This might be true

It was about this time last year that my husband and I agreed that we should start going to church. I was pregnant, and it was becoming increasingly important to me to figure out my religious beliefs the closer it go to the baby's due date.

I planned to find a nice church to join, hopefully with lots of other young families like ours. I even planned to work on my faith and try to come to some sort of peace with the concept of intelligent design. It never even occurred to me to believe in Jesus. Not once. I didn't even think that that was what modern Christians were supposed to do. I thought we all agreed that all those stories were pretty far-fetched and we should just think of Jesus as a nice guy who had interesting things to say. I honestly thought the only difference between most Christians and non-Christians was that Christians just really liked what Jesus had to say and wanted to talk about it once a week.

Then a few weeks ago on Friday, July 22 I was passing time in Borders while my mom was getting a birthday massage and I happened to see The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. I started flipping through it. I couldn't put it down. I read late into that night, called a babysitter to help me with my son Saturday during the day so I could read, and continued devouring every page until the wee hours of Sunday morning. It was around noon on Sunday when I'd finished it.

I set the book down and fell back onto my pillows, staring straight ahead. I couldn't believe how much my worldview had changed over the course of one weekend. There was suddenly so much more at stake. My search for religion was no longer an interesting little thought exercise, my evaluation of churches no longer centered around how easy it was to park.

A bit in shock, for the first time in my life, I looked over at the Bible on my nightstand and thought, "This might be true."