Got God?

First, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Chad and i'm on staff here at Christlife as an intern for the 2006-2007 school year. As a student at UMBC I was fascinated by the fact that this week is "athiesm week" and last night's event was a forum where religious topics could be addressed in a safe environment. This event led me to some interesting considerations about what makes people athiests vs. believers. I have find that some athiests (not all!) have an intense aversion to religion. There seems to be something utterly hateful that they find in the lives of faith. Now, what I'm about to say must be read very carefully as it will come across rather condemningly either.

I often wonder if people who reject God have an intense fear or repentence. I only say this because in my own experience, the times that I feel furthest from God are the times when I really don't feel like repenting. However, when I can be brought to that point of inner surrender to God's will, I come to see that my fears were imaginary, and that the God of love is unimaginably more powerful than my greatest fears. And so, my spiritual life seems to be a roller coaster ride of learning to die to myself... learning to let that wretched part (the part that, for reasons I can't explain, simply loves darkness) of me die and only through this type of death to I find freedom in the life of God through Christ. Why Christ? Because I see in him the fulfillment of every human need given by God: love, intimacy, truth etc... I'm sure there's so much more to be discovered in knowing and loving Christ, but I am still towards the beginning of my journey (and I imagine will be until I die).

So anyways, about athiesm.... I wonder if in some cases people are so possessed (however you want to interpret that) by a spirit of fear that they have lost sight of the awesome glory and power of God's love. I remember reading Conversion by Malcolm Muggeridge, who, in recalling being rescued from suicidal despair wrote,

"Suddenly, without thinking or deciding, I started swimming back to shore . . . I shouted foolishly for help, and kept my eyes fixed on the lights of Peter's Cafe and the Costa da Sol. They were the lights of the world; they were the lights of my home, my habitat, where I belonged. I must reach them. There followed an overwhelming joy such as I had never experienced before; an ecstasy. In some mysterious way it became clear to me that there was no darkness, only the possibility of losing sight of a light which shone eternally; . . . that our sufferings, our affliction, are part of a drama - an essential, even an ecstatic part - endlessly revolving around the two great propositions of good and evil, of light and darkness. A brief interlude, an incarnation, reaching back into the beginning of time, and forward into an ultimate fulfilment in the universal spirit of love which informs, animates, illuminates all creation, from the tiniest particle of insentient matter to the radiance of God's very throne . . . Though I scarcely realised it at the time and subsequently only very slowly and dimly, this episode represented for me one of those deep changes which take place in our lives; as, for instance, in adolescence, only more drastic and fundamental. A kind of spiritual adolescence, whereby, thenceforth, all my values and pursuits and hopes were going to undergo a total transformation - from the carnal towards the spiritual; from the immediate, the now, towards the everlasting, the eternal. In a tiny dark dungeon of the ego, chained and manacled, I had glimpsed a glimmer of light . . ."