The Life of Lou Ruppert

Every now and again, I ask myself why I am a Christian. How did I manage to start believing in God, specifically the Christian view of God, which is one of the most inconvenient ones? Surely I’m smarter than that! And worse, how did I manage to attach myself to a church, which requires me to sacrifice my scarce time and money, and to endure the glaring faults of other people in close quarters? Why would I limit my own freedom, squander some of my best resources and the most fruitful years of my life, for something which would appear on the surface to have no tangible value?

To be honest, I got there in a really roundabout fashion. Like all scientifically minded boys, I was taught that believing in God was stupid. It was a sign of intellectual weakness. I prided myself on how independent I was to be discarding this outmoded world view along with all of the other science geeks. This stage of my life probably lasted into high school.

In high school, I started believing in God in an abstract sense. I knew there were things we couldn’t explain, things which were probably even outside mankind’s ability to grasp them. It was a kind of science fiction theology, where God was some kind of benevolent force who would hear our prayers and answer them if the signal was just right. During one family vacation, I had an argument with my father, a fairly staunch atheist, about something stupid that only a teenager would argue about, and he sent me to the motel room we were staying in, to ground me. I found a Gideon Bible in the drawer, which was the only thing I hadn’t read up until that point, and decided to read it. Everything in there seemed so real and true. And I found that I wasn’t angry at all anymore when I read it. I couldn’t explain how I lost my anger. When my father came to let me out a few hours later, I had probably gotten through about half of the old testament and was calm and in my right mind. The transformation fascinated me.

So, by the time I got to college, I had read most of the Bible. I believed in the God of Genesis and Revelation, but thought all of the Jesus stuff was stupid. I took a comparative religions and mythologies course, and decided that I liked Buddhism. Everybody likes Buddhism in college. Everyone. It’s the only religion with no father figure. But in the first two years of school, the only friends I had who were generally happy and pretty laid back without being dorks were fairly devout Christians. I decided I’d give the Jesus stuff a chance and went out and bought an old King James Bible. Church was still for chumps, though.

Fast forward to the last couple years of college, and I started going to a Bible study in the dorm room next door to mine. It was more interesting than church, much closer, and the people teaching it seemed to be able to explain the Bible in a way that didn’t sound all hokey and pretentious. It was more like a conversation than a guy in a bathrobe standing on a pedestal behind a microphone droning on about thees and thous and assorted “begats”. That was my gateway drug for church.

Ten years later, I’m an elder in a church I helped to start. What happened? I guess it boils down to the fact that I wanted to be happy, and this stuff has a supernatural ability to do that to me. It also neatly explains phenomena that I have seen and read about that I can’t explain with my old religion of sola scientia. Either the stuff in the Bible is real, as far as there being a God, and as far as what sort of being he is, or there is a powerful force in the universe that tolerates being referred to as Jesus in order to foster communication with us meat-bags.

As far as the church thing goes, it serves as a sort of petri dish to help me to see how people work and what sorts of things God does with them. It’s also a good way to help me to remember to pray and study, since I’ve proven to myself that I need structure in order to learn stuff that isn’t always interesting. I haven’t touched my Russian since I got my degree, and I haven’t touched my Arabic since I took the last class Syracuse University offered last spring. And I haven’t touched my French since I came home from Québec last fall. I really need accountability when it comes to staying focused. Church, while it costs me dearly sometimes, is the best way I’ve found to keep that focus and accountability.

Nobody should believe stuff “just because.” It’s like driving off of a cliff because “that’s just where the wheel is pointed.” It’s essential to reexamine your assumptions and beliefs from time to time, just to make sure you’re pointed in the right direction, and are getting what you’re paying for.

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