Devin Rose on Giving God a Chance

I grew up in an agnostic home both my parents left the Christian faith my dad was Episcopal and my mom Church of Christ but by college they had had enough of that so we grew up learning to believe in nothing essentially they said believe in whatever you want to believe in but what we spent our time on was sports Nintendo sitcoms you know common things from sort of the 80s that was our life of in pop culture the only church we ever went to was Unitarian Universalist one and I remember in one of the the sermons the guy gave he made a joke about Dan Quayle who was the vice president at the time that everyone laughed at and everyone laughed you know at this joke but there was nothing about God or Jesus at all it's just very vague so I grew up then and became you know an agnostic atheist through high school thanks be to God I was blessed in many ways including academically so I did very well in school full scholarship to college academic scholarship in the Honors Program etc etc so I had never had a need for God in my life and that was one reason then you know brought up not believing in God did well and everything didn't need God there was almost no way or opportunity for me to even want to believe in God that changed when I went to college started getting nervous in social situations a little uneasiness maybe in my stomach a little you know feeling some some fear or dread and that might be in class that might be going over to friend's house or studying together with a group of people and I kind of brushed it off at first but as the week's went by I got stronger and stronger until I was feeling like I was going to be sick to my stomach even just sitting in class I would just start sweating for no reason because I was trying to bottle up all of this fear and anxiety in it made itself a self-fulfilling prophecy you know a positive feedback loop which and you know electrical engineering that's what I was studying is if that thing because it you know it feeds in on himself so that was something I was so afraid and ashamed of and tried to hide from every person because I had it all together you know I was an atheist I was an honor student with a scholarship I never needed help from anybody but as I tried to overcome this the this anxieties nothing worked the self-help books I got didn't work the little mental tricks that I had read that you could do didn't work and I started to become frightened like this is something that is going to consume me and and ruin my life the anxieties got worse and soon I started having what I thought were nervous breakdowns I didn't even have the language to understand what was going on but this nervous breakdown happened where my heart was pounding I kind of felt this a real sense that I was looking at myself from a you know a third-person perspective the anxious thoughts were just racing in my mind at hyperspeed and I couldn't control them at all and this just this you know happened one day when I was in college and I I was panicked well I later found out that that is a panic attack and you know the classical name now for what it was is social anxiety disorder with panic disorder and I learned that because it got to the point where I told the one person in my life who I thought would not judge me and that was my mom so you know in spite of just growing up as an atheists know that we were a pretty happy atheist family nothing severely bad ever happened to us my parents loved me spend time with me all of these things so at a human level it was a very good upbringing even though it was lacking the spiritual component so I told my mom mom I'm starting to get really nervous and anxious and something Bad's happening and she said oh you know I've had anxieties for years you don't need to worry about it it's something normal he probably got it from me and I said mom this is not normal otherwise I wouldn't be telling you it's bad and as I as I explained it to her you know she listened and said let's have you go see a psychologist that was for me a big step because I had always associated people going to see psychologists or weirdos right there they can't hack it themselves they gotta go talk to some other person what can some other person do right I can do everything myself but I said I'm at the point where I'm open to that so I went to go see the psychologist and that's when she said you have a social anxiety disorder with panic attack and also you're clinically depressed and instead of being upset about this I I it was a huge relief other people have this weird thing that I've got and you know people who have been in a similar situation understand that it feels so good knowing that you're not the only one and there's people who've actually gotten better from this I didn't know how that was gonna happen for me yet but going to the psychologist was the first big step at that time I was still an atheist and I was a little bit disappointed because the steps that she gave me were more of this cognitive behavioral therapy mental tricks where if you're feeling some kind of fear or anxiety you would write down what's the percentage I think that this will happen Oh 40% I'll get humiliated in front of all my classmates 40% and then you go and you wait a week and you look back and say did that event actually happen and you say yes or no and so you're supposed to say oh you know I thought this was gonna happen but then it didn't oh man I'm just I'm making this stuff up in my mind and so that was the type of exercises I was going through unfortunately they had almost no effect at all and the anxieties continue to get worse so in college again I in spite of all these problems I had been pretty successful and managed to get an internship at NASA Johnson Space Center doing engineering I was living with my mom who lived in the Houston area and since I wasn't getting any better or even seeing the psychologist I began to despair to really lose any hope that even this professional person whose to be able to help with this type of thing isn't doing anything and driving to and from work one day I just saw in my mind that my mind's eye if you will this blackness a complete blackness the absence of all hope that my life is going to be one of constant pain and dread and fear it's never gonna get better and I want to end my life as an atheist you know as long as things are going well well hey I'm happy to be alive this is great you know but I understood now finally why people did commit suicide because they have no hope and I was getting that place of no hope whatsoever so I wasn't ready to kill myself yet but I was hoping to die you know maybe a meteors gonna hit me maybe someone will crash into my car you know any of the different ways that you could die I thought that would really solve my problems because I wouldn't have the shame of killing myself right in the pain that I knew that would bring to my family and all of that but the constant pain and fear and dread that I lived in would finally end at that lowest of the low point is when I finally thought maybe there's an alternative to atheism maybe in fact atheism is not true and that God is true and when I thought of God I thought of Jesus because all my friends were Christian friends you know who were who were religious at all and in them if I was honest with myself there was an authentic joy about most of them there was a peace and it was something that I as an atheist thought I had but now with all these anxiety disorders and depression realized I didn't have it all and I longed for that so I began to pray and say god I don't believe in you but please help me if you're real that was the first prayer my cousins who were who were you know fundamentalist Baptist had given me an old King James Version of the Bible and I was 10 years old had an inscription and everything I started reading it in Genesis a Christian friend of mine when he found out I was I was doing that so why don't you start in a New Testament start with the Gospels I said no no no this is the Bible this is God who supposedly wrote this I'm beginning at the beginning and I'm plowing through this to the end and that's what I did every night prayed God please help me if you're real because nothing else has every night read I was reading about ten chapters of the Bible just devouring it and not because I understood it and it was new and it was giving me something but because I wanted to get through it and find out there was some nuggets of truth or wisdom that I could latch on to with it so two things happened plowing to the Bible I did run into some nuggets of wisdom specifically any passage that spoke about anxieties or fears or peace and there's many passages in the Old and New Testament that talk about those things I latched on to those I wrote those down to go back and read them so there was something happening there but then also and this was nothing had changed externally in terms of what I was doing that the anxieties began to lessen they had gotten worse and worse they started the lesson and I said scientifically speaking this is interesting because they've gotten worse and worse over the past four years what's happening the only difference is I started praying so I want to keep doing this to give God a chance I still had a impossible at that time I thought for me to believe in all the incredible stories in the Bible you know the miracles the kind of outlandish claims of things that happened throughout the Bible that I said I got a set aside those doubts and fears those have had their chance yeah maybe it is all rubbish maybe it is but what if it's true and the fact that something's happening I've got to keep trying this out atheism had its day I'm giving this a shot and I did and as the months passed I slowly began to believe this could be real this could be true and that was an exciting feeling because it was restoring that hope that there really might be a God and he's real he's powerful enough to help when everything else failed you know all of my much-vaunted in my own mind intelligence and skills and abilities completely failed right but now something's happening that's outside of myself and only if there's some other being doing something could it happen so this was the time when I was giving God a chance and in my mind there was a little sapling growing up in the woods you know picture the big redwood forest and is this little sapling and I was having to shield it from all the doubts and fears that wanted to crush it you know the the fact that I knew that Christianity wasn't true wanted just you know demolish this little sapling of faith but I had to give it a shot and I don't know how else I could have done it because when you know something is true well you know it's true how can you not know it's true and and so that it was almost like atheism was a belief I had and for it to be replaced with Christianity as a belief I had to try to believe in God you know that was the path that that I had to take so God was doing something though he really was nothing else had worked and now in answer to prayer he was moving I thought it could just be a flash in the pan only if he is really real will this change in the anxiety's continue right while I continue to get better so at that point I left the internship went back to college and my three evangelical friends found out I was reading the Bible these were the guys had argued with constantly about whether God existed or not try to convince them that he did it they all went to a Baptist Church you know Southern Baptists they found others reading the Bible they said here's an NIV Study Bible put that old King James 1 on the Shelf you know this one is it's in clear English it's got the study notes in the bottom and I said this is great no I'm really you know I'm getting it I can now talk with them too about it and of course they were praying for me because they were really excited that I could actually become a Christian and get saved so the next big step was they invited me to go to church with them you know by this time of the anxiety disorder I was mortally afraid of being in groups of people especially if I'm in a pew squashed in by a lot you know of others I can't get out easily what if I have an attack of anxieties that was very frightening for me but I said I gotta try this Christians go to church that's what you do you know so there's not reading the Bible and praying but you got to go to church and I wind and I was very nervous it was almost all I could do just to sit there and try not to panic but that's what I did and along the way I was listening I was listening to the pastor who was a very gifted preacher very gifted explaining the Scriptures so I had my Bible and you know he said he turned to this passage in Matthews going through Matthew and he would explain something and I said oh my goodness I never would have realized that yeah these insights so I was learning in spite of the difficulties of just being at church I was learning the songs so that I wouldn't feel like I was an outcast you know because everyone is sing any songs they all know him because they've been seeing him for their whole life I had never even heard of them but my faith was slowly growing and at this point it finally became level with the unbelief and began to tip the scales and that was a the most exciting time I think in my life that had ever been when God sort of came rushing in and the gates were thrown open and I really believed in God for the first time

Channel: Convinced Catholic

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Id: Ghu04nVse0g

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 31 2019