The Man Who Led Me To Christ

He was twenty, and the man was thirty eight, and they prayed together in a car park outside a garage where they both worked.

That is where his faith comes from. Not from a book, not from a service. From one man who stayed forty minutes past the end of a shift, every Thursday, for two years, because a young man had questions and nobody else was answering them.

Eighteen years later, that man stood up in front of about sixty people and said, carefully and without heat, that what had happened among the group this younger man belonged to was not from God.

He was not shouting. He named nobody. He was doing what he genuinely believed a man in his position ought to do, and there were people in that room who thought he was right and people who thought he was wrong, and the whole thing lasted about ninety seconds.

The younger man has never answered it. Not that night, not in the seven years since. He has thought of about forty things to say and has never said any of them, because there is no sentence in any language that lets a man contradict the person who gave him his faith without something breaking that neither of them can mend.

So they are cordial. They shake hands. And the most important thing that has ever happened to him is a thing the most important man in his life believes did not happen.

If your spiritual father cannot hold what God did in you, come and sit in the courtyard. Neither of you is being put on trial here.

Two true things that will not sit together

Let us set both things down and look at them, because seven years of holding them apart is what has worn him out.

The first is that this man is the reason he knows God. That is not sentiment. There is a straight line from a car park outside a garage to everything he has believed since, and no amount of what came later changes one hour of those Thursdays.

The second is that something real came to him later, and the first man cannot hold it, and said so in front of sixty people.

He has spent seven years trying to make one of those cancel the other, because that would be simpler than the actual situation, which is that both are true at once and there is no arithmetic that resolves them.

You do not have to cancel one of them. Nothing about a man who cannot hold what came to you has ever unmade what he gave you or what God did. I am not saying that to keep the peace. Scripture says let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, for we be brethren (Genesis 13:8), which is a man arranging a separation while insisting on the brotherhood, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man who has never answered a sentence.

A separation with no wrongdoer in it

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it puts nothing on the man who prayed with you.

Read how Abram handles a split that could easily have been settled by rank.

And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren.Genesis 13:8

For we be brethren. That is the reason he gives, and it is stated as an ongoing fact rather than as something the separation will end. They part in the next verse, and the brotherhood is not withdrawn in it.

And Abram, who could have imposed a settlement, gives the younger man the choice of the land instead. Nobody in the passage is named as the one who was wrong, and the account does not require it in order to move on.

You can part on a thing and still be brothers, and Scripture arranges exactly that without naming a wrongdoer. That is written into the passage itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it to a man seven years into a silence.

Neither of you is being judged here

This has to be said very plainly, because a page like this could easily be read as a quiet verdict.

He is not being condemned here. What he said, he said out of care for people he was responsible for, and there are people who love God deeply on both sides of that question, and he has never once taken back a single hour of those Thursdays. He still shakes your hand. He means it too.

And you were not wrong to receive what came to you.

This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the concession as much as lieth in you admits that resolution is not entirely in your gift, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a settled ruling, who lets a man keep his father and keep the truth.

And if these seven years have cost more than the people in that courtyard know, if sleep has gone, if seeing him has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.