The first question anyone reading this new blog, or the book it will eventually lead to, will ask, will be why they should bother. Why should anyone care about my story?

I ask myself that. I admit – parts of the story are funny, and other parts are interesting. I’m also a pretty good storyteller. At the same time, all stories have funny parts and interesting parts, and there are many good storytellers. So why should anyone care about my story? I’m not a minister. I have no degree in theology, and in fact, everything I know (or think I know) about theology comes from reading the Bible.

The truth is that I lived this story, and as a result, there is absolutely nothing abnormal or compelling about it at all, at least to me, and yet every single time how I became a Christian comes up in conversation, I am told I should write a book, so my story appears to be compelling to other people.

When you are told once to write a book, it is easy to blow it off. When you are told twice, you still might blow it off. When you are told every time a certain subject comes up that you need to write a book, eventually you decide to do so, and so here I am – telling my story in a blog, eventually to cull from the blog material to write a book.

I can’t give my entire story all in one entry, so I’ll start at the beginning – how I found (or perhaps was found by) Christ.

It was in the summer of 1975, when I was four years old.

My parents were atheists who never talked about religion without insulting the concept. Religion was stupid, ‘an opiate for the masses,’ as my father explained.

My mother is an even more devout atheist than my father was, and I learned about her upbringing at an early age – she was raised Dutch Reformed, and though she ended up an actress and then drama teacher (my dad taught history), acting was a sin in the Dutch Reformed Church, as were a great many other things. My mom had to sneak into theaters and movies to see acting, and would get into trouble whenever she got caught.

As I remember it, dancing, singing – even singing church hymnals when out of church was a sin. That could not have been true – my grandfather, I found out much later, had a doctorate in music (and he had an organ in the living room) so clearly music was allowed, but that’s how I remember it from when I was four, and though the specifics of that example can’t be true ⏤ the sense of the religion being extremely strict was true, and my mother was just not religious as a result, but decidedly anti-God.

I can characterize everything I knew about Christianity at four as: it disavows anything that in any way might be fun, it is stupid, it was created to help control the masses, the leadership of the church knows that it is all B.S., churches are exploitative – they exist to transfer money from the gullible to the corrupt, smart people are not religious, and last but not least, there is no God. When one is four years old, their parents know everything, and that is what my parents had taught me.

My grandmother on my father’s side was a Unitarian Universalist. When she went to church, she went to People’s Church, which was far more of a political cult than a religion. I’ll discuss People’s Church again several times, I promise. For now, understand that while my family did not go to any church (when I was four), People’s Church was viewed in reasonably good favor for being a church that did not believe in God. It was an atheist church – members sometimes called it the Church of Man.

I’m told that not all Unitarian Universalist churches are as anti-God as People’s Church (and one of my sisters, who as an adult became an active member of People’s Church, told me that People’s Church is not as extreme as it used to be), but the only experience I have had with a Unitarian Church was the People’s Church of my youth, and that was particularly true when I was four.

The only thing I knew about Jesus was that my father would use His name a whole lot whenever he was angry, adding an expletive between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’.

My best friend was a neighbor kid two doors down the street named Ian. Ian and I were best friends – we rode our big wheels together and played every day.

On Sundays Ian would go to church, and I would not be able to play with him until after lunch, but after lunch I’d head over, and on to the big wheels we would go, until one Sunday Ian said he was going to go to Sunday School. I was about to head home until he asked if I wanted to go too. My parents thought it sounded harmless enough and so I went.

I don’t remember much about Sunday School. I remember coloring some pictures of people wearing strange clothes. I assumed they must have been people from a long time ago – maybe they were people from this religion.

At some point one of the adults asked if any of us children knew anything about Jesus. A bunch of hands went up, mine included. Being new, I was called first.

“I know his full name,” I proudly announced. And I WAS proud – Jesus’ full name was literally the only thing about Jesus that I knew!

“Yes, his name is Jesus Christ,” the adult said.

“I know his middle names,” I said, somewhat shocked that this adult did not know Jesus’ middle names. He did not even seem to know that Jesus had middle names.

“Jesus Christ is His full name,” the adult answered, and then he went into some of the other things Jesus is sometimes called (Jesus of Nazareth, for example), indicating that those things were not actual names.

I was adamant that Jesus had middle names, and I told him so – my father used his full name all the time!

Finally, the adult asked the question you must never ask a four year-old raised in an atheist household: “OK, then. What do you think Jesus’ full name is.”

Proudly, with great conviction I blurted it out: “Jesus Fucking H. Christ!”

It is not hard to imagine the result, though to be honest I do not remember exactly what was said next. I remember being pulled aside and talked to about why I would say that, and I remember that once the adults figured out I’d really thought that was His full name (and was not just trying to be a smart ass), the adults explained to me who Jesus was, and that Jesus Christ really was His full name.

When I got home, my parents asked me how Sunday School went. I said it was fine. They asked me if I learned anything. I said, “Yes I did. I learned that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, who died for my sins, and that He does NOT have middle names!”

Holy Smokes was my dad mad. He drug me back to the same church (and I still remember what church it was – a Baptist church on Nichols Road near West Main, in Kalamazoo, Michigan), and chewed out the pastors: “How DARE you brainwash my child!!”

The problem was, for my parents at least, that I had not been brainwashed, and I told my parents that, before my father drug me back to the church. No tricks had been played on me. I had simply been told what Christians believed, it made sense to me, and I found that upon hearing it, I believed it too.

My faith remained a subject of debate for the rest of my childhood, and particularly at first. My parents tried very hard to talk me out of my new found faith, but none of their arguments made as much sense as the simple truth that Jesus was my Lord and Savior, who died for my sins. There was a simplicity to the belief in Jesus – it answered a great many questions about the nature of existence and the battle between good and evil. A four year old may not have a very mature sense of such things, but even at four we know good and evil exists, and we know we will not live forever. Jesus gave answers to things where before I’d only had questions.

Now… I do not remember much about the debates I had with my parents at four years of age. I just remember I had them – they wanted me to denounce this new religion of mine, and I was not having it. I found my parents’ arguments to be logically weak – almost always circular – and had an easy time countering them.

Does a four year old even know what a ‘circular argument’ is? I found out what it was, as it was one of the first things my parents used to dissuade me from belief – the argument for God is circular and must be rejected. This part of the debate I do remember. “So too is the argument that there is no God,” I replied. “I do believe and if circular arguments are bad, I am not going to stop believing because of a circular argument.”

The core of my belief – the bedrock that grounds it – is from that first debate with my parents when I was four. I recognized even then that though it was true that all arguments in support of there being a God are circular, and therefore there is no logical reason to adopt belief, the same was true in the reverse: all arguments that there is NO God are also circular, and as such for the believer there is no logical reason NOT to believe. Whatever assumption about the existence of God one starts with, there is no logical reason to change outside of whatever may happen to that person in their personal lives.

I experienced other reasons for me to believe later in my journey, and I will over time discuss all of them, but for now, suffice it to say that an atheist cannot disprove God without circular arguments anymore than a theist can prove God’s existence.

To me this story is nothing special or unique – it is simply what happened. Others point out that what happened to me, at such a young age, sounds like it had divine inspiration – how does a four year old successfully debate his parents without the Holy Spirit flowing through him is one thing I have heard more than once. I had one guy trying to convince me that all Christians must be reborn. I was never reborn, I told him, and yet I am a Christian. We went back and forth for a long time, and finally he asked how I became a Christian. “Of COURSE you do not remember being ‘reborn’,” he finally said, “It happened when you were FOUR – you probably don’t remember anything from before that!”

I actually do remember things from before I became a Christian, but I don’t remember much, and I don’t remember much of it very well. I’m the youngest of three, and am sometimes shocked at just how inaccurate some of the details of my memories are. I remember secret passages all through my grandmother’s house (the People’s Church grandmother – in the summer I spent so much time with her I practically lived with her). As it turns out, there were no secret passages, but one of my sisters used to tell me there were as a means of trying to get me to go down a laundry shoot from the second floor to the basement. Luckily, I never actually went down the laundry shoot (and nor do I remember her wanting me to), but I remember the secret passages as if they were real.

I also remember going to daycare when my parents both worked at Loy Norrix High School. The daycare was in the same school so I rode with them to work in the morning. I remember certain stores along the way (one was a toy store we never stopped at), and I remember that the KC and the Sunshine song, “That’s the way, aha aha, I like it, aha aha” played on the radio every day, all the way to school. Of course, that song was not on the radio all the time, even though I remember that it was, but it would have been on often enough when it was popular (in 1975 – when I was four).

Somehow my memory of accepting Jesus is more complete and more vivid than other memories from early in my youth.

And that’s that. I was raised a Christian in an atheist household. I was also a Republican raised in a Democrat household, and perhaps those two things are related.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll continue to share my experiences in my personal journey to Jesus. I invite you to join along, and I invite you to share your experiences in your personal journey in the comments.