Testimony:
The apostle Peter tells Christians to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15). What I would like to do in a few paragraphs is to tell you a little bit about my background, and the development of my life with Christ.I grew up on a farm outside Rome, Georgia, a small town in the northwestern part of the state. My early world consisted of my siblings, parents, grandparents, the other families who lived on the farm, and a few close friends of our family. It was a world in which children didn’t know many people, but they got to know them pretty well. I saw adults from a variety of races and creeds spending long hours together in hard, productive work, and experiencing all the joys and sorrows of the human condition. I attended Georgia Tech (Bachelor of Architecture), Georgia State University (M.S. in Urban Administration) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis). In 1973, I married the loveliest person I’ve ever met, and Susan and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary this year. We had a daughter in 1984 and currently she is at the University of St. Thomas. I am a professor in the Division of Health Services Research and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. My research is on health economics and health policy. Thanks to the strong faith of my parents and grandparents, I was immersed in the Christian faith since the day I was born. I joined our church at age nine. In my denomination, that meant making a public profession of my faith in Jesus Christ and being baptized. Despite my young age, I still remember quite vividly the immediate effect that my baptism had on my view of the world and my place in it. I understood then, as I do now, that there were two forces at work in the world. I understood that I had consciously aligned myself with good, rather than evil, and that my choice would involve costs as well as rewards. Over the years, my early profession of faith has been a source of inspiration, confidence, guidance and joy. However, I found it necessary to reassess my commitment to Christ as an adult. I have read articles recently about the life-crises that young people have around the age of 21, which apparently get much less attention than mid-life crises. That certainly was my experience. My crisis was not so much a crisis of faith, as a panic attack. I had missed the Vietnam draft by only 3 numbers in the lottery and was facing life’s responsibilities, including the immediate need to earn a living. However, there was an element of the panic attack related to my faith. I believed at that time that I had reached the limits of the Christian faith’s ability to explain its core beliefs from any sort of intellectual perspective, and for me, any progress from that point on would just be a matter of “blind” faith. In retrospect, this conclusion was both odd and unwarranted. I was fairly familiar with the Bible, but I had read virtually no modern apologetics, much less any of the great works of Christian scholarship written over the millennia. I knew almost nothing of church history. The limits I had reached were not the limits of the Christian faith, but the limits imposed by my own ignorance. At that point that I began to weigh alternatives worldviews. Nihilism, both pure and the type embedded in a materialistic worldview, were non-starters for me. I had seen the black depression in people who had convinced themselves that life had no purpose. The eastern religions offered a happier form of purposelessness, but I knew that the joys and sorrows of life were real, not illusions. I saw that there really was no choice to be made, at least nothing that I could rightly term a choice. On the one hand lay a meaningless existence promising despair and depression. On the other hand stood Jesus Christ with the promise of life triumphant and everlasting. If that’s what we call a choice, then I wish all choices were that easy. However, the primary reason I rededicated my life to Jesus as an adult was not because Christianity simply was the best available worldview (although it was). Nor was it the realization that Jesus had been a reliable guide and source of strength for me since committing my life to him as a child (although He had been). The primary reason was my realization that the claims of Christianity are true. The Bible is, in fact, the historical record of God’s love for human beings, despite our failings. Jesus really did live, die and live again. He really was fully human and fully divine, and His words actually have brought life triumphant and everlasting to his followers, who represent one-third of the world’s current inhabitants. Since my adult decision to follow Christ, I have had a chance to remedy some of my deficiencies in Christian scholarship. I also have had the great pleasure to work with the Maclaurin Institute, a Christian studies center at the University of Minnesota. These experiences only have increased my confidence that the claims of Christianity are true. I’ve also had my share of personal failures and disappointments, but the truths of Christianity continue to provide me with the essentials necessary to put both successes and failures in perspective. The first is the assurance of an unassailable source of personal worth that results from being created in the image of a God whose act of self-sacrificial love reconciled my imperfection to His perfection. The second is the humility and awe that I experience when I contemplate the power, goodness, mercy and grace that God has shown to one as undeserving as me. |
