I "let Jesus into my heart" when I was four years old. I believed then as I do now that He is a real person, alive, and working in my heart in ways that are not possible, at least not for me, without His influence. Then, as now, I don't know how it works. I have heard theories/ideas on how it works from the minds of people smarter than me. I've also heard, from people smarter than me, that the idea of God is all a fiction. In the end though, they are only ideas. Ideas are only our minds' forms of things that are either real or not. The things themselves exist, or not, regardless of the ideas we have about them. I believed He was real then, I believe He is real now. An odd thing to me is that there has never been a time since my youthful "conversion" (perhaps even before then) that I didn't believe He is real, is alive, is God. Even during the seasons (yes, that's plural) of my life where I turned my back on Him, I still believed in Him.
Jesus was real to me as a 4 year old and throughout my life in very different ways than he is now. He is also very much the same in other ways. As a 4 year old, I held the image in my mind of a door on the outside of my heart that swung open to the knocks of a tiny Jesus. This image, when taken literally, is pure nonsense. But the image was just an idea: the abstract form of a true or untrue thing made as best as my young mind was capable of at the time. The idea was given to me in many forms by my upbringing in church, by some people who didn't believe it and some people who did, and by the illustrated children's Bible that we had in our house as kids. More than likely that image of Christ knocking at the door was from a drawing of Jesus knocking at the door of one of his friend's house, mixed with the image that formed in my mind from hearing Sunday school teachers, pastors, and various other people talk about "asking Jesus into your heart". Back then I believed that I was letting someone who loved me into my life, into myself. The image that formed in my mind had no bearing on whether or not the thing imagined was actually true. The amalgamation of ideas presented visually and audibly through religious channels, was useful in that it helped me understand then what I still believe is the reality. The childlike imagery is gone now, but if what the image/idea was about is true, no ideas either for or against it will change that. I believe that the truth will win out. However sound or nonsensical our ideas about the truth are, it will win, independent of them. Everything I've experienced to this point in my relatively short life has confirmed this on many fronts.
My wife, who (or whom, I never know when I get that right) I love more than even I know, and our children, who mean more to me than my own life, I encourage and will continue to encourage to seek honesty, whatever path it takes them down. The Person I asked into my heart at age 4 is the same Person I see and feel in the hearts of my wife and children (among others). It is the same Person that I saw in Stacy's heart even before I decided that I wanted her for my wife.
There is one path that will lead to that Person, and it is honesty. Once you catch the scent of honesty, or rather, once it catches you, you will follow it to the end. We were made for it. We demand justice and truth because it is fused in our bones. We get angry because truth matters to us. In my estimation, the scent has gotten ahold of my wife, now more than ever. I see it, and the more I think about it, the more I feel secure in the merit of her search, and know that hearing about her journey will only grow me. One of the reasons I know this is because there is pain with growth.
I believe He is there, leading us to Him, to our ultimate truths that He has made for us at the end of our spatio-temporal road. Regardless of the degree of the truth or falsehood of the ideas that come our way, I believe He is at the end of it all, calling our names: calling our true selves back to Him. Follow truth, wherever it takes you, because truth, in the end will win out. If you are a lover of truth from the outset, you will not be disappointed in the end. You will be confirmed in your quest, and ultimately validated throughout your entire being: you were made for it. Keep Truth and Honesty as your master, because you will meet Him at the end of the road: He and they are one in the same. When that happens we will all finally know (not believe or disbelieve, but know) what I hope is true: that our ideas of truth and honesty are to the reality as a marble is to the sun. Then we will see for the first time fully and completely, and we will be in awe of and love the Truth.
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