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"PEOPLE Actually believe this nonsense?"

My story

I was around 12 years old the first time I opened a Bible. I was a hurting, confused child looking for answers and unable to sleep at night. My parents had raised me to be a moral person and to respect others, but had their own issues with God, and therefore the religious environment of my family was decidedly agnostic. I suppose it could have been part of the immediate effect of their recent divorce that kept me awake at night thinking of the brevity and insecurity of life, but I seem to remember my stress coming from a different source: I was learning things in school that terrified me. At school I was taught that this world was nothing more than a product of chance; random collisions of atoms and permutations of DNA had led us to the world as is it now. And the world, is it is now, is in trouble. Air pollution, acid rain, species extinction, environmental catastrophe and global warming clouded the future. What would the world be like for me when I was my parents’ age? How dare their generation hand me down such a messed up planet? Life seemed meaningless to me.In despair one morning, I snuck into my mother’s room, took her dusty Bible off of the bottom shelf and scurried back to my room. “Millions of people have found comfort and meaning in the Bible,” I told myself. I spent the rest of the day in my bed reading, hoping God would meet me through its pages.I started reading as I would any other book – at the beginning. What I found was a confusing array of strange stories that seemed utterly disconnected to any of my questions. Men from dust, talking snakes, global floods, polygamy, plagues – the world I was exploring seemed more messed up than my own. Nevertheless, the stories were interesting enough to keep me reading. I read through Genesis and Exodus before lunch, thinking I was doing pretty well – then I hit Leviticus. There I found confusing and, quite honestly, offensive laws that made absolutely no sense to me. But Leviticus was a breeze compared to the next book: Numbers. Numbers, as you might guess, contains large sections of nothing more than numbers. Numbers numbering people I didn’t know, never heard of, and didn’t care to know. The thought going through my head as I threw the Bible down in disgust and disappointment still echoes in my mind: “People actually believe this nonsense?” I snuck the Bible back into my mother’s room, and didn’t pick it up again for years.Years later I would become one of those people who has found meaning in the pages of Scripture. I wish I could go back in time and talk to my twelve-year-old self and encourage him that his search for answers was not misplaced. I wish I could help him by simply directing him to a different starting point. The way he was trying to read the Bible was like trying to study calculus before learning how to count. I wish I could be there to guide him as he explored the Bible, so that he’d first find the answers to the questions of his soul before moving on to the advanced calculus.While I can’t go back in time, the app you are holding in your hands is my attempt to help others in the same exploration. I’ve tried to get out of the way as much as possible, for it is not in my words that you will find your answers, but in the words of Scripture itself. In the first section, EXPLORE, you will encounter God through four books of the Bible: the Gospel of John, the letters to the Roman and the Galatian churches, and the book of Psalms. These books will introduce you to Jesus Christ and contain the basic teachings of the Christian faith. From there you can continue through the app to walk further into the Christian faith toward new life and maturity. I am firmly convinced that if you approach the Bible with an open heart and mind, you too will find the answers to the questions of your soul. Are you ready to explore?

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