I Have Seen The Light And It Is Christ (*April Fool's)

Our Savior

Although I haven’t posted in a few days, there is a reason for my brief hiatus. For the last several days I have undergone a remarkable personal and spiritual transformation. It all started on Sunday when a friend whose father recently died asked me to attend his church for a service dedicated in his honor. I was reluctant at first, but I came to realize that it would be kind of dickish of me to refuse the request of a grieving buddy. Besides, my friend isn’t really that religious, but just wanted to attend the sermon at his father’s church.

As I sat in the pew, my mind drifted in and out of the sermon being delivered by the oddly-proportioned preacher before me. He was a balding man, short and bespectacled like an evangelical George Costanza. And he was just as animated.

“We all deserve death,” he began what was to me a very strange way to start a sermon dedicated to a churchgoer who just died. “Every last one us. But through the grace of God, and the sacrifice of His Son, we are rescued from the darkness of death and are allowed to bask in the righteousness of His light.”

We all deserve death. Interesting.

“And in His light, all our desires are fulfilled. All our questions are answered. All our suffering is ended. If we glorify God during our life, he will surely glorify us upon our death.”

I’d like to be glorified, I thought.

“Not to glorify God during life is to fail God,” Pastor Costanza continued. “It is to do disobey him. It is to disgrace him. It is to turn your back on God. God will not tolerate the prideful because pride is Satan’s best friend. And pride goeth before the Fall.” He then proceeded to remark how my friend’s dad was one of the most unprideful people he had ever met.

For some reason I cannot explain, the sermon was resonating with me. And I could have sworn that the giant cross on the wall above the minister began to radiate, as if surrounded by an aura of that light he had just been talking about. I rubbed my eyes and even shook my head a couple of times, but the aura remained and seemed to pulsate correlative to the intensity of the pastor’s message. My brain felt numb, as if high on drugs, but this was no substance-induced high. This euphoria was not a natural phenomenon. The warm feeling that washed over me that day was nothing short of an otherworldly experience, no doubt brought on by unerring truth of the words emanating from the stocky and unassuming man at the front of the church. Had he been more charismatic, I might have chalked up the entire experience to the skillfulness of the messenger. But there was nothing remarkable about this preacher, which seemed to lend legitimacy to the very strange yet uplifting experience I was so gleefully enjoying.

After the sermon I went home and consulted my Bible, which up until then I regarded as a work of literature only. I reread the Gospels and to my surprise, found that they actually made sense to me for the first time in my life. Not only did they make sense, but the truth of them seemed so obvious that I wondered how I could’ve been so stubbornly resistant to the Word. The reason was my pride, and like the pastor said, pride goeth before the Fall.

At that moment, I told myself that I would refuse to fall. Right there on the spot where I had been reading the Bible in my kitchen, I knelt on the hardwood floor and prayed to Jesus and begged him for forgiveness for having been such a prideful fool. Only weeks before I was telling a relative how I was utterly incapable of believing the “nonsense” in the Bible. Praise be to Jesus that I was wrong.

I am now glad to call myself a slave to Christ. I am here to serve Him and no other. Thus, in good conscience, I cannot contribute to this website any longer. It is embarrassing for me to go back and read the awful things I said against God, and I hope that Wolf will understand why I want to take them down. In the meantime, I am working on a new blog designed to spread the good news of Christ’s sacrifice. I will work tirelessly to make sure his message is heard loud and clear. I know many of you will be upset by my “conversion.” However, I can only ask you respect that I have had an epiphany that I can only hope will lead to a fulfilling life that is devoid of the rank cynicism that has hardened my heart for much of my life.

Thank you and God Bless,

Max Canning