Weird Where It Counts

When I was growing up, I sincerely tried to understand what God wanted from me. I even tried to do those things. (Well, most of the time, anyway.) But I didn’t feel (or seem) any different from anyone else. For all those years, I just felt like a bad boy trying to be good. I felt disingenuous, fake, a pretender. As I got older, eventually I got tired of all that work and decided to “just be myself.” I partied, I lied, I chased girls, and I generally tried to keep myself surrounded by a constant cloud of selfish entertainments.

Then one weekend when I was a sophomore in college, a girl I knew, Laura, was on a long drive home to see her parents. Tragically, she fell asleep at the wheel, wrapped her car around a tree, and was instantly gone. This jarring event profoundly impacted my perspective. Suddenly I saw my life through different eyes, asking questions I had never asked before. What if that had been me? What is my life about? Why am I here?

One place I started looking—partly for answers, although mostly for comfort—was in the pages of the Bible. I stumbled across Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:13–14: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” You don’t have to believe in the God of the Bible (or even in Jesus) to find the wisdom in that statement. Simply take a look at the people around you and consider: Where are their life choices carrying them?

Continued on page 2: The wide and broad way... »