Belief By Accident

We were new Christians and our oil exploration company was small, but some of us had decided to meet before work in the conference room to pray for each other and for the people who came in that office. We asked Christ to come into the company’s life through us if it were His will. We had never known anyone who had done this, but were fascinated with the changes that took place.

For example, one day the man whom I felt was an agnostic, particularly concerning the person of Christ, came rushing into my office right after lunch and flopped down in a chair, looking very pale. That morning we had been talking about the fact that the Christian life and faith in Christ can only truly be grasped experientially, through a committing of one’s life. This had been hard for this man to see. He had an excellent academic mind. His father was an outstanding professor in biology at a Big Ten university. The young man had received a degree in chemistry and a graduate degree in geology with excellent marks. This idea of faith in Jesus Christ having to come before the understanding sounded like intellectual suicide to him.

Now he was sprawled in a chair across from my desk staring at the floor. Finally he looked up and said, “Do you know what just happened to me?”

When I said I didn’t, he related this story: it seems that on the way back to the office from lunch, he had been driving in a crowded section of the city. Several cars ahead of him, a young mother had gotten out of a parked automobile and stepped backward right into the path of a truck, which struck her down. It all happened so quickly as he was inching toward the place where the woman lay that all he could remember was seeing the look of terror on the three-year-old little girl’s face as she stared down at her mother through the open car door. A policeman had rushed up from the corner and was waving traffic around the accident. My friend said as he drove by he saw the dying woman, and she looked up at him with a pleading look . . . and then disappeared from his view as he was motioned ahead in the traffic.

The shock of this incident had made a profound impression on the man opposite me in the chair. It had shattered the shell of intellectual sophistication, he said, inside which he had been living. It had revealed to him starkly his mortality and the truth that his real objections to committing his life to Christ were not intellectual at all. They were volitional. He simply didn’t like the idea of giving up his will to God or anyone else. And upon realizing this, as he had driven on down the street, he had suddenly known existentially who he was and who God was. In the same moment, he wanted deeply to respond to the Christ whose presence and love he now sensed in his own experience. Right there in the car, he had consciously committed as much of himself as he could to as much of Christ as he could perceive. He prayed that God would come into his life and reveal Himself more completely.

Malcolm’s deep conversion and loving changes in attitude the next few months affected us deeply. And the memory of the baby looking at her dying mother on the street reminded him, and, as he told people with intellectual objections to stepping into the Christian life personally, “It’s okay to have your doubts, but . . . don’t wait too long.”