growing up had been the sizeable list of rules and regulations that I had been stuck with. I started out studying the Sabbath issue because it was the issue that Seventh-day Adventists make the biggest deal about, after all it's in the name.

Gary, a friend and member of the local church, had written a paper entitled SCRIPTURAL AND RATIONAL PROOFS FOR SEVENTH-DAY SABBATH WORSHIP. I knew that he was aching for someone to respond to his paper and so I endeavored to do so. Little did I know that my response would turn into a 21-page document! After much study I came to the conclusion that not only were the Ten Commandments an exclusively Jewish set of laws, they were no longer in effect and in fact had never been a requirement of salvation. This was somewhat liberating because it freed me not only from the Saturday vs. Sunday issue, it also shot enough holes in Ellen White's legalistic theology to free me even more from her writings.

When I started expressing concerns about the validity of some Adventist doctrines to some of my friends I expected strong reactions. I expected these people to try to sway me back into the fold and to argue strongly in favor of Adventism. Instead what I got was the cold shoulder. Some friends we had spent a lot of time with were no longer interested in doing things with us. People simply ignored heretical statements. It was like these people were in a state of denial. Or perhaps fear that they might be persuaded by my "wayward" thoughts. I remember now that Ellen White warned them against people like me. Why would they want to associate with me when they believed that I would turn against them in the end? According to Great Controversy, ch. 38, p. 608, paragraph 2:

As the storm approaches, a large class who have professed faith in the third angel's message, but have not been sanctified through obedience to the truth, abandon their position and join the ranks of the opposition. By uniting with the world and partaking of its spirit, they have come to view matters in nearly the same light; and when the test is brought, they are prepared to choose the easy, popular side. Men of talent and pleasing address, who once rejoiced in the truth, employ their powers to deceive and mislead souls. They become the most bitter enemies of their former brethren. When Sabbathkeepers are brought before the courts to answer for their faith, these apostates are the most efficient agents of Satan to misrepresent and accuse them, and by false reports and insinuations to stir up the rulers against them.

Eventually I was drawn to some individuals who were of a similar persuasion as myself. These individuals were hard to find because they knew what would happen if they "came out," but they do exist and for a person like myself they are a Godsend. Some of these people helped lead me to the realization that in order to minister to those who are still strong believers in Adventism, I needed to maintain my Adventist façade, but continually promote the truth about Jesus Christ. In effect I need to redirect the attention from SDA-centric teachings to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. At times it is hard to do this, but I continue to try.

I came to the conclusion that Seventh-day Adventism is little more than a cult. Not only are the beliefs designed to keep people from leaving (primarily from fear), the sociological dynamics of the Adventist community are engineered to keep people from leaving for fear they will become outcast. They are designed to keep out external influences and to maintain control of the mindset of the people from a central location – publishing houses run by the General Conference. The funny thing about all this is the fact that the only thing Adventists agree on 100% is that the SDA church has the truth and is the remnant church and once you've left that truth you are lost. Oddly enough none of them can agree exactly on what this mythological Adventist truth is and so the only thing that keeps Adventism from splintering apart is this singular myth.

After having completely convinced myself that Adventism was wrong the natural feeling for me to have was that of resentment. I felt like I had been misled my entire life; like the church had been one big lie. I had to deal with this resentment and still have such feelings from time to time. But I am slowly getting over it with the Lord's help and beginning to realize that Adventism was an important part of my life. Because of Adventism I have a strong sense of morals, a good knowledge of the Bible, and a very good family life. Adventism drove me to Christ because, like the Mosaic law for the Jews, it forced me to realize that I was not good enough to save myself. And while I agree that we all need guidelines for day-to-day living, I feel very strongly that the primary problem with the SDA church is an unhealthy focus on these guidelines and a faulty understanding of which set of guidelines we need to follow. It focuses too strongly on good works and does little to spread the good news that we don't need to and in fact can't be perfect but that Jesus Christ came to provide us with a way to salvation even though we don't deserve it. Let me switch gears a little bit to explain.

Medicine has taken great strides in the last century – consider the case of antibiotics. Never before have doctors been able to so effectively remove bacterial pathogens from the body, and after all, are not pathogens the cause of most disease?

But how do we know that pathogens are the cause of disease? I believe that I just heard some gasps of surprise. We all "know" that pathogens are the cause of disease and questioning that doctrine is met with astonished looks of disbelief. Indeed, the symptoms of infectious disease are often the outward signs of the body's defensive reaction against an invading pathogen, but how did the pathogen gain such a strong foothold within the body in the first place?

If your clothes grow mildew you can use powerful detergents to clean them and get rid of the smell, but if you put them back in the same damp closet they will grow mildew all over again. The real problem here is not the mildew even though it was the cause of the nasty smell. The real problem is the dampness in the closet. What needs to be done is to install a dehumidifier or better ventilation. So it is with bacteria and antibiotics.

Oddly enough, modern medicine approaches many other problems with this same philosophy. If we can make the symptoms go away, then everything will be all right. You have a headache? Here, take two aspirin. You have insomnia? Here take some sleeping pills. You have clogged arteries? Don't worry about how your arteries got clogged, we'll clean `em out for you. You have cancer? Never mind how the cancer got there in the first place, you need chemotherapy to get rid of it.

But let's not stop there. We have a growing incidence of venereal disease? Let's pass out condoms. Your marriage isn't working out? You need a divorce. Kids are massacring kids in schools? Let's regulate guns. Somebody blew up a building with a homemade bomb? Let's regulate the fertilizer industry. People are breaking laws? Let's build prisons. People are sinning? Let's proclaim the judgement of the wicked.

It seems as though more than just doctors have the tendency to ignore the root problem. Every time we see a new disease, we invent a new medicine to mask the symptoms. Every time we see people with new personal problems, we establish a new program to help them deal with it. Every time we see a new societal problem, we legislate a new rule to deal with it. Medicine is getting so complex that doctors can no longer just be doctors, they have to specialize. Our legal code is so complex that we have lawyers who specialize in certain types of cases. Our legislature is continually patching holes in our ever more delicately held together legal baggage, and pretty soon all our dirty laundry is going to fall out, only to be slid silently behind an iron curtain.

Our theologians are continually patching holes in our ever more delicately held together theological baggage, and pretty soon all our dirty laundry is going to fall out and take the congregation with it.

If there is anything that the Old Testament was designed to teach us, it is that human beings cannot follow long lists of rules, regulations, and guidelines. The Old Testament devotes entire books to nothing but rules and regulations but the people who were given these laws were never able to keep them. They were continually getting into trouble and crawling back to God for forgiveness. Just like aspirin, laws don't fix problems they mask symptoms. We have missed the boat on this one entirely, laws really weren't meant for anything more than to teach us that there is a much more serious problem hidden deeper.

It is this very concept that Paul is talking about in Galatians 3:24-25 (NASB):

Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.

The law Paul speaks of was not created to solve any problems. It was created to point us to the true solution, which is Jesus Christ. John 5:39-40 affirms this:

"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling * to come to Me so that you may have life?

Now that Christ has come God's righteousness has been demonstrated through his life. The law is no longer needed as a tutor because we have a positive model to follow that is far superior to the negative model represented by the law. Romans 3:19-23 explains this:

Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no * flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law {comes} the knowledge of sin. But now apart from the Law {the} righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even {the} righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

We are ministers of the new and living covenant, not the law written on stone but the covenant of Christ. The written contract has faded away and Jesus Christ – in us – takes the place of that contract. Those who wish to learn God's ways need not study the law but observe Jesus Christ's righteousness through his servants on earth. 2 Corinthians 3:1-6 states:

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some, letters of commendation to you or from you? You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. Such confidence we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as {coming} from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate {as} servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

It is Jesus Christ within us who will convict each individual of what he must do even though one individual may be convicted differently than another. Romans 14:4-6 states:

Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person regards one day above another, another * regards every day {alike.} Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God.

In Colossians 1:25-27 Paul clearly expresses what our duties are as ministers of the new and living covenant. We are here to spread the good news that we can have Christ living within us.

Of {this church} I was made a minister according to the stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit, so that I might fully carry out the {preaching of} the word of God, {that is,} the mystery which has been hidden from the {past} ages and generations, but has now been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

It is Jesus Christ within who heals our inmost disease – no laws can do this. As ministers of the new covenant we are not here to pass out aspirin; we are here to direct people to a real healer. We are not here to point out the symptoms; we are here to point out the cure. We are not here to provide condemnation; we are here to reveal salvation. We are not here to provide guidelines for behavior; we are here to point to the Savior. We are not here to lead people to our church; we are here to lead people to Jesus Christ.

Final Thoughts

The final complaint with Adventism that I have not yet resolved for myself is Adventism's sentiment toward free thought. I know that I have to realize that Adventism does not have a corner on this market, but I get the feeling that Adventism is a little worse than average on this issue. I think that this attitude stems from the belief that the SDA church is the remnant church and therefore as near to infallible as is possible on this earth. This close-mindedness frustrates me greatly for I feel its impact in my own life. I wish to discuss my thoughts on issues of religion with others and I consistently receive the cold shoulder anytime my views do not coincide with what people think are Adventism's positions on the issues. I get the feeling that people wish I would keep quiet unless I mimic the party line thinking – or what they think the party line thinking is.

I have tried multiple times to speak my mind but to no avail. I hope that by presenting my testimony as clearly and truthfully as possible people will begin to better understand what I have to say. God has led me on an incredible journey. At times I knew he was there leading and other times I didn't even know he existed. There is a poem called Footprints in the Sand that talks about two sets of footprints going off into the distance symbolizing our walk with God. There are points where one set of footprints disappears and we may think that God has left us, but those are really the times that he is carrying us.

What I am today is not a product of my upbringing, Seventh-day Adventism, secular humanism, my research skills, or my own thought process. I am who I am because God has led me down this path. The number of small details and events that have occurred in my life that have led me to where I am today cannot be coincidence. Each piece fits so elegantly into the puzzle that I am amazed at how well orchestrated my life has been.

I don't regret my Adventist upbringing. I realize it was there to drive me toward Christ. The simple realization that I cannot save myself and the fear that goes along with that helped to push me to study what Christ actually said and to depend more fully upon him. Paul describes the law as a tutor in the book of Galatians and that is exactly what I believe Adventism has been for me. But now that I have Christ I no longer need a tutor.

I could write so much more but I hope that this will suffice. All I hope for is that my testimony will be one of the pieces in the puzzle of someone else's life that brings them one step closer to God. I still have a long way to go and much progress to make, but with Jesus Christ I have no fear.