Athiesm's Problem

To any of you who doubt the presence and magnificence of our Lord, Jesus Christ; first, I must say that I understand exactly where you are coming from. I, too, at one point was a non-believer. Moreover, I was violently anti-Christian to the point of persecuting these children of God. The following is a letter of my conversion to Christianity. It reads through from my early years and the person that I was at that time through to my troubled childhood and teen years all the way to where I am right now. I will focus on and demonstrate the many ways in which I know that Jesus Christ is Lord and God. Hopefully, you will listen with an open heart and realize the wonderful truth that took me so long to see. At the end are a few easy Bible verses to read for further study.

My childhood was much like any other. I was born on January 13, 1980 to loving parents and a solid home. Everything was as good as things could be. I very vibrantly remember when I was two years old writing my name on a piece of paper and running around to show my mother what I had done. It was very important to me even at that young ago to feel respected and loved. I remember playing with my sister and chasing her around the house. We loved each other and our situation. When I was very young, my mother and father divorced and my father left us completely. That was the deal; if he left, it was going to be a clean break. I still remember seeing him for the last time when I was four years old. In the coming years, I would end up seeing him again, but not before much damage had been inflicted in our home. My mother remarried a friend of my fathers' and things again went quite smoothly indeed. I had a fairly strong bond with my stepfather. We did many exciting and interesting things together. I very much enjoyed our time and could not get enough of it. When I was seven, I gave the word that I desired to quit Cub Scouts. This was one of the stronger bonding opportunities between the two of us. I did mention that I had good reasons for my request, but I knew at that very moment that things would never be the same. Storms came and washed away the happiness of my youth. Pressing financial difficulties coupled along with my family's growing lusts for material possessions drove us out into the wilderness of lies. From about this time, I was fascinated by everything mechanical, electrical and involving biology. My spare time at home was spent going through encyclopedia books in a concerted attempt to appease my desire for knowledge and at the same time to draw my mind away from my home life. At home, I would make various gadgets and take them to school. My classmates would marvel at the things I was doing. This, eventually, would be one of the many undoings of my life without God. As the years passed, my former "friends" became very weary of my trinkets and tricks. They began to call me names and taunt me all the day. This escalated into a full torment which lasted approximately until I was 16.

During this time, I fell into a deeper and deeper depression that never faded not even for an instant. I would go to sleep at night hating my life and hating everything else around me. The searing hate and unyielding depression would permeate my mind up until the moment that I fell asleep. Even in my dreams, I would hate myself. In the morning, I would open my eyes and the first thing that would pop into my mind was how angry and let down I was that I woke up again. My typical day would consist of waking up with a burning rage at 5:00 in the morning and going to school, where people would follow me around telling me to kill myself. I was followed around everywhere. No one would ever leave me alone. I even had a few teachers taunt me -- teachers that I didn't even have class with. I literally had no friends and no family. No one to turn to at all to vent my feelings to. Something happened along the way and my ability to actually feel any form of joy suddenly and inexplicable disappeared. When I was about eight years of age, my sense of pleasure, accomplishment, amusement and happiness simply vanished. I distinctly remember on many occasions trying desperately to laugh at anything in this world. I would do things such as watch television shows like Friends and no matter what I did, I was physically an emotionally unable to laugh. Everyone around me was laughing and talking about how funny these things on television were. I would move the air in and out of my lungs to fake a laugh because I didn't want anyone to know what was going on inside my head. Days ran into each other and there was no way to tell one from another. I no longer had "days"; I simply had one long never-ending day. This strengthened the non-stop barrage of condescending hate that drove me quite literally insane. After years of taunts and torment, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, everyone who used to follow me around and tease me just ended their torture and I was left all alone in my own mind.

When I was 12, I discovered music. Up until this point, I had never listened to music because the only bands that I had ever come into contact with were terribly unmusical ones. This is the time that I discovered my bad music. The music I was listening to did very much make me feel better at the time and made me realize that I was not the only one in the world feeling this way. It did, however, help to drag my spirit even further down without my knowledge. Through years of torment, coupled with a uniquely strong video recorder-like memory and an uncontrollable ability to continually run through my day over and over again, I eventually did go insane. Because of my memory, even when people were leaving me alone (which in itself may have even been worse -- to be completely ignored) I constantly played back what they did do to me. When I would "re-experience" the memories over and over again, all of the accompanying emotions would play back along with the images. The burning hate and rage and depression was right there in the memories, too. In my mind, I quite literally was going through a constant torture even when I was perfectly alone.

At some point during these years, the pressure built up in me and other than being extremely susceptible to illness, I began to develop a tightening in my chest. It began as what would feel like a tension that would come and go, but after a while, it never left. Slowly, this tight feeling in my chest began to grow and manifest itself in much more powerful ways. The tight feeling I was having grew more and more unbearable and its hold on me was too much to take. These pains felt as though a car was actually parked on top of my chest. As this phenomenon grew in intensity, it also expanded in duration. No longer was I getting pangs of chest pain, now I was having in all-out non-stop flood of physical pain that was so intense I