I was 27 when I decided to read the Bible for myself. My parents had enrolled me in Sunday school by correspondence soon after I learned to read and write; later, my father began to read the Bible and pray with the family before bedtime. We began attending church when I was 10, and I was a devout churc member during my youth. But now I had been away from the Bible and church for as long as I had been a churchgoer.

In those intervening years, I had read Neitzsche, Ayn Rand, Thomas Paine, a variety of occult and esoteric writings, and a lot of history. What was I looking for? I couldn’t have told you. It just seemed that something was missing in my life, and I hadn’t found it in organized religion nor in the things I had read nor in the boozy nights spent making a fool of myself with my friends.

I didn’t expect much from the Bible; after all, it had been written by so many different people in so many different places and times. But I felt that I needed to read it for myself. Maybe I could find some little kernel of truth, some glimpse of the presence of God – if there was a God.

So I started reading, I don’t remember just where, but I believe it was in the Old Testament, and I continued reading in all my spare moments throughout the following year.

I didn’t know what to make of it – this book whose parts had been created in such a disconnected way was so interconnected that the parts I did not want to believe were inextricably linked to the parts I did want to believe.

It was one book. There were only two possibilities: this book was either entirely a message of God addressed to all mankind, and me in particular at this time, or it was entirely a very clever man-mde deception. I didn’t want to accept the first possibility, but by now the second possibility seemed to be altogether illogical and unworthy of belief.

Now I was in deeper, more difficult, quandary than when I first opened the Bible. God had maneuvered me into a corner and the way out was to start listening to Him.