Candace, a reader from Wisconsin, wrote to tell me of her conversion experience. It’s as moving as anything like it I’ve ever read. Here’s what she had to say:

Heading into 2007, I was in miserable shape. I had been a heavy drinker for 25 years. I had abandoned a 20-year career in a hospital laboratory in 2002, and had lost all of my savings in a failed business venture. It had become increasingly difficult for me to hold a job for more than a year at a time. I had a gambling problem, and was struggling under more than $25,000 in credit card debt and past-due bills. Unable to make my mortgage payments, the loss of my home and everything in it was imminent. I was depressed and hopeless, angry and cynical. I was irresponsible in every way, and I both pitied and hated myself.
 
I had some wonderful friends, but little appreciation for them. It had been years since anyone visited my home (and had they come, I would not have allowed them in). Family relationships were strained, pretty much across the board, to varying degrees.
 
I had, over the years, taken a ‘Whitman’s sampler’ approach to spirituality, but nothing ever seemed to stick. What little I knew of the Bible and of Christian living was grossly distorted or (I now know) flat-out wrong. The whole notion of God seemed unintelligible to me — stupid, fairytale-ish, anti-intellectual, nothing but a crutch for people who couldn’t figure out how to live life on their own. 

Shortly after the New Year, I learned of the tragic death of a dear young friend. Olivia, nine years old, and her father had gone through the ice on a local lake, and Olivia had drowned. While struggling to cope with that devastating loss, I was also growing a new friendship, with one of those sort of people who has something about them that you know is different, but that you can’t quite name. On February 11th of last year, I e-mailed my new friend some questions I had about God. He answered in ways that spoke to me, and added two great bits of advice: “Just talk to God while you putter around the house, like he was your buddy,” and “Find out if there’s a Christian radio station in your area.” So, feeling foolish, awkward and decidedly unsteady, I began talking to God and listening to others talk about God.
 
On February 16th, I wrote an e-mail to my friend telling him I had polished off a bottle of vodka the night before, and I was going to try and drive home without buying another. In response he asked me to write and let him know when I got home, even if I did stop for more. I made it home without stopping, and my friend kept me company via e-mail throughout a very rough weekend, as I detoxed from decades of alcohol abuse. I also spent a lot of time that weekend talking to God as if He was my friend, and I kept my radio on and tuned to the local Christian radio station around the clock. (I do want to warn people not  to ever detox at home alone. It was rough. Really, really rough. Knowledgeable medical people since have told me it’s only by the grace of God that I survived it.)
 
The following Tuesday morning, while driving home from a pet-sitting visit, I was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. I started sobbing, and had to pull over to the side of the road because I was unable to continue driving. I wept and wept, babbling nonsensically to God between sobs. Once I was done crying, I felt entirely different. I didn’t understand exactly what had happened, but I knew my whole world had changed for the better.
 
When I got home, I went directly to the computer and wrote down the things I had said to God in the car, and called it the Cynic’s Prayer:
 
OK, God, I give up. I’m Yours if You want me.
I don’t care how awkward I might feel talking to You, or about You.
I don’t care how much trouble I have accepting some of the teachings.
I don’t care that my entire former self-image was wrapped up in the “party girl” persona.
I don’t care if some Christian music is treacle and the lyrics contrived.
I don’t care what havoc may have been wrought in Your name in the past, or what may be in the future.
I don’t care if some of Your flock seem hypocritical or self-righteous or sanctimonious.
I don’t care if there are times when I can’t feel Your presence.
I don’t care if loving You means I have to at least attempt to love myself.
I don’t care if friends roll their eyes and laugh at my conversion.
I don’t care if I feel like a faker sometimes, and I don’t care if it’s harder to do Your will than it would be to follow my own desires, and I don’t care if I’m less than perfect at it.
None of that matters. I give up. I want You. And I’m Yours, if You want me.
 
It was probably a week or so before it actually dawned on me that I had been born again.

As I write this, I have been sober for 15 months. I attend two or three recovery meetings a week, and will do so for the rest of my life. The people I have met in recovery are just amazing, and words that I used to choke on — “Hi, I’m Candy, and I’m an alcoholic” — now come easily at the beginning of each meeting because of the wonderful examples I see all around me. I have not struggled, for even one moment, with any desire at all to have a drink. It seems that God has lifted that burden and healed me.
 
Right away, both my new friend, Jon, and a long-time friend, Bill (who is a Baptist minister), began encouraging me to find a church family. In “weakness and fear and with much trembling,” I began visiting God at His house a couple of weeks before Easter, and it didn’t take long before I was looking forward to Sunday each week. That November, I became a member of my church, and I was baptized on the first anniversary of my sobriety, with Jon, Bill, and many other friends and church family members in attendance.
 
Every day I am in my Bible and spending time in prayer. I have an insatiable appetite for the Word, and am growing steadily in my relationship with the Lord. I take classes at church, and listen to and read all kinds of stuff about knowing and loving God and living a Christian life. Concepts and ideas I could never understand — indeed, that I thought were ridiculous! — are now as clear as a bell, and it’s hard to comprehend how I could have missed them before.
 
I never gamble anymore, haven’t for months, and I’m working with a volunteer financial counselor from my church to learn how God wants me to handle money. I did not lose my home after all, and my finances are getting better all the time. God has blessed me in big ways in that regard.
 
Through Christ, my life now holds things I hadn’t known for a very long time, if ever: hope, peace, humility, perseverance, contentment, self-control, joy, courage, strength. And a love that is totally beyond my capability to express.
 
The process of identifying, confessing, and repenting of my sins has been difficult. It’s still a work in progress, actually, and no doubt — being human — it will never end. That’s what we humans do, isn’t it? We sin. But the Holy Spirit really does help me go through that process, and crying helps a lot too. I used to do everything I could to avoid crying whenever possible. Now I just run a hot bath and let the tears flow. It hurts worse to hold all of that back than it does to just walk forward through it, especially when you walk with the right company.
 
The power and beauty of what Jesus did for me on the cross just overwhelms me. It’s almost too much to absorb, and my gratitude for it brings me to my knees. Because of Him, I know that God loves me, and has made me His child, and has forgiven me and will continue to have patience with me while I learn how to live His way. Looking back, I can see that He has always loved me, always wanted me, but it was up to me to let Him in.
 
One of the most amazing and delightful changes, now that I have let Him in, is how full of joy I am, even though life is still hard. My problems didn’t magically disappear. In fact, for a little while, they seemed even bigger and more overwhelming. But underneath it all, even in the most difficult times, there’s this river of joy carrying me forward, and I find rest in God’s grace and peace.
 
Well, there’s a whole lot more I could say. I could talk about this forever, I think! But I’ll wrap up now with two of my favorite passages from the Bible.
 
The first is Hebrews 12, verses 1-3:
 
“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”
 
The second passage is from 1 Peter. Actually, all of 1 Peter is awesome — I love the whole book — but this is Chapter 2, verses 1-3:
 
“Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.”
 
I have, most certainly, tasted the kindness of the Lord.

An Evangelizing Christian (”EC”) and a guy who Wasn’t Having Any (”WHA”) had a conversation in a coffee shop yesterday. I totally eavesdropped on them. Here’s the gist of their exchange:

EC: But you can’t get into heaven unless you’re a Christian.

WHA: Why not? I’m a good guy. I lead a moral life. Why should I be kept out of heaven?

EC: Because in the Bible, Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

WHA: But that doesn’t say you have to be a Christian in order to get into heaven. That just says that Jesus decides who does and doesn’t get into heaven. “You have to go through me to get into heaven” isn’t the same as, “You have to be a Christian to get into heaven.”

EC: Yes, it is.

WHA: No, it really, really isn’t. If Christ had meant, “Only Christians get into heaven,” he would have said that. But he doesn’t say that in this quote — which is weird, since that’s the quote Christians invariably rely upon as their ultimate proof that only Christians get into heaven.

EC: But that’s what, ”No one comes to the Father except through me” means. It means you have to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior in order to gain eternal life with our heavenly Father.

WHA: Well, that may be what Christians have decided  that quote means, but that’s not what the words of that quote actually say. All Jesus actually says there is, “You have to go through me to get into heaven.” In other words, “When it comes to admission into heaven, I am the decider.” [Fear not: I squelched my laughter by jamming half a croissant in my mouth.] It doesn’t say anything whatsoever about what you have to think, believe in, or be before you can make the cut. It doesn’t say anything  beyond that Jesus will determine who is and isn’t acceptable to him. That’s it. There’s nothing there to indicate that Jesus would necessarily refuse a Muslim or a Jew into heaven. That quote only refers to the process by which people do or don’t gain entry into heaven. It doesn’t stipulate any kind of qualifications for getting in at all. And for Christians to assert that that quote does mean what its actual, literal words clearly don’t support it meaning, isn’t good for Christians. It can’t help but make them seem exceptionally dense, willfully irrational, or lying. Either way’s not exactly an inducement to join their club.

Quite the speech! It worked, too: My evangelizing brother in Christ shut down like a Hummer dealership.

After the Christian effected an exit, I started up my own conversation with Mr. Articulate Atheist. I liked him; he was a decent, forthright guy. In the course of our talk, I promised him that here, on my blog, I would do as I have done, and recount his conversation with the proselytizing Christian. Furthermore, I promised him that I would ask whether any of my readers would be willing to take a stab at refuting his assertion that “No one comes to the Father except through me” doesn’t, in fact, say anything whatsoever about whether or not one has to believe in Christ in order to get into heaven.

If you’re inclined to answer this earnest seeker, he’s listening.

See a related postof mine, “What Non-Christians Want Christians to Hear,” here.

In the comments section of my last post (An Atheist Asks: Why Did Christ Have to Sacrifice Himself To Himself?), any number of atheists and/or agnostics raised the same question: What, exactly, was the sacrifice Jesus made? One put it exactly that way. Another asked, “This is what baffles me most about Christians: The Great Sacrifice.” Another wrote: “I am attracted to the Beatitudes and the concept that God is Love, both themes that seem to me utterly inconsistent with a God who demands sacrifices of anything or anyone living.”

I figured that what they were all basically asking was, “What, exactly, is the atonement?” So that’s the question I promised I’d answer.

As many of my regular readers know, I wrote a book called “Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang: Why I Do the Things I Do,” by God, as told to John Shore. In that (very short) book, I have God himself directly answering eight or nine of the most commonly heard objections to, or questions about, Christianity. (A few such questions are: “I just don’t believe in God, period.”; “If you [God] really exist, why don’t you prove it?”; and ”What’s the deal with evil, anyway? Why does a God who is all-powerful and all-compassionate allow evil to exist? He either wills evil to exist — which makes him despicable — or he’s powerless to stop it, which makes him uninspiringly weak, to say the least. Both bite. What’s up?”) One of the questions I have God address in that book is: “What’s the whole ‘Atonement’ thing actually mean?”

Below is part of how, in Penguins, I have God answer that question. I’m going to use that answer here, because … well, I think it’s about as good an answer as I can write. (Note: If you’re a Christian who’s offended by the literary conceit in Penguins of putting words into the mouth of God, please bear in mind that I didn’t write this book for Christians; I wrote it for non-Christians, who of course aren’t likely to share such squeamishness. Please also remember that in The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a’ Kempis also put words into the mouth of God, and for 500 years Christians considered that book nearly a second Bible. Thanks.)

So here’s some of what “God,” in Penguins, has to say when he is asked what the whole “Atonement” thing actually means:

The At One-ment (Hey! I’m Hooked on Phonics!™ Wait—no I’m not) refers to that act in which I allowed myself to get brutally murdered so that all humans could be forever cleansed of the guilt associated with the things they do or think that do not, shall we say, represent their finest moments.

I let myself be tortured to death so that you could live free of pain.

But, hey, no pressure or anything. I don’t want you worrying about it. I was glad to do it. Seriously. No problem. It was a Friday. I really didn’t have all that much to do but hang around anyway. …

Still, there was a job to do, and I was the man to do it. And so I did: The “it” in “It is finished” refers to the establishment of the means by which all people, forever, could have access to real and lasting salvation. I know I just said this, but if anything in the universe bears repeating, it’s that what my dying on the cross secured was the means by which, from that point on, all human beings could have rinsed from their hearts and minds their guilt (however “naturally” they acquired it), which, without my divine intervention, must otherwise fester inside of them, where at best it severely undermines the quality of their lives, and at worst compels them to contribute to that wretched, twisted cause that seeks to drag all of humankind down into the pits of degradation.

Do you see? I won the battle between good and evil by paying, in full, with my body, any and all karmic debt that might ever be incurred by anyone doing evil.

You might owe the phone company, the electric company, the credit card company, and your landlord. But you don’t owe me, or the world, anything. I’ve already totaled you out.

I’ve already atoned for your sins.

Which means that you and I, forever, are copacetic.

As long as you believe in me, that is. As long as you believe that as the Christ I took human form and stepped into human history for the specific purpose of removing from all people—by which I most definitely and forever mean from you personally — the debt incurred by any and all sin.

Believe that, and it’s all about you and me, friend.

Don’t, and you’re on your own.

But you believe it. You have to. Cuz you know who’s on your side, don’t you? You know who’s got you covered, don’t you?You’re feeling the love. You know you are. C’mon. Admit it. Who loves you? Who? Who cares about you? Who gave his all so you could delight in life instead of being bogged down by true existential angst?

Who’s your daddy?

That’s right: Me. The Father. Jesus. The Holy Ghost.

Us.

I.

And what do really good fathers do? That’s right: They fork over the big bucks to cover the cost of every single thing their kids could ever think of doing.

Do you really wonder why such infinite numbers of people have always signed on for Team Jesus? Do you really think they’re all just lazy, shallow simpletons?

Well, they’re not. What they are is debt-free. Which is to say that, spiritually speaking, they’re forgiven.

Forgiven!

By God Almighty!

Forever!

Man, I just don’t know what else you could possibly want from me.

–from Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang, copyright 2005 by John Shore

In the comments section of my recent post, God is Love, Christ is Pain, a respectful and thoughtful atheist reader asked me why God had to sacrifice himself in order to forgive us. “If a god who is omnipotent wanted to forgive us,” he wrote, “couldn’t he just forgive us, and make it so we never forget? Why sacrifice himself to himself?”

My response was this: ”By dying as he did, Christ knew that he would be creating an image of that act that was so vivid, and so visceral, that it would forever last in people’s minds, hearts and imaginations. God couldn’t ‘just’ forgive us — without getting personally involved, without in every last possible sense of the phrase bringing it down to our level, without his very graphic mortal expiration on the cross — because he knew that wouldn’t stick. He knew that people tend to forget; that we naturally get so focused on their own lives that the reality of God — which is, after all, a fairly nebulous concept — tends to slip first from our minds, and then from their hearts. Jesus didn’t want that to happen. He wanted people to remember what he had done for them. So he made the means by which we are eternally forgiven as real for us as he possibly good — and that meant availing himself of the sheer, raw, dramatic magnitude of the crucifixion.

“Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself for his sake. He did it for ours. And so he made sure to do it in a manner that we’d never be able to forget. What Jesus did on the cross was compassionate, mercy, and love of the highest possible order. And we haven’t forgotten it yet.”

I now find that I want to add something to that answer, and figured I’d do it here. That something is this:

Jesus knew that people would always know that he knew that he was God. Time and again, he either flat-out says, or heavily implies that he is, in fact God; like, for instance, at John 10:30, when he says “I and the Father are one.” So there’s no question that Jesus knew he was God. How could God not know his own nature?

Now I’m no theologian — and I’m certainly not offering here anything having anything whatsoever to do with any Official Doctrine that I know of — but it seems to me that if Jesus knew he was God, and he knew we knew he knew he was God, then he also knew that a lot of us wouldn’t be able to help but think that, in a way we very definitely don’t, he had it made.

Jeus was God. It doesn’t get any better than that. And he knew he was God. He knew his story was going to end well. He knew that when his adventure here on earth was over, he was going back to heaven to take his place at the right hand of the Father. There’s no way that’s not a wonderful place to be.

None of us are quite that lucky, are we? We can say that we do, but the bottom line is that we don’t have anywhere near the assurance about our ultimate fate as Jesus had about his. It’s not possible that we could.

What Jesus wants, though, if for us to fully understand the complete depth of his identification with us. And that, I think, is why he let himself die on the cross in the horrible fashion that he did. Because he knew that we would always understand how terribly, terribly real that was. God or not, he got beaten. He knew that we would forever after that understand that he did become one of us. He did suffer the worst any of us could. That, too, is not in question.

And he didn’t even leave it at that. He actually gave us every last indication that when his final moment came — when his pain and suffering had reached its terrible crescendo — his identity with us was absolute and complete. We know that as he was dying, Jesus felt himself no more a God than we do. That, I think, is the sheer, knee-buckling power of his finally crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We know Jesus was God because he defied death. And we know he was mortal because of the way he died.

He did it. His point got across. It stuck. It’s as real now as the moment that our great hero, exhausted, breathed, “It is finished.”

(The follow-up post to this post — which I wrote in response to some of the very good questions raised in the lively comments section below — is Inquiring Atheists Want to Know: What, Exactly, Was the Sacrifice Jesus Made?)