When Mike finished, I told him his spiritual journey would fit well with the Hebrew Christians of the First Century. They experienced deliverance by God as Father and began to observe the Spirit breaking into human life. Eventually they encountered Jesus, accepted him as God in human form and developed a life-changing personal relationship with the promised Messiah.
At a high-school church camp I was given a devotional booklet and challenged to "sit on a rock under a tree and talk to God". My imagination was captured by this quote from the booklet, "The commandment of Jesus is hard, unutterably hard, for those who try to resist it. But for those who willingly submit, the yoke is easy, and the burden is light." Perhaps God was near today, not trapped back in history. Maybe this Christ was personally concerned about me. And someday, if I could understand the meaning of "willingly submit to the yoke", I would find meaning and purpose for my life. I later learned that the quote came from Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. Perhaps I was the only young cowboy in Oklahoma to undertake a spiritual journey because of a German theologian.
On the campus of the University of Oklahoma I studied physics and continued my intellectual quest to understand God. I attended a weekly Bible study in my social fraternity. I read the creeds of my church. I attended weekly meetings of a campus ministry and listened to a people tell their own stories of God at work in their lives. After several years of collecting data, I conducted my personal "experiment of faith" by challenging Christ, if He is actually alive and real, to come into my life.
As the experiment continued, I formed friendships with friends of Faith at Work. I began to see the Spirit work to transform lives and relationships. These practical lessons in relational theology jarred me loose from my belief that the ultimate spiritual goal was having correct intellectual ideas about God in my head. I saw that God's Spirit can transform relationships... with God, with myself, with the significant people in my life and with the world.
What I came to last was what Mike saw at his first AA meeting when he faced living miracles, God's Spirit miraculously transform anyone who would work the AA program. Mike and I covered segments of the spiritual journey in a different order, but we ended up bothers on a common journey. Mike seemed amazed that his earliest idea of a Higher Power had grown beyond anything he could have imagined. I am amazed that I've ended up where Mike began... facing a need daily to let my Higher Power, whom I call Jesus Christ, do for me what I cannot do for myself.
Bob Slocum is both an "ordinary Christian" as a Presbyterian layman
and a high-tech entrepreneur as founder of Polatomic Inc, a Dallas TX company
that specializes in new product development.