I scrolled through my Facebook feed, one post after another. Photos of friends, pictures of coffee, quotes from famous people. Advertisements.
I stopped. There it was again!
The same ad that I had seen over and over for the past few months. I hardly ever paid attention to the ads on Facebook, except this one. This one. I didn’t even notice the product being advertised, but that didn’t really matter; it was the tagline that got wedged in my brain so firmly that it replayed like a chant in my mind without my even really looking at the ad:
“What if, for 30 days, you just believed?”
Since my husband Pat had first begun his research into philosophy of religion, his reading list had transformed, book by book, into a study of Christianity. Simultaneously, this ad began showing up in my social media feed. So, while my husband was becoming more Christian-like by way of his studies, I was slowly being introduced to Christianity by way of my boredom-induced web browsing. The funny thing is that, as far as I’m aware, that advertisement had nothing to do with Christianity, and yet that is how I thought of it, how it kept niggling at me as I sat on the sidelines, watching Pat immerse himself in Christianity and become a better husband and father as he did.
I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something to all this Christian stuff. Could it—as wild and wacky as it sounded—actually be true? And even if it wasn’t true, were there enough potential benefits to living a Christian life, including becoming a better, happier person, that would make the absurdity of organized religion worth it?
What if, for 30 days, you just believed?
I didn’t even know what belief actually entailed. Did I need to “accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior”? What did that even mean? Could I just read a Bible? Should I pray? What kind of prayers? Did I need to give up my Sunday mornings, get out of comfy pajamas, and actually go to a church?
No, I decided. No, no, no. I couldn’t do that, not any of it. And so, as I had many times before, I scrolled right by the ad and left it at that.
And yet…
What if, what if, what if?
Meanwhile, Pat thrust himself deeper into Christianity, wrestling with his biggest hangups to a faith in Jesus. Miraculously, Jesus prevailed. Pat set aside his atheism and accepted Christ as Truth. He was eager for me to join him in this newfound belief, but through his years of internet marketing and his experience being my husband, he knew there would be no pressuring me into Christianity. He needed to finesse me a little, present the message in just the right way, and that meant he needed to address my concerns and my disbelief with dispassionate interest.
“You know,” he said to me in passing, “I got a book on Kindle you might like. It’s called The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.”
“Oh?” I said politely.
“It’s about an investigative journalist, an atheist, whose wife converts to Christianity, and he goes on to research Jesus from an historical perspective—he interviews all these experts, including anthropologists and historians and psychologists. Anyways, if you want to take a look, you can read it on your phone.”
And then he walked away.
He didn’t force me to talk about the book. He didn’t make me say I’d read it. He didn’t hand me a copy. But he did put the ball in my court—which was the smartest thing he could’ve done. I had, after all, become a “no” person. Had he forced me to make a judgment call right then and there about that book, I would’ve balked, and the impenetrable walls of Jericho constructed around my heart would have only grown stronger. Instead, he used two evangelization techniques that we ought to pay attention to.
One: often a person can be more persuasive when he can get someone to see that he isn’t being pushy, but rather that he’s allowing the space and genuine freedom for that person to make his own assessment of the Christian faith.
And two: know a person well enough that you can come to a discussion of Christianity from positions he is already interested or invested in.
His brief synopsis of the book did intrigue me. Coming from a family of journalists, being a lover of history and anthropology, and having a spouse who had seemingly left me in my non-belief? It all worked together to make me want to open the book. Pat hadn’t mentioned how the story ended. Did the writer get his wife to de-convert? Or did they coexist without treading on each other’s beliefs? Or did he discover that his wife was in the same spot as me—with the tiniest smidgen of hope, exhausted by cynical non-belief—yearning for truth?
What if, for thirty days, you just believed?
That week, the advertisement showed up one final time in my Facebook news feed. This time, I gave the idea some serious thought, playing around with a kind of thirty-day faith challenge. That would be long enough to give a real attempt at trying on Christianity. If I got to the end of the month and realized I still didn’t believe, then, sure, I might have to eat a little crow, but I would also be in the position to have my atheism strengthened. If I gave this religion an honest try and found it wanting, then I could be even more confident that atheism was true and settle back in, as much as I might not want, into my closed world of nos. If I went through the thirty days and believed in Christ, well . . . future Christine could worry about that improbability when the time came. Besides, that last option was a bit too frightening to wrap my head around.
So how does it turn out? Get the ending in Catholic Answers’ new book, Not Just Spiritual.