Hi there...
Was looking around for a toe into the site and tripped across here. Seems like as good a place to begin as any.
There's probably a label that can be attached to the views I held before conversion to Christianity... but I'm not sure what it would be. I didn't think about God, didn't think about where the world or all the things in it came from, didn't think about my nominal Roman Catholic 'faith'. Neither did I care. Iano was Iano and lived his life as he saw fit. The prime thing that concerned me, was me. And that was, by and large, the view that seemed to be shared by people I came in contact with - so there was no reason to think there was anything inappropriate/invalid about it.
A constant throughout my life had been a tendency to live it intensely. As a kid it was the string of hobbies; entered into with relish, then developed to deep levels. Not for me, the casual picking up and discarding of interests once the initial novelty had worn off. Additional to a strong drive to seek fulfillment and enjoyment however, was a parallel companion called boredom. Whatever it was that gave initial satisfaction would eventually (even if it took years) loose it's lustre and I'd start to see the activity as being...well, a bit pointless really. There was always a void behind the surface satisfaction and pleasure. Something that remained untouched - no matter what I tried to fill it with: childhood hobbies, juvenile delinquency, drugs, sex and then when I came to my senses a little, university, work, success-seeking, homebuilding.
Satisfaction-seeking had, for me, the characteristic that I needed more as I went along. Yet for all the new thrills I could access, they never even approached the peaks of childhood ones. The shiny new motorcycle I could now easily afford, not a patch on the beat up old Suzuki I scraped my pennies together for. Neither did anything ever seem to pan out as expected. The promise always had a downside. The bosses, to think of one example, I had so respected for their confidence/abilities/power, were the same folk who had non-marriages/70 hour weeks /no relationship with their kids - once I had climbed high enough to get a view of things myself.
I couldn't have vocalised it so at the time but to me, life had to be about something and everything I looked at for meaning was transparent. They weren't substance - just beautifully packaged illusions.
Mild disillusionment with it all set in at 30. By the time I passed my 38th birthday that disillusionment had cranked up to despair. I was trapped. I had tried innumerable things to fill the void and although there were things as yet untried, logic told me that the results could only be the same. The itch was getting worse, the attempts to scratch it more desperate and damaging. I was an object moving in a straight line and no exterior force was having any effect. And the only direction I could go in was down.
It was at that point I turned to an unseen, unbelieved and unknown God and cried for help.
He did...and I haven't looked back since.
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