OK, I'm convinced. Now what?

I need to get some sort of Cliff's Notes version of the Bible sometime this week.

I've been devouring books on religion for a couple of months now and am intellectually convinced of the following things:

• Some sort of intelligence created the universe.
• There is good reason to believe it is the God that the Bible talks about.
• Once you truly believe in God it's pretty easy to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. The evidence there is pretty compelling.
  

All of this makes sense logically but, as I mentioned in my first post, my heart has yet to catch up. I've tried praying but can't stop the voice in the back of my head that says, "I am talking to myself here. This is crazy." I think I have truly opened my mind and my heart to the possibility of believing in God, so I'm not sure what to do next.

In some of these books the authors talk about how enriching it is once you finally believe. I get really frustrated and pissed that I haven't been able to make it happen for myself. Last night I thought, "This is so hard! If only God had given people some sort of written instructions for how to believe in him!"

Oh, yeah. I guess he did.

So I picked up the Bible I bought last week (the first I've ever owned) and started reading. Wow, that's some dense stuff. And it's LONG! It would take me like, I don't know, decades to read the whole thing. So I'm looking for some sort of summary that will give me the basic gist of what the Bible says about how I'm supposed to seek God and Jesus or whatever.

Then I found myself thinking, "If there were only a place where I could go and talk to Christians and have them explain this stuff to me!"

Umm, yeah, I guess there are places like that.

This realization that the Bible and churches might actually serve a purpose has been a big one for me. My whole life I've obviously been aware that these things existed but thought of the Bible as a collection of fairy tales (sorry, it's true) and thought of church as having a purely social function. It's like I'm seeing these things for the first time now.

If you had told me two years ago that today I would be open to the possibilities that Bible is a truthful book that I might use to guide my life and that going to church might help me get in touch with God, who exists, I would have probably collapsed from shock. No. I *definitely* would have collapsed from shock.

So I've come a long way, but I still have a long way to go. I worry that this spiritual journey is going end in a dead end. I've gone as far as I can intellectually, and now it's time to believe emotionally. But that's not something I can control. I can think and rationalize and analyze all day long with absolutely no impact on my heart, and that's the big battle that needs to be won.

Wish me luck.