A plan

I technically don't have time to update at all, but I wanted to say a couple of quick things:

- The comments to my last two posts have been truly mind-blowing. Thank you so much Colleen, Steve G., and Jeff. I think that if I ever do end up believing I will look back and be able to point to your comments on the posts from 10/1 and 10/5 as the catalysts that started pushing me in the direction of faith, just when I was starting to lose hope that I'd ever believe.

- I've mentioned before that I can pinpoint when my spiritual quest began in earnest: Friday, July 22 of this year. I had been meaning to look into the whole Christianity thing since it's important to my husband, and since I knew I didn't want to raise my child to be an atheist (or, worse, to be "spiritual but not religious"). But I just didn't know where to start and, frankly, wasn't all that interested in it.

I had taken my mom to an appointment with an aesthetician for her birthday and headed over to Border's to pass the time while I waited for her. When I walked in the door, it was strange. I immediately saw Strobel's book The Case For Christ and walked right over to it. What's odd about this is that I have always actively avoided the Religion sections of bookstores, assuming they're just filled with books like "Let's Cry About How Amazing Jesus Is -- For Teens!"

I always assumed that every book in the Religion section is not something I'd be interested in. But for whatever reason I gravitated to The Case for Christ. I devoured it in two days (no small feat for a busy mom) and it completely changed the course of my life. For the first time ever, I actually considered the possibility that maybe Jesus was something more than just a nice guy with interesting things to say.

In the past few months since then I often wondered what would have happened if I had not seen that book in Border's that day. Just a week before I'd purchased a book for fun summer reading, Galileo's Daughter, that I was very excited about and was adamant about not getting anything else to read until I'd finished that one. Many times I've thought about how different my life would be right now if I had just stuck with my plans to read Galileo's Daughter instead.

Then, last week, after finishing every Lee Strobel book ever written, a summary of the Bible, and Mere Christianity I decided to give myself a spiritual break and go back to Galileo's Daughter. A funny thing happened after I got about 20 pages into it: I found it to be the most compelling case for Christianity I've come across yet. The stories of how Galileo personally balanced his beliefs as a sincere, devout Catholic with his passion for science kindled in me an interest in being a Christian that I had not yet felt.

It strikes me as interesting that even if I had missed Strobel's book and gone back to Galileo's Daughter, I still would have started on my path toward Christianity at the exact same time. It almost seems like it's part of some sort of plan.