“I AM AN ATHIEST”

We were two proud, pudgy old gray-heads sitting on a bench at the park watching our grandkids play – bragging about how smart and good looking they were.

I pulled out some cards with Scripture verses I was thinking about.

He asked me what I was studying.

I told him they were verses from the Bible.

He said, “I don’t believe that stuff. I’m an atheist.”

“O really,” I said. “Why are you an atheist?”

He said he didn’t like churches.

“O really,” I said. “I burned out trying to run churches. I couldn’t fix people I was expected to fix. I couldn’t even fix myself. So I resigned and just became a friend of Jesus. ”

Then he said, “Well, there must have been someone to start all this,” sweeping his hand pointing to the lake, trees, and park around us. Then he launched into a defense of Intelligent Design!

But he just told me he was an atheist, and now he is making the case for a creator!

I just listened, and said nothing. He was talking himself out of being an atheist, and I was under no pressure to convince him of anything.

Finally, it was time to take our granddaughter, Amelia, home; so I shook his hand got up and walked off.

What just happened here?

There was a time I would have felt guilty not pressing him to “receive Christ.” It was very peaceful just watching him come to his own conclusions. God was after him and I just watched the chase.

What were my take-aways?

Well, first, people are saying things they don’t really believe in their heart. They don’t know what they believe until they start trying to explain what they thought they believed.

We all seem to have a truth-detector in our spirit that will guide us if given a chance in a non-judgmental and safe place where we don’t have to win an argument.

As Pascal said, “People are generally persuaded by the reasons which they themselves discovered than by those which have come to the mind of others.”

So what was the old grandpa’s problem? He hated religion, not God.

The irony is Jesus hated religion, too. In fact, he warned against it. ‘Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, that is, hypocrisy.” (Luke 12:1)

Hypocrisy is acting like something we aren’t which is a characteristic of religious people.

Maybe this old man got tired of the phony and wanted to be around some people who are real.

I know that is what I want too.

And Jesus said, he loved “real” too.

So that old grandpa was closer than he realized, and the more real he gets the more he will get to know personally the creator who “started all this.”