by-grace-of-god:

“The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world made sense to me.”

“I was caught in a no-man’s land between finding the case for Christianity extremely compelling, and not being able to take the leap to belief because I could not prove it to be true.

I didn’t know where to turn, so I decided to do an experiment: something rang true about Augustine’s famous statement that you must believe so that you might understand, and so I began to live my life as if God did exist. I prayed, even though I felt like I was talking to myself; I followed the Christian moral code; I read the Bible and honestly tried to understand what it might be trying to teach me. I conformed my life to a God-centered life, even thought I wasn’t sure I believed that God existed.

There was no big thunder-and-lightning encounter with Jesus, and, frankly, I only rarely “felt” God’s presence. But once I began this experiment, it was as if some hidden, tremendously powerful magnet had been activated within me that began pulling me in one direction. One odd “coincidence” after another formed a breadcrumb trail to lead me to God, and it sure did seem like some external force was acting in my life in a real way.

But the most interesting part was this:

The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world made sense to me; the more human history made sense to me; the more I started to make sense to me. The picture of human life that I’d formed based on science alone now seemed incomplete. I still believed everything I’d learned through the lens of science, but I now saw a whole other dimension to the world around me. It was like the difference between looking at a picture of a double-fudge chocolate cake and having one in front of me to smell, touch, and taste: everything I knew before was still there, but I was now experiencing it in a much more intense and vivid way.”

Jennifer Fulwiler (videos)