Suddenly my Life Didn’t Seem Such a Waste,
or: How I met God in Texas and got to know Him in Australia

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By Ian Dale, written November 2002

  Among Christian circles, the story of how one came to believe in and follow Jesus Christ is called a testimony.  For me, it was a gradual change from Atheism to Christianity.  Here is a brief (well, compared to three years time) account of my spiritual journey thus far:

  I grew up in a Christian household.  My parents took me to church with them almost every Sunday for as long as I can remember.  From a very early age, though, I was skeptical of religion.  I didn’t like the conformity I saw in the adults there, the rules that it imposed, or the burden of having to sit through church every Sunday.  At about the age of nine (around the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus), I rejected the idea of God.  I don’t remember exactly when or why, but I do distinctly remember a page in a third-grade textbook that said how early people invented religion and gods to explain phenomena like thunderstorms, and I guess I extrapolated that to be proof that all ideas of God were invented, and that science can (or would eventually be able to) explain everything.  I never told anyone about this though, so it continued in my mind mostly unquestioned throughout my childhood.  I continued going to church until I was about 17, but refused to listen or participate.

            I was very much a loner in high school, and hardly talked to anyone about anything personal, especially not religion, so my assumptions continued to go unquestioned.  I was often lonely and depressed, obsessive and craving attention and importance.  The “drug” that got me through all this was my art, something I had always enjoyed and excelled at, and was a great source of encouragement from others.  This led to much improvement as an artist, but also an extremely imbalanced life, and never satisfied me.  My self-image was in a constant tension between excessive pride as an artist and an unhealthy lack of self-esteem as a person.  Towards the end of high school, I became obsessed with winning awards and fame through my art, hoping one day even to rival Michelangelo or Picasso in importance.  That would be my immortality, and I thought it would solve all my problems.  Yet with all the success I had had already, I was never happy. By the end of senior year, I had begun to realize that success and fame would never be enough, but I still couldn’t stop my craving for them. 

            When I started university in Fall 1999, things started to change rapidly.  My discontent with how I was living grew into a vague interest in philosophy (of which I knew little about).  And as I was equipped with slightly improved social skills, dorm life led to many new friends.    As freshman tend to do, we exercised our growing intellectual skills with the occasional discussion of philosophy and religion, and for the first time, I was both exposed to other people’s views firsthand, and had to express my own views verbally.  Along with this, I was exposed to many new ideas in my first-semester literature class, including postmodernism and existentialism, primarily through a book called The Stranger, by Albert Camus. 

All of this new stimulation caused me to really think about my atheism, and the implications it would have for life as a whole.   I realized that atheism didn’t just mean there was no God or afterlife, but also that there was no meaning or purpose to life, and no transcendent morality.  At first this was quite freeing, as I was engrossed with the ideas of creating my own purpose to life, whatever I wanted it to be, and my overachieving nature was relieved that it really didn’t matter what I did with my time here.  The immanent death of myself, of humanity, and eventually of the universe itself, made immortality through artistic legacy a futile endeavor, and freed me somewhat from that obsession.  I knew in some ways that all of this was quite depressing, but I was convinced that it was the truth, so the only thing I could do would be to make the most of it.  I believed everyone had to come up with his or her own reason for living, and for me, it would be immediate personal enjoyment through artistic creativity. 

            Freshman year finished up and my atheism was stronger than ever.  But on June 5, 2000, while reading Nietzsche and thinking about The Matrix, I came to the sudden realization that I could never be certain God didn’t exist.  In the same way that the people in The Matrix were oblivious to the reality around them, so too it was at least possible that there was more to our world than what we see.  To know with certainty that there was no God would require a perfect knowledge of the universe, which, as a rising college sophomore, I didn’t yet have.  Even atheism required faith.  And so long as there is even the slightest possibility of a God and purpose, it begins to matter greatly what one believes and does, as there is a possibility of being wrong.  Filled with fear and doubt for an afternoon, I became an agnostic. 

As the summer went on, I continued to do a little research here and there, but the initial fear and motivation faded as I went on with the daily activities of life and art.  My main preoccupation was a massively ambitious animation project, which turned out to be far too much for me to handle.  Sophomore year began and the project in which I had invested so much of myself became increasingly impossible given my other responsibilities.  I began to study oil painting, which I found I really liked.  But my second major critique in the class was devastating, as my teacher tore apart my painting (figuratively) and perceptively pointed out all of my pretence.  This critique, combined with the failure of my animation, threw me into a period of depression for two weeks, thinking I was a worthless hack of an artist and a person.  I eventually rose from this depression humbled, and with some rethought values. 

Spring semester sophomore year, I was excited to take a course in East Asian ethics and religion, and find some non-western approaches to living a possibly-meaningful existence.  Though I had for so long been apathetic to other people, and dismissive of any sort of imposed morality, I actually took a great interest in the non-theistic approaches to morality and self-improvement of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.  I also enjoyed the Taoist concept of an impersonal force guiding the universe, which we could tap into to seek contentedness and fulfillment.  I even saw evidence of such a force at work in the occasional serendipitous successes I had while painting.  I began to implement some of these concepts into my perspective on life, and it was a great help.  But to fully follow them would require more of a withdrawal from society than I was capable of, and they still left me with uncertainty concerning the ultimate issues of life.

Sophomore year ended in May, and I embarked on a cross-country drive back home with my father.  I used the long days of riding as an opportunity to finally read a book I had impulsively bought several months earlier, Philosophy for Dummies.  The book was exactly what I thought I needed, a summary of the world’s philosophies that was shorter and easier to read than the original books I could never find the time or attention for.  What I didn’t expect is what I would find in those summaries.  The book went through a variety of views and arguments on issues such as free will, good and evil, the afterlife, God, and the meaning of life.  It brought up issues I hadn’t ever considered, and questioned so many of the assumptions I had held for so long.  I was humbled and enthralled, and my worldview changed almost hourly as I soaked up all the new ideas.  By the time we reached Texas, I was convinced that there was a God of some sort, and the whole world was different.  Everything started to make more sense.  That night in Shamrock, Texas, while playing with a dog that lived near the motel, I broke down with a mixture of joy for God and shame and regret for my wasted life, and cried for the first time in six years. 

I finished the book in Tennessee, and reached home in Virginia soon after.  My whole outlook on life was changed.  Suddenly I mattered, and other people did too.  There was a reason for all of this, a reason to do good, a reason to wake up in the morning.  There was something out there that cared, and there was quite possibly hope for life after death.  I didn’t know who this God was or what it wanted from me, and honestly I was hesitant to find out, but the simple existence of something made all the difference in the world.  I can never fully describe what it was like, but I found at the time that a song from the newly released film Moulin Rouge captured it quite beautifully:

  Suddenly the world seems such a perfect place

Suddenly it moves with such a perfect grace

Suddenly my life doesn’t seem such a waste

  But even with the joy and hope, uncertainty remained.  I believed in a God, but didn’t know what he/she/it was like, what it wanted, or which religion, if any, was the best way to reach it.  Having grown up in a Christian-derived culture, Christianity was the possibility that I felt simultaneously the most threatened by and the most resistant to.  I wanted to preserve my agnostic uncertainty in a way, to believe that there was a God but we couldn’t really know much about him/her/it.  But I knew I couldn’t be sure of that.

One night late in June, I spontaneously decided to e-mail the author of Philosophy for Dummies, a philosophy teacher named Tom Morris, and tell him how important his book was for me.  Desperately wanting to be useful and somehow employ my talents for “the good,” I volunteered to help him with graphics for his website.  Morris responded the very next day, and, excited by my offer, he mailed me a few of his other books.  He said one of those books would help me with the “cosmic issues” I was grappling with.

And that it did.  Making Sense of it All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life brought even more ideas to my attention.  This book also fascinated me, and I tore through it faster than any book I had ever read.  It reminded me of the urgency concerning beliefs on “existentially central” issues (questions of God and the meaning of life), and painted a brilliant depiction of the human condition that echoed what I had learned and experienced during the previous two years of growth.    After clearly establishing the need for some sort of stance, it introduced me to several rational arguments for why Jesus Christ is worth believing in.  I had reluctantly attended church for ten years, yet I was amazed by how little I actually knew about Christianity.  The Bible as divine revelation, Jesus Christ as a historical God incarnate and an atonement for our sin (though at the time I preferred the term ‘imperfection’), justification by faith not works, and the whole idea of religious guidance actually improving our life and happiness here on Earth, were all foreign concepts to me.  All of a sudden, Christianity was something I actually wanted to believe in, and through logical arguments and historical evidence, the book showed me that it was not only possible, it was the most rational position.  That Monday afternoon in July, all of my questions, hopes, desires, and concerns crystallized on the person of Jesus Christ, and to the best my limited understanding allowed, I committed myself to him that day.  I was a Christian.  Who would have guessed?

With the strength, hope, and motivation afforded by God, my life began to improve immediately.  I broke free of obsessions, addictions, bad attitudes and bad habits, and started to replace them with good and constructive ones, in ways I was never able to do before.  The attention and immortality I had craved with my artwork, I was able to find in God, the one being who could actually provide it.  I still had lots of questions about the specifics of Christianity, but I faced them with a peace and happiness that I had never had previously.  In addition, my apathy was replaced with a growing concern for the good of the world and other people, and I wanted some way to help.  I was reluctant to share my faith or any of these changes with my family or friends, partly out of pride, and partly because I never really shared anything really personal with them.  But I continued to receive some online guidance throughout the summer from Morris, and from random readings on the Internet or in bookstores.

Despite my belief in God and in Jesus, I was still skeptical of organized religion and the Bible.  I had heard about all the atrocities committed by the church, and the supposed contradictions and inaccuracies in the Bible.  I knew I could trust God, but I wasn’t so sure about His human institutions.  Distrust (along with laziness and distractions) prevented me from actually getting around to reading the Bible.  As school started in the fall, I was eager to live a good life for God, but with a very fragmented knowledge of how to go about it.  I decided to give the church a chance, and randomly visited a different one each Sunday.  But except for the sermons I received there, most of my guidance came from secular wisdom.  My life continued to improve, and I grew closer in my relationship to God, but I knew that there was an inconsistency between my personal Christian belief and my reluctance to get involved with the church or share my faith with even the people closest to me.  I believed in Christ but I didn’t want to be a “Christian.”

The fall 2001 semester ended, and I went home for the holidays.  Finally having the free time, I began to read the Bible; first the Gospel of John, and then Matthew.  Much to my surprise, they were actually really good!!  I was inspired and encouraged by Jesus’ teachings, and also realized how much I failed to meet them.  There were many things I needed to do, such as get baptized, but my reluctance to go public as a Christian prevented me. 

Fortunately however, I was scheduled for a semester of study abroad in Australia.  I was excited about the possibility for travel and for personal growth and contemplation, and also realized it’d be a good opportunity to try out a new lifestyle, and get involved with some Christian groups.  As luck would have it, some of the first people I met when I arrived at school there were from a campus Christian group that was part of a local church.  On my fourth day in Australia, I went to a service there with one of the girls from the group.  It was good, but I wanted to check out other options first.  A few weeks later, knowing I was “sorta-Christian,” the girl invited me to a study group.  When I was reluctant to commit, she confronted me, questioning where my priorities, commitments, and beliefs really were.  Though I barely knew her, the things she said somehow characterized me perfectly, and I knew I had to make a choice.  I still had a lot of doubts about the specifics of Christianity, but it had been working well so far, and I knew I couldn’t turn back.  Long-term agnosticism was irrational, and atheism was a dead end.  And I saw no logic in believing in God, the source of all things, without at least trying to pursue Him as fully as possible.  Christ had done so much for me already, but I needed to go further.  I went to the study, and then back to the church on Sunday, and made a formal, public commitment to Jesus Christ (albeit in front of a bunch of people I didn’t know, but it was a start).  The next week, I was baptized on Saint Patrick’s Day. 

This was big news, and I knew at that point I had to tell my parents.  At the end of our weekly international phone conversation, I awkwardly told them what I had done.  The last thing they knew concerning my spirituality was my refusal to go to church when I was 17, and now, at 21, I was a Christian.  It was quite a surprise, I’m sure.  But in yet another example of God working to bring good in ways I could never predict, my confession opened the door to a vastly more open and loving relationship between us in all areas.  I am amazed and grateful.

The following weeks and months in Australia were a blessing and a struggle.  I took classes, read the Bible regularly, and gained a much better knowledge and understanding of the faith and the Christian life.  But I also had lots of concerns over Christian stereotypes, Church history, Bible accuracy, science, and some questionable doctrinal teachings of the particular church I was attending.  With God’s help I kept at it though, and the more I learned, the more everything made sense.  The closer I got to God as presented in the Bible, the better life got, so I learned to trust the Bible more.  And I read Christian apologetics books with a passion, finding answers to most of my questions.  When I met a second group of Christians later in the semester, I actually found some friends I was comfortable with, and fought against some of my remaining stereotypes.  They helped me become more comfortable with my own identity as a Christian, and I was no longer afraid or ashamed to admit it to others.

 Now I’m back in the United States, and God continues to amaze me.  He never ceases to challenge me when I become complacent, or to remind me of my shortcomings.   Though God has made me a much better person, He has also made me more aware of my many, many “imperfections,” gradually showing me just how flawed and broken I really am, and how far I have yet to go. Yet through it all He has given me a peace and a love that make me happier and more contented than I ever was without Him.  Far from bringing intellectual death, God has given me a truthful foundation for coherent thought, and even more things worth thinking about. God has given me a purpose and direction in life, a path I can follow to serve Him, and accomplish good, loving, and truly lasting things.  He has turned my selfish apathy into a softened heart for other people, given me a better grasp of my emotions, and in a way, made me more “human”.  God has even opened my mind and expanded my interests beyond my previous narrow-focus on art, yet at the same time He has gotten involved in my art practice, making it far more fulfilling. 

In every area of my life, faith in God has made all the difference in the world.  He has done more for me than I ever could have dreamt when I accepted the relationship.  I need to remember, though, that the Christian life is a difficult one.  The good that God brings isn’t always the good that one would expect.  Jesus followed God, and look what happened to him. J  But I know that my life with God, struggles and all, is far more meaningful and fulfilling than it ever was without Him, and the good that it brings in the end will far outweigh the hardships. 

I want to share with you the amazing loving goodness that I’ve found in God through Jesus Christ.  It is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s available to everyone who wants it.  If you’d like to find out more, feel free to e-mail me at iandale@alumni.usc.edu, or check out some of the web sites listed below: