Something magnificent has gone terribly wrong.

That is about as much as I can say with certainty.

The world is good. Being alive is good. Love is good. Food, work, bodies, trees, children, friendship, laughter, sex, sleep, making things with our hands—all of it seems almost impossibly good. I do not look at the world and see something worthless from which we need to escape.

But something is wrong with us.

We grasp at everything. Money, possessions, security, status, pleasure, attention, even time. We hurt each other. We judge each other. We build lives around protecting ourselves from loss and then lose everything anyway. We distract ourselves to death. We know that we are going to die and spend most of our lives pretending that we aren't.

I am not talking about humanity from a safe distance. I do all of this.

And then there is Christ.

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I believe about him. I still have questions that I cannot answer. Christianity makes claims so enormous that sometimes I cannot believe I believe them.

There is a God.

God is not merely some force behind the universe, but the source of being itself.

And somehow this God entered his own creation.

He became one of us.

I don't know how to make that reasonable. I don't know why the source of everything would care about creatures like us, much less become one. There are days when the whole thing seems almost too strange to believe.

But on my best days, I dare to believe it.

And I am beginning to understand that everything depends on it.

If Jesus was only a wise man, I could still admire him. I could try to forgive people. Give things away. Live simply. Love my enemies. Stop judging people. Worry less about myself. Serve others.

None of that requires Christianity. Human beings have discovered versions of these truths in many places. A Buddhist can relinquish attachment. A Stoic can meet suffering with courage. A person who believes in no God at all can live with extraordinary generosity and love.

If Jesus is merely another teacher, then perhaps I can take what is useful from him and continue looking elsewhere.

I tried that.

I tried to domesticate Christ. Keep the teachings. Take what seemed true and useful and leave the impossible claims about the man himself alone.

But once I seriously entertained the possibility that Christ might actually be who Christianity says he is, I couldn't put him back in that box.

Because Christianity says something radical.

Christ does not merely know the truth.

He is the truth.

If that is true, then his life is not one man's particularly beautiful answer to the problem of being human.

It is a revelation of reality itself.

That changes everything for me.

It means love is not merely preferable to hatred. Mercy is not merely nicer than vengeance. Giving is not merely more admirable than grasping. Humility is not simply good manners. Loving an enemy is not an impossible moral stunt performed by unusually holy people.

These things are somehow written into the nature of reality because they are the nature of God.

And sin begins to look different too.

I have often understood sin as bad behavior: things God has forbidden and which I am therefore supposed to avoid.

I am beginning to suspect that this is much too small.

Sin may be something closer to living against the grain of reality.

If God is as Christ reveals him to be, then hatred, domination, greed, judgment, endless accumulation and obsessive self-preservation are not wrong merely because they violate rules.

They are unnatural.

We are living out of alignment with the source of our own existence.

Then I look again at Christ.

He does not grasp.

He gives.

He does not accumulate.

He relinquishes.

He does not destroy his enemies.

He loves them.

He does not climb toward power.

He kneels and washes feet.

And then he allows the creatures whose existence depends upon him to nail him to a piece of wood.

If Christ is God, the cross tells us something almost unbearable about what God is like.

And perhaps about what we are supposed to be like.

That frightens me.

Because Christianity can very easily become another thing I possess.

I can have opinions about theology. I can read Augustine and Isaac of Syria and Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. I can compare Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism. I can think about sacraments and salvation and judgment and hell and universal reconciliation. I can learn the liturgy. I can kneel in the right places and say the right words.

And I can remain almost entirely unchanged.

That possibility frightens me more than choosing the wrong denomination.

I do not want Christ to become another interest.

I do not want Christianity to become an accessory attached to an otherwise ordinary modern life.

I do not want to spend years learning what Christians believe while avoiding the terrifyingly simple thing Christ actually said:

Follow me.

I don't know exactly what that will require.

I know enough to suspect that I will not particularly like some of it.

Forgive.

Do not judge.

Give.

Love your enemy.

Stop worrying about tomorrow.

Do not store up treasure for yourself.

Serve.

Pray.

Lose your life.

These are easy things to admire and difficult things to arrange a Tuesday around.

That is increasingly where Christianity interests me.

Not primarily in what happens for an hour on Sunday, but what happens Monday through Saturday.

Church may be part of this. I think it probably is. Christians have always gathered. We pray together. Confess together. Hear Scripture together. Receive bread and wine together. I have knelt in Catholic churches, Orthodox churches and now an Episcopal church, and I may kneel in all of them again.

I don't know.

For the moment, I can kneel where I am.

But I am much more concerned with what happens when I stand back up.

Because eventually I have to leave the church.

Then there is money.

There is work.

There is my family.

There is someone who irritates me.

There is someone who needs something from me.

There is something I want.

There is something I am afraid to lose.

There is someone I need to forgive.

There is tomorrow.

There is death.

There is the actual place where I have to decide whether I believe any of this.

I cannot prove that Christ is God.

I wish I could.

It requires more faith than I sometimes care to admit to believe that there is a God at all, much less that the source of being entered human history, walked around on two feet, ate with his friends, wept, suffered and died.

And I have discovered something uncomfortable about myself.

If Christ were somehow proven completely untrue—not merely that some doctrine about him was wrong, but that there was no God behind him, no resurrection, no ultimate reality corresponding to what he revealed—I think something in me would collapse.

Perhaps that says nothing about God.

Perhaps it only reveals how frail I am.

Perhaps human beings are frightened little storytelling animals staring into an indifferent universe, desperate to believe that love means more than chemistry and that death is something other than the end.

I cannot rule that out merely because I dislike it.

But there is another possibility.

Perhaps the hunger means something.

Perhaps our strange conviction that love ought to win, that mercy is somehow more real than cruelty, that beauty matters, that another person possesses an almost sacred worth, that death feels like an intrusion rather than the natural completion of everything—perhaps these are not merely comforting stories told by frightened animals.

Perhaps we are homesick.

I don't know how to prove that.

I only know what I am increasingly willing to stake my life on.

Christ.

Not merely the proposition that Christ exists.

His way.

Because I cannot imagine an ultimate reality in which I regret having tried to live like Christ.

I cannot imagine arriving at the bottom of things and discovering that I should have loved less.

That I should have forgiven less.

That I should have held tighter to my possessions.

That I should have protected myself more fiercely.

That I should have judged more people.

That I should have spent more of my life securing my own importance.

That mercy was a mistake.

That giving myself away was foolish.

And Christianity makes an even greater claim.

Perhaps the reason I cannot imagine such a reality is that ultimate reality is not merely compatible with Christ.

Ultimate reality is Christ.

I do not know that in the way I know that a stone will fall when I drop it.

I dare to believe it.

And that belief is beginning to ask something of me.

If Christ is God, then following him is not a lifestyle.

It is not self-improvement.

It is not my preferred philosophy.

It is not an aesthetic.

It is an attempt to live according to the truth of things.

And if that is true, the frightening thing is not that Christ asks too much.

The frightening thing is how much of my ordinary life I have built in the opposite direction.

I have spent enough time admiring the road.

I would like to start walking it.