Sample Chapters

CHAPTER 1: Is It Logical To Believe In God?

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).”

“I believe in Science,” he said confidently. Then with deliberate focus and dramatic pauses, he tapped the Bible that sat on the table and added, “I believe in reality.” Looking down at me over the top of his glasses, he said with emphasized clarity, “This book is real, but that says nothing about the truth of the words written in it.”

In other words, the Bible does not measure up to science. Or does it?

The word science comes from the Latin Scientia, which means knowledge — and according to Merriam-Webster: knowledge based on demonstrable and reproducible data.

Good science is the basis of vast amounts of the collective knowledge of humankind that differentiates mankind from the rest of creation even as it informs and fuels the modern era. Modern science transported mankind across time from horse drawn wagons to super-sonic flight, even into space; to lifesaving and disease-destroying technologies and medicines, to rescuing the environment from previous abuses and feeding multitudes across the globe. It expands our understanding of and our mastery over our world.

Importantly, whether it be Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion, or any of the basic Laws of Physics, good science gives us just that, laws – not an opinion or a wish, not a personally held belief, but the truth of an objectively existent reality. Moreover, by trusting in the Scientific Method we surpass opinion, come to knowledge, and in the process, discover truth.

At its core, scientific knowledge is that which is obtained by employing the Scientific Method, which can be simplistically described in four steps. It is an ongoing process of discovering the truth of things:

Observation of a phenomenon of the universe
Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon
Use the hypothesis to make predictions
Test the predictions, modify the hypothesis as needed to ensure predictability

Thus, Science, while ever expanding in its scope and accuracy, seeks knowledge that is pointedly objective, not personal opinion. Steel balls rolled off the top of a building fall to the ground – every time – consistently with the laws of gravity.

Science is beyond politics, it neither relies on the authority of government, nor on majority rule to determine what is true. Science discovers truth that exists independently of mankind and its opinions. And very importantly, it does not confuse consensus with truth but rather enables mankind to arrive at consensus in truth, two very different things. Consider this: a conversation occurs between coworkers in which one comments that “I feel like it is Friday” and the other responds with “Oh no, in my heart of hearts I know that today is most definitely a Monday.” Well coached in the mandates of their culturally sensitive and progressive American Corporation, they come together to reach consensus and so agree to identify the day as Wednesday – an example of believing that consensus is truth. But then they are joined by a new hire who, uninitiated in the politically correct process of sublimating facts with feelings, produces a calendar making clear that it is, in fact, Tuesday. With no Management in sight, all three are free to recognize that it is actually Tuesday – which is consensus in truth – and then continue happily on their way.

A crucial element of Science, one that enables confidence in the validity and truth of scientific facts, is predictability. The hypothesis must not just be proven, but tested and retested to ensure that the result is true, and true always. Of note is that predictability necessarily requires that our universe is not random, but ordered. A random universe would be, by definition, un-predictable. In such a Universe, Science would not – could not – exist. Hence, not by mere scientific proof, but by the very legitimacy of Science itself, we know the universe is ordered.

Additionally, Science teaches us that order does not accidentally, or randomly appear out of chaos. Instead, the existence of order is proof of the process of order-ing. We know the difference when we see it. Fluffy white clouds floating aimlessly across the sky are random; skywriting is ordered. That ordering is undeniably evidence of a plan. And the existence of a plan, is in turn, evidence of a plan-er.

As surely as ordered therefore knowable is the antithesis of random and unknowable, the very legitimacy of Science is proof of what politically correct scientists, unwilling to admit that God the Creator exists, refer instead to “Intelligent Design.” That embarrassing surrender to culture poses, even demands, two questions of anyone who loves Truth: What is the nature of this Intelligent Designer of all of Creation and secondly, what is our relationship with him?

What could matter more?

Einstein, genius mathematician scientist, asked and answered that question with what is now one of his most famous quotes: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.”

Therefore, to profess a universe born of accident denies not just the observable, verifiable truth of our world and the universe; it denies the order necessary to enable the existence of Science. It worships instead at the altar of a random and capricious god of evolution, a god that does not even mention, much less claim, Creation.

Just as importantly, atheism fails to offer any basis for the existence of morality. Morality measures the right and wrong of human behavior. It is simply and logically true that any legitimate “standard of measure,” whether it be to measure the distance between two points or the existence and purity of morality, must be outside that which it measures. Therefore, while we can debate the nuances of contextual right and wrong, for Right and Wrong to even exist, their measure must be distinct from that which is measured. That necessitates a standard not of us, but outside of us, against which what we do and who we are is measured. In a world where the defining Wisdom is, as Shakespeare would have us believe, that we must “To thine own self be true” (Act 1 Scene 3 Hamlet), there is no Truth, but instead nothing beyond more than 8 billion personal opinions. If such is true, then there is no Right and no Wrong – only self-serving preferences that ebb and flow with the vagaries of place and time, culture and power, ever changing to reflect the desires du jour of the congregants of the Church of Relativism.

Consider this: in a universe where morality has no objective source but rather is an accidental ancillary to the random wanderings of evolution, then it too is governed by the concept of survival of the fittest – might makes right, to the victor belong the spoils and genocide is naught but an expression of natural selection. “Let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we may die” is neither more right nor less wrong than “Let us rape, pillage, and burn.” We know that is just not true.

What atheists – whose definitions of Good and Evil are written not on our hearts by a loving and eternal Creator God, but in vanishing ink on crumbling parchment – claim are mutually exclusive World Views, Science vs God, are reconciled in the Christian World View: Science teaches that God is; the Bible teaches who God is.

The modern, culturally manufactured conflict falsely asserts the discussion is Science as contrary to God. Instead, our ordered universe includes mankind endowed by God the Creator with intellect and rationality. Science is an expression of employing both in our search for Truth. All this integrates our abilities to observe, analyze and understand such that it enables us to discover, comprehend and participate in his plan, growing with his help into the men and women He created us to be.

Science is not contrary to God, but rather a gift from God. It is as simple as this: Science reflects reality. Atheism does not.

We thank you, heavenly Father, who by your mercy, not our merit, grants that we might come to know the Truth of who you are and of whom you created us to be.

CHAPTER 2: The Fall

“…but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

How could a Just and Loving God allow all of mankind, from before recorded time began until the second coming of Christ, to suffer in punishment for Adam’s Fall?

In the Biblical story of Genesis, God created for 6 days and although pleased with what he had created, he was not finished: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’

“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation” (Genesis 1:26-2:2).

Of note, there is no mention of the creation of Sin, because Sin was not of God’s original creation – not from God and yet, according to the story of the Fall in the Book of Genesis, by Adam and Eve’s sin, all of God’s creation is marred by sin – fallen. But how can God’s creation not be as he intended? Did the omnipotent, omniscient Creator of all that is make a mistake?

Did God get it wrong?

More specifically, how can an all-loving God continue to punish all of mankind for a sin committed before time, before any of us was born?

God’s creation of the heavens and earth reached its crescendo when on the 6th Day Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. They were given a purpose, to be Stewards over His creation. To them and only them, alone among all the rest of creation, God gave not just life, but dominion over His Creation. God put Adam and Eve in charge.

God also gave them a command: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’” (Genesis 2:16-17). We know the story, Adam and Eve succumbed to Satan’s temptation and in what is now known as “Original Sin,” they ate the forbidden fruit and were expelled from the Garden. But that is not the whole story. Not even close.

God, in considerable detail, called all the world into being. Yet in the midst of this amazing story of Creation, he spoke only one commandment that said not what will be, but rather what was not to be, “…you shall not eat…” God commanded Adam and Eve to not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

That commandment established the context in which the most significant and devastating event in human history occurred. Adam and Eve, at that moment the entirety of the human race, they in fact were the human race and its progenitors, the original ancestors who passed on to each of us who and what we are. They were both the pinnacle and stewards of His Creation, and they rejected God and instead chose Satan. Their choice gave control of creation to Satan: “…and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).

That bears repeating. Mankind, created in the image of God as Stewards of Creation and given the gift of Free Will, used that Free Will to reject God and choose Satan. That is how the world in which we live got broken; that is why everything is so broken.

God didn’t make it broken. We did.

Consider the ramifications of Adam’s and Eve’s horrific use of Free Will. Every moment of pain, suffering, and injustice; every crippling disease, depression, sorrow filled tear and broken heart; the very existence of sin and death – and every shattered soul since the beginning of history can be placed at their feet.

A lesson for all: to confuse the Stewardship of God’s Creation with privilege carries the gravest of consequences. And Free Will does not ever mean, nor does it ever grant, freedom from accountability.

But even more amazing than our monumental failure is that God’s mercy is greater than our sin. At our fall He immediately launched his plan, not of retribution, but of forgiveness; not punishment, but restoration. Despite our choice to reject God’s plan and instead align ourselves with Satan in submission to Satan’s plan, God’s plan was and is for our salvation, no matter how unearned and undeserved. His desire remains that we spend eternity with him.

But first, in an attempt to better understand it all, let’s take a closer look at the sequence of events.

God’s commandment to not eat of the forbidden fruit makes perfect sense inside the context of his declaration in Genesis 1:31 that everything he had made was not just good, but very good. That amazing creation of the heavens and the earth, and especially that which he made in his own image, Mankind, was worth protecting. And that was God’s loving reason for the commandment to not eat of the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil; the commandment was to protect Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve were the first, the beginning, the infancy of Mankind’s existence. They had no experience of Evil, not even a framework or context in which it could be understood; they had known nothing but the “good and very good” of God’s creation. Two more facts crucial to a complete understanding of the Fall must be noted. Firstly, Created in his image included that Adam and Eve possessed Free Will. That is because God understands that Love is not the dictates of one imposed on another, but a relationship shared between them. That means Love cannot be imposed and still be Love. So firstly, Free Will is necessary for Love to exist. And secondly, God’s nature being Love mandates He honor our Free Will, even to allow mankind to make the worst choice possible — to deny God and choose Satan.

Like a loving father today, God desired to shield his children from pain and suffering. The purpose of the commandment to not partake of the fruit of that tree was to protect them from the very real consequences of coming to know Evil before they were ready – not unlike rules made by loving parents today.

Satan, creature not Creator, is subject to God’s Creation wherein Mankind has Free Will. As such Satan could not impose Evil on Mankind any more than God would impose Love. But Man could choose, and Satan could tempt. Satan seduced Adam and Eve. When Adam and Eve broke God’s commandment to not eat of the forbidden fruit, an irrevocable change occurred. To say it one more time, Adam and Eve – Mankind – rejected God and thereby chose Satan. That broke everything!

God’s punishment of Adam and Eve included expelling them from the Garden. But even Mankind’s banishment from the Garden was not just punishment, but also the act of a loving father. Here’s why. In the Garden there also existed the Tree of Eternal Life. If, after breaking God’s commandment, which put them in a fallen state, Adam and Eve had partaken of the fruit of that tree, they would have lived for Eternity in their sin – an apt description of Hell.

Out of His love of Adam and Eve, God moved immediately to prevent that: “Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever –’ therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:22-24).

The expulsion of Adam and Eve and all their descendants from the Garden was ultimately a loving act of protection.

Later, in the chapter on God’s Sovereignty and our Free Will, we will discuss in greater detail how Free Will is not in conflict with God’s Sovereignty but is rather, a manifestation of it. But simply stated, as love cannot be imposed and still be love, God must and does honor our Free Will. And just as God allowed Lucifer to use his Free Will to rebel, God allowed his angels to join Satan’s rebellion, a choice that condemned them to eternity as demons. God also allowed his chosen ones, his Stewards of all of Creation, Mankind, to reject his plan for them, to embrace Satan’s plan, and break all of creation – hence The Fall.

Thus, Adam and Eve catapulted us out of our infancy in the paradise of the Garden into the adolescence of our existence, mortals in a broken world.

Adolescence, for the collective of Mankind as well as for each of us individually, offers a time of growth through challenges – a time to grow, in part, from mistakes made. It is the environment and mechanism by which we might grow into the men and women we were created to be… in the image of God.

Each of us is God’s created and unique expression of Mankind. Each is both an individual and connected on a shared journey – a journey to explore and discover not just the reality of the world in which we live, but the fullness of our humanity as brothers and sisters, sons and daughters created in the image of God. There is much we must learn, both as organs of the body of humankind as well as distinct individuals.

One of the most meaningful ways our learning, appreciation, and understanding of the world in which we live is enabled is through knowledge of opposites. A 6’6” man towers above others in a room of much shorter, averaged height people, giving meaning to the concept of tall. Surrounded in another room by professional basketball centers, he is short. 6’6” in either room, “short” and “tall” only have meaning by comparison to their opposites.

Similarly, we read in the story of Creation, on Day One God created dry land that separated and gave definition to the sea: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:9-10).

He also created light, the essence of which is embraced and appreciated only because there was darkness: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Genesis 1:3-5).

We comprehend the meaning of land and light by their defining opposites.

In much the same way, prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve had only known with-God. Just as one who has never shivered through a winter’s night cannot truly embrace the promise and joy in the warmth of a summer sunrise, Adam and Eve’s appreciation of the Love of God was catastrophically incomplete. They could not know what the choice they made in the Garden of Eden gave away. Joni Mitchell had it right with the lyrics of Big Yellow Taxi:

“Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone?”

But thanks to God’s mercy, Mankind did not suffer the total and permanent loss of our relationship with God. God re-opened the door that Mankind closed, the door to the fullness of our relationship with him as He intended it to be.

When Adam and Eve exercised their Free Will and ate the forbidden fruit, their defiance of God’s commandment precipitated the Fall. But God went far beyond just preventing that choice from becoming our eternity. In the most magnificent act of love imaginable, he transformed that sin into something glorious. The sin of one man, Adam, by which all are infected, would be washed clean by the suffering, sacrifice, and blood of one man, Jesus Christ, God the Son: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

God’s Love wins out!

In Paul’s epistle to the Romans, we read: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good…” (Romans 8:28). God’s uses Evil and our sin to highlight the depth and breadth of his love for us. By his love and the blood of his son, even our ignorance, weakness, and sin became meaningful pieces of God’s plan for our salvation and our eternity with Him.

Yes, the heavens and the earth were created by an all-loving God – yet Evil and its spawn, Sin, exist. But by the mercy and love of that all-powerful God, they both become purposeful; they spotlight Right as distinct from Wrong much like the curbstones against which we stub our toes when we stray from the narrow path to Salvation.

No, God did not get it wrong. That Love cannot be imposed and still be Love necessitates that Free Will must exist. And for Free Will to exist in a meaningful way, there must be alternatives that are truly significant, and in their own right a challenge to God’s created order, thereby requiring a real and committed choice on our part. In general terms, those options fall into two categories. One is the seductive offer of glorious gifts, such as Satan’s promise that Adam and Eve would be like God (Ironically, made in his image, they already were!), found in the Book of Genesis. The other is being tempted to deny, even rebel against God out of anger for the incomprehensible suffering this broken world visits upon us – the Book of Job.

These two seemingly disparate options are very much the same in that they oppose, are contrary to, God’s created order of our loving and obedient relationship with him. They are the temptations of Sin; they are the core of Satin’s strategy of destruction.

Therefore, the existence of Sin – being out of proper relationship with God – is necessary to make possible our choice to be in proper relationship with God. And the definition of that God-created proper relationship with him is to love him above all else… “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:36-40). Not suggestions but Commandments we are called to obey, they are all about Love, which comes from God: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Not of his creation, yet by his Love, the Fall and Sin became intentional parts of God the Father’s plan for our Eternity with Him. They illuminate the magnitude and magnificence of his Love as they set the stage for his self-sacrificial and greatest gift – salvation earned not by us, but for us; gifted to us by the blood of Jesus Christ, God the Son.

The story of the Fall, not unlike the parable of the Prodigal Son, ignites two burning Truths. Firstly, the errant use of Free Will, even in the immaturity of our youth, leads to catastrophic life altering outcomes. But even more importantly, the Truth that shines through all is the loving nature of God our Father in Heaven, whose Mercy is greater than our Sin.

Father, we rejected you in the Garden when Adam and Eve chose Satan. Open the eyes of our hearts and guide us, your prodigal Sons and Daughters, through the Darkness we chose back to the Light of our eternal home in you. Amen

CHAPTER 3: Immanuel (God With Us)

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23).

I love motorcycles. A twist of the wrist, the bike growls, beneath me the wheels churn the pavement into a blur, and it begins. Into the mountains, powering through another sweeping curve… I’m in the wind and free!

My love affair with motorcycles began in 1968; I was 13 years old. After school I would sneak my older brother’s brand new 1968 Ducati 250 out of the garage, quietly push it out into the street, kick start it and take off. It was my best summer ever until, that is, the day my father came home early from work. He never did that – until he did. As I straddled the Ducati talking with a friend a few blocks from my house, I looked up to see my father drive by ever so slowly, eyes straight ahead, his hand silently pointing the way to our house. That did not end well.

But he was too late; I was already hooked. Across the five decades that followed I rode for a couple hundred thousand miles, most of them crisscrossing the Colorado Rocky Mountains, without ever putting a bike down.

Until I did.

It was November 11th, a Saturday morning and the wind was kicking up a little. But the weather report for the ride I planned called for dry, sunny, and warm enough – just right for a late season run. Out of Colorado Springs and southwest on 115 to highway 50, into and out of Canon City, tucked into my 1500cc Valkyrie I muscled through the canyon along the Arkansas River. At Texas Creek it was left on 69 and a twisting, winding ride south, the Sangre Di Cristo Mountains on my right all the way into West Cliffe, one of my favorite Colorado mountain towns. Slowing through both streetlights on main street, it was east on 96 through Silver Cliff, then into the Wet Mountains and heading home without a car in sight; it was just me, the wind, and the road… perfect!

I snaked through two back-to-back S-curves and had just dug into the third blind curve when my eyes popped wide at the sight of sand washed across the road in front of me. 50 years of riding reflexes kicked in: back off the throttle, let the bike ease up taller, weight neutral, gentle rear brake, stay smooth, off the brake before the rear wheel hits the sand, let the rear end slip a little… don’t panic… steady… smooth… stay with it… and still the unthinkable happened. The bike went out from under me and launched me airborne, my legs barely clearing the seat when the right side of my rib cage crushed against the guard rail. My body hung against the top rail for a second, then slid down to the road. And there I lay on that beautiful and deserted mountain road, barely conscious and unable to move.

My whole body throbbed with the pain from massive internal injuries – traumatized intestines, a battered diaphragm that spasmed with every attempt at a breath, a bruised spleen and a lacerated kidney that bled into the pool of blood forming in my gut from my punctured right lung, pierced by one of my seven broken ribs. All the while a category 4 liver laceration dumped more blood than the kidney and lung combined. I couldn’t move, couldn’t inhale enough air to call out for help.

Not that anyone would have heard me. That beautiful, quiet, country road morphed into a deadly deserted road in the middle of nowhere. The only sound was the wind rustling through the Blue Spruce and Douglas Fir that lined one side of the road, the other side a sheer cliff that went straight up for a hundred feet. The eerie quiet was uninterrupted as I lay on the side of the road, silently bleeding out.

The pain went beyond anything I had ever experienced. And though it wasn’t the first time I’d time I’d been hurt – but the pain of diving into a swimming pool and breaking my neck years before paled by comparison.

As if observing from a distance, I watched the scene play out. The wind gusted down the narrow two lane that wound through the S-turns. I watched my body, paralyzed with pain, lay still, unable even to turn away as gust after gust whipped the sand on which I wrecked across the road and sandblasted my face. I saw my eyes clench shut and everything went dark as the pain chained my body to the pavement. Darkness and pain, like a black wave, flowed over everything, the world and my life disappeared beneath it.

The pain and darkness were surreal… almost alive. I gasped as they tried to smother me. Relentlessly, wave after wave crashed over me, each one darker, thicker, heavier. Finally, it was too much, I couldn’t fight any more…don’t have the strength… hurts too much… it doesn’t matter anymore… can’t win, can’t fight… it’s too much… I… can’t… fight… any…

And everything stopped. Resigned to its inevitability, I waited for the end.

It was deathly quiet. And calm… so very calm. But then something changed; there was something different. Like a door silently opening into a light filled room. There was more than just the darkness – I was not alone.

A scene played out in my mind: Christ at Gethsemane prayed that God the Father might spare him from the unimaginable human suffering he faced, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will (Matthew 26:39).”

And I prayed, “I can’t do this, I can’t… but thine, not mine… thine not mine…”

Another wave of pain crashed over me. But there was a difference. The darkness blinded me and the pain still hurt, but they were not all there was, not all that mattered.

Later I came to understand what I could only feel in that moment. Relative to eternity, our current mortal existence is but the blink of an eye. Christians are called to be in the world, but not of the world – but all importantly, especially in this broken world, we are not alone. When the pain came at me again, I knew it was not all there was, it was but a piece of a timeless moment inside the awareness that I was not alone; and what was with me was greater than the darkness and the pain.

The sound of a car door slammed shut followed by hurried steps approaching grabbed my attention. A man knelt at my side and asked if I was okay. I opened my eyes. I tried short breaths to fill my lungs enough to speak, but it hurt too much. He sat next to me and ever so gently let my head rest in his lap. And I passed out.

Sometime later I heard him tell someone to keep driving to where they had cell signal and call for help. Then the wind picked up and again sand-blasted my face. Reflexively my face turned away and my whole body exploded in a spasm of pain. That’s all I remember.

When I opened my eyes, a woman also knelt next to me, protecting me. Holding a leather jacket up in front of me, she shielded my face from the sand-blasting wind. The wind gusted and she turned her own head aside, her blonde hair whipping wildly as she was pelted by the same wind; but she never let go of the jacket.

Miles from cell service and much further from a hospital, my head cradled in the lap of a good Samaritan, I lay on the side of the road, drifting closer to death. In the deepest prayer of my life, I again prayed scripture from the garden of Gethsemane, “Father, let this pain pass from me: but not as I will, but as you will.” I prayed it over and over and over.

And I knew He was there as I faded back out of consciousness.

When I came to, I was on a gurney being loaded into an ambulance. The EMT said we were nearly an hour out from the hospital. It turned out that more than 10 hours passed before I again regained consciousness.

I came to and as my eyes slowly focused, I realized I was on a bed surrounded by 5 or 6 doctors and nurses. I looked up at them, but none of them looked at me; they watched the monitors above my head. They were waiting to declare me dead.

Motionless, I watched them and suddenly realized there was no sound. None. Surprised more than frightened I stared up at the doctors and nurses as they moved in slow motion, like a movie effect, or a foggy dream. I watched them as they watched the monitors. And I prayed.

I have no sense of how much time passed. Finally, in fantasy-like slow motion, one of them looked down at me and saw me look up at him. Silently, in slow motion his face spread into a smile, and he mouthed words without sound. Then the nurse next to him looked down and fist-pumped, also in slow motion. Next to her the third nurse soundlessly clapped her hands once and then again. At the second clap, as if the “play” button had been pushed, the noise of the trauma center filled my ears, and their movements revved up to normal speed.

As the nurses moved back to their duty stations around the room, they clapped and cheered, celebrating the victory of life over death. The doctor came around to my side, rested his hand on my arm, slowly shook his head and a tired smile, a smile that almost touched his eyes, appeared.

He took a deep breath, exhaled, and looked down for a moment, seeming to search for the words. When he looked up his smile faded away as he explained that along with 7 broken ribs, my lacerated kidney and punctured lung, my liver was ripped nearly in half. He explained that livers can’t be stitched. Along with the other torn organs, it was dumping blood into my gut. He told me if my body stabilized, I would live, but if not, I would bleed out and not make it through the night.

He rushed to add he had already ordered a blood transfusion for me since I had lost so much blood, and he wanted to have the Flight for Life helicopter transport me 100 miles north to a hospital in Denver where they had more expertise with damaged livers. He leaned closer to hear me whisper, “Whatever you think is best. I’m okay” and I went back to my prayers. His shoulders relaxed, he nodded and closed his eyes.

And I prayed.

With me strapped in, the helicopter lifted off from the trauma center in Pueblo, Colorado and flew north to Denver. I spent a few days in ICU and then a few more before checking myself out and returning home under the watchful eye of a friend. As we left the hospital to begin the ride down to Colorado Springs, Stephen explained that he was moving in with me until I was okay as I dozed off.

He moved in while his wife Amanda, along with friends from my church, cooked for us and delivered meals. Despite their prayers and efforts, my condition slipped. One night two fitful weeks later, I slowly sat up on the couch, then tried to stand, but something was very wrong. I called to Stephen as chills rippled through my body and I collapsed. In adrenal failure, on the threshold of catastrophic organ failure, I was in Severe Sepsis slipping towards Septic Shock. While Stephen dialed 9-1-1, convulsions wracked my body so violently that the couch shook. At the peak of those convulsions, I hoarsely whispered the words, “Father, please help me. Father, please help me. Father, please help me…”

And He was there.

At the hospital they pumped me full of antibiotics and surgically installed tubes to drain the pool of infected blood in my abdomen ignored by the Denver hospital. Five days later, tubes draining the block of infection that encased my liver into a bag hung at my side, I went home.

It was rough going. Plagued by insomnia, panic attacks, and claustrophobia, unbeknownst to me, I was suffering from PTSD. Sleepless night after sleepless night, panicked with the suffocating fear that my house was collapsing on me, I found myself in the back yard shivering in the frigid darkness of Colorado winter nights asking why.

And praying.

The next months were full of hours, so many hours, too much time to think… endless unsettled, reflective hours that spawned a darkening sense of just how broken is the world in which we live. That, combined with the most honest look at my own brokenness I had ever permitted, filled me with regret. On the worst nights, haunted by guilt, the darkness cast its shadows well past sunrise. Shamed by guilt, I stumbled beyond remorse and fell against the threshold of depression.

For some, a word to the wise is sufficient. But for the rest of us, me included, the strength of our faith is fire formed in the forge of such adversity. Slowly, and very thankfully, the most profound healing those months of recovery produced was the sure knowledge that in the darkness, there shines a light. It was the hope in that light that carried me through. This is true first, foremost, and forever because I was not alone.

We are not alone.

It was a rough year. I wasn’t always sure I would make it. But I did. Some suggested I made it through because of how tough I am. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather, it had everything to do with the God who at his incarnation as man was named Immanuel, God who is with us: “… and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23).

The God of the Book of Genesis – the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph – the God promised by the prophets and incarnated by the Holy Spirit of the Blessed Virgin is with us, especially when we need Him most. He is God the Son, given for us by God the Father that all who believe in Him shall not perish but shall have eternal life. He was, is now, and always shall be Immanuel, God among us. “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

God the Father, whom we rejected in the Garden, followed us to live in the world not as he created it, but the world as we broke it. He divested himself of the glory of his majesty and humbled himself such that the God who created all that is might be born as one of us, incomprehensibly man yet still fully divine. He chose to live amidst our brokenness, to be the light that shines in the darkness that the darkness has not overcome. He walked among us, guiding us, suffering the pain of our sins that he might light our way back to the Father.

It is the most amazing story ever told. God the Creator honored our use of the Free Will with which he created us, even when we used it to deny Him. With unimaginable humility born of agape, the unconditional love of the Father, the God who stoops to save stepped down from his throne as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and was made man. Jesus lived among us to light our way through the Darkness of our making, then died for us on that cross carrying our sins: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Sin and Satan, rather than Mankind, were judged on the cross. In perfect obedience to God the Father, Jesus paid the price for our Sin with his death on the cross. Thus, by the blood of God the Son, Mankind was reconciled to God the Father.

God the Father resurrected God the Son – the defeat of the Death to which we condemned ourselves in our choice of the serpent over God in the Garden. His promise of eternity in paradise with Him for which he created us was restored. He is Immanuel, God with us, and despite our failures and rejection of him, He is always with us. Of that, we should remain ever mindful and for that, worshipfully grateful.

Father, fill our hearts with your in-dwelling Holy Spirit that with your guidance we might be better the men and women you created us to be. By your grace, not our merit, grant us your strength and hold us from harm. Shield us from evil and make us wholly yours. Amen