10

I took my time as I strolled along the sidewalk in front of Central Market. I stopped Donald’s stroller just outside the grocery exit, next to the birds who pecked at crumbs by the store’s outdoor restaurant. Soon I would need to wrap this up. I’d treated myself to a leisurely lunch in the gourmet grocery store’s cafe, offering Donald bites of the mashed potatoes that came with my grilled tilapia. Alas, now it was time to make one last trip to the bathroom, change Donald’s diaper, and head back to my mom’s house to get back to work unpacking. I turned toward the parking lot and imagined what awaited me as soon as I returned to my new suburban home. The boxes. The furniture assembly. The grocery shopping. And the boxes.

It had taken us the rest of the fall, as well as winter and most of spring, to get to the point that we were ready to move in with my mom. I told myself that the holdup was because there was so much to do: We had to get our condo ready to sell, meet with potential realtors, and strategize with my mom about the setup in her house. In reality, though, it was a long exercise in procrastination. The thought of trading in my view of all of west Austin for the view of a backyard fence pained me more and more as the reality of it got closer, and I always managed to find one more reason to put it off. As the late spring temperatures rose and our bank account balance fell, it was time. Now, in the last days of May, we were finally moving.

Donald had begun to doze off in his stroller, and not even a group of birds fighting over a discarded hunk of bread was enough to keep him awake. Now would be the perfect time to leave. But surely there was something else I had to do. The sign of a bookstore at the far corner of the strip center caught my attention. That was it: I needed a book. I couldn’t face the Sisyphean toil that awaited me back home without a new read. I’d grab one quickly, and then I’d get on the road.

When I pulled open the glass door to the bookstore, the stroller wheels caught on a metal plate on the floor. I bent over to jimmy them free, and when I straightened up, an object caught my attention. At the far end of the store, against the back wall, was a book. I didn’t even see the thousands of other books in the store; it was as if only this one existed. It had a light cover, and it almost seemed to glow the way it stood out in my perception amidst the clutter.

I moved intently toward it. I’d never been to this bookstore before, and I didn’t know what section I was headed for. I stopped short when I saw the sign, above and just to the right of the book: Christianity.

I’d never been in the Christianity section of any bookstore or library before; the closest I’d come was when I’d taken all the Bibles in my elementary school library and moved them to the Fiction section, in what I was certain was the most erudite prank the whole fourth grade had seen all year. When I got close enough to see the title, I laughed. The Case for Christ. I leaned the stroller on its back wheels to turn around, but the book’s subtitle caught my attention: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Mainly, it was the word journalist. That was annoying.

I was a journalism major for a few semesters in college, and it gave me enough of a glimpse into that line of work to know that you have to be a quick, clear thinker with an eye for detail and an ability to sift through large amounts of data in order to be successful in the field. It was irritating to see Christians co-opting that title to try to sell books, when by “journalist” this author undoubtedly meant “I wrote a couple of blurbs for my church’s Sunday bulletin.” I picked up the book, looking forward to simmering in the indignation that would come with my discovery of the loose use of the term.

It turned out that the author, a guy named Lee Strobel, was a Yale Law grad and the former legal editor for the Chicago Tribune. Okay, so he was a journalist. I was about to put the book down when another note caught my attention. It said that he was a former atheist, and that he’d “investigated” his way into believing in Jesus. I fished my mobile phone out of my purse to check the time. I did need to get back home. But first, I had to deal with this book.

Atheist journalists do not become Christians based on investigating evidence. If he wanted to claim that he had had some sort of vision, I could believe that: Even otherwise normal people could be misguided by powerful emotional experiences sometimes. But to say that he’d investigated his way from atheism to Christianity was absurd. It would be like saying that you investigated your way into believing that there really is a cauldron full of shiny gold coins at the bottom of every rainbow.

I put the book under my arm and pushed the stroller over to the store’s cafe. Amidst the smell of burnt coffee and the sounds of hissing espresso machines, I settled into a chair in front of a small table and opened the book.

Strobel started with a story about a Chicago police shooting case he’d covered for the Tribune, where he thought he knew what had happened, because the evidence all pointed in one direction. After a call from a tipster, he took a second look at the facts and found, to his great surprise, that an entirely different story took shape. He asked readers to do the same with this Jesus stuff: Take another look at the case, consider new evidence, look at old evidence from a different angle.

Strobel seemed like a nice guy, and I believed he’d really been an atheist. He didn’t seem to be exactly the same type of atheist I was, at one point mentioning that he was initially resistant to learning about Jesus because he didn’t want to give up his immoral lifestyle. That would never have occurred to me, since I knew right from wrong without receiving instructions from a holy book, but he wasn’t using the term “atheist” as loosely as I’d expected he would.

My phone buzzed, and my mom’s number appeared on caller ID. She was undoubtedly calling to ask where I was, since I said I was only going out for a quick lunch. I put the phone back in my pocket; I’d call her back once I was on the road.

I stood and hoisted my purse on my shoulder. It was time to head out. Yup. Time to walk away from that book. Just leave it there, or maybe put it back on the shelf.

But the thing kept drawing me back to the table, each time I tried to step away.

If the past few months in the grinder of new parenthood and new business ownership had taught me anything, it was that I didn’t have it all figured out. My late-night epiphany on the balcony at the Westgate had made me consider that I might have been missing fundamental truths about the human experience. Could it be possible that there was something here that was worth looking into further?

My phone buzzed. My mom again. Time to go. I took the book over to the checkout counter, telling myself that I could return it later since I’d probably never pick it up again.

On the drive back to the house, my purchase sat on the passenger seat, wrapped tightly in the bookstore bag. I assured myself that any eagerness I felt to read it must be due to an extreme desire to procrastinate, and that the excitement that fluttered within me must be late-arriving emotions about the move to my mom’s place.

* * *

“What’s in the bag?” my mom asked when I got home.

“What bag?” I looked down. “Oh, the bag in my hands? I don’t know. It’s a book.”

My mom sat at the command center of her massive network of desks, which covered two entire walls in her home office. Her job managing the finances of an eye care company had her especially busy that day, and she kept turning her attention back to the computer screen as we talked. “Any book in particular?”

“I can’t remember the title. Or what it’s about.” Donald came to the rescue and crawled up next to my feet as we spoke, a concerned look on his chubby face as if he were on an important mission. My mom swung her chair around so that her back was fully to her computer and leaned forward to beckon Donald. “And how did my little man do today? Was he a good boy?”

I started to answer, but then saw that she’d been speaking to the nine-month-old baby. It became clear that this would be a meeting with an extensive agenda: My mom and Donald would need to go over what he had for lunch, whether he was da cutest widdle man in the entire world, and possibly review what the kitty-cat says. “Would it be okay if I went into our room for a while?” I asked. “I should probably get back to unpacking.”

My mom picked up Donald and propped him on her lap so that he was facing her. He giggled and tried to take her glasses, and she responded by initiating a game where she would lean in so that her glasses were just within reach of his outstretched hand, then she’d pull back and Donald would explode in guttural giggles. I tried again to ask if it would be okay for the baby to hang out with my mom, but it was clear that even my questions were an interruption to this convocation of their mutual admiration society.

The bedroom door hit up against a box after opening only halfway, and I pressed my back against the wall to squeeze through the opening. The room consisted of my mom’s double guest bed, her dresser, her two bedside tables, and a tall, narrow bookshelf—the bookshelf being the only piece of furniture we owned in the room. It was a small room, with only a few feet between the sides of the bed and the walls, and I had to move past the boxes like someone on a boulder-climbing expedition. I sat down on the bed and pulled the book out of its cellophane bag. In just a minute I would get back to work unpacking. First, I just wanted to read a few more pages—only to get to a stopping point from where I’d been at the bookstore.

For someone who didn’t care about reading The Case for Christ, I did an amazing impression of finding it riveting. I stretched out on the bed and smoothed the book flat at my side. Whether or not Strobel perfectly nailed every single one of the dozens of points he and his experts raised, he made a good case that Jesus as a historical figure did exist and that his life did have an eerie similarity to ancient Jewish prophecies.

Two pages into a new section, I heard my mom’s voice out in the hall. “Do you need more time?” she asked through the crack in the door, which still couldn’t be opened because of the boxes. “I need to run errands and was going to take Donald with me.”

I jolted up and fumbled to straighten a lampshade, as if that would make it look like I was being incredibly productive. “Yeah. I could use a while longer.”

She and Donald chattered down the hall, and a few seconds later I heard the beep-beep-beep of the alarm system announcing that they’d exited the house. I returned to my book, where Strobel was interviewing a man who detailed the shockwave of changes that radiated across the globe shortly after Jesus’ death.

“When Jesus was crucified, his followers were discouraged and depressed. They no longer had confidence that Jesus had been sent by God, because they believed that anyone crucified was accursed by God,” said Strobel’s interviewee, a Ph.D. philosopher with a background in chemistry named J. P. Moreland. “So they dispersed. The Jesus movement was all but stopped in its tracks.”

Moreland then pointed out that, soon afterward, these people dramatically regathered, abandoned their former ways of living, and dedicated their entire lives to spreading the specific message that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead. And, finally, many of them died heinous deaths rather than recant their claims that they personally had witnessed Jesus alive after death. As Strobel pointed out, some people are willing to die for beliefs that they mistakenly think are true, but nobody will die for beliefs that they know are false.

Moreland also pointed out that something huge happened in Jewish culture during that time. He began by describing five ancient social structures, such as keeping the Sabbath and the practice of animal sacrifice, which were the very center of Jewish life at that time.

“Now a rabbi named Jesus appears from a lower-class region,” he continued. “He teaches for three years, gathers a following of lower-and middle-class people, gets in trouble with the authorities, and gets crucified along with thirty thousand other Jewish men who are executed during this time period.

“But five weeks after he’s crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him . . . And get this: They’re willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such importance both sociologically and theologically.”

Regardless of your religious beliefs, Moreland said, you had to admit that something explosive happened to Jewish culture in first-century Palestine. His own explanation was simple: “They’d seen Jesus risen from the dead.”

I paused. Was it so crazy to believe that this could have happened? Was I crazy for thinking it might not be crazy? I kept bouncing back and forth. It’s crazy: Reasonable people cannot believe that anyone ever rose from the dead. It’s not crazy: If some kind of God does exist, then presumably he could hook up that sort of thing. If you’re willing to believe in the divine at all, it’s not that much of a stretch to believe in Jesus’ Resurrection.

What made Christianity’s story so challenging was its specificity. If the idea had been that Jesus was a special guy who had a special gift for coming up with insights about spirituality, I wouldn’t have hesitated to consider it. There was comfort in vagueness, which was one of the reasons I found Buddhism appealing. All the teachings of Buddhism resided in the ether of thoughts and experiences. In contrast, here was Christianity, talking about corpses rising from the dead and guys transforming water into wine at a party that happened at this one house on this one day. Buddhism allowed some bet-hedging: You’re never going to look like a fool for believing that dukkha exists. It’s just a concept. But to say, “I believe that on a certain day, two thousand years ago, a man came along and healed another man who was blind”—that was a different deal. Specificity makes an easy target.

I set the book down and sat motionless on the bed. The house was still; the neighborhood outside was still. The only sound was the soft click of the air conditioner as it turned off. A thought approached. I tried to fight it, to reject it, to do everything not to let such an insane idea into my mind, but it overwhelmed me like a tidal wave. And I asked myself with a frightening level of openness: What if it were true?

The words sunk in slowly, one by one.

All of reality suddenly shifted, so forcefully that I shivered with vertigo. What if there were a God? What if he did enter into a human body at one point? What if he were here, now, aware of this moment, wanting me to know that he exists?

My skin tingled with the possibility that I was not alone in the room—that I’d never been alone in my life.