Seeing the Same Things Part3

My last post was about my return to faith after a period of atheism, this continues that story. Thinking about it now I gave up my faith not because I doubted, I gave up because I could no longer live that way. It was more of a rejection than an honest doubt. So after this period, I started to consider believing again because of fears, I was alone and could not handle my life by myself. Well, all it took was a slight change in me and good things started to come my way, things that reinforced a different outlook in life, custom-tailored for me. At this junction I quit working and went to college full time. This opened up a new world for me, I was a bad student in my high school years and did not put much effort to my studies. In college I could choose my classes and I savored learning, it was stimulating and I was starting to hone in on what my talents and gifts were. I took a debate class because it was part of my required courses. I realized that I was naturally inclined towards Logic and argument. Part of this class was staging debates with fellow students, I took part in one debate and used my old fundamentalist preacher style talent of public speaking. I really impressed my teacher, I remember he asked me to join the debate team, it was amazing! So debate involves defending ideas, part of this is defending both sides of an issue. During this time I was starting to stray from God again, things were going well and I thought that I should apply the principles of logic to evaluating my faith. After all, fear was what caused me to return to faith. I came to a point where I said to myself that I would give God one last chance to convince me about Him, I was ready to abandon it all again for intellectual reasons this time (as opposed to emotional ones when I first rejected faith) and I gave Him a chance to "convince" me. I remembered seeing something odd in a Christian bookstore many years ago, science fiction novels. In the moral majority influenced Christian culture of the 80's science fiction and Christianity did not mix so seeing this book intrigued me. I went to our corner public library and found one of those books, it was "Out of the Silent Planet" by C.S. Lewis. Little did I know that God was answering my challenge, and that He would answer it in a big way..