A Love Story

I was a sophomore in college when I met the atheist who would become my best friend.

Halfway through our shared philosophy course, he entered the room one day, glanced down at my essay on Plato, and rolled his eyes: “Plato.  Predictable.”

I looked at his essay on Nietzsche and rolled my eyes.  “Not any more predictable than that.” 

What that exchange begot was a friendly rivalry marked by banter and debate, both in class and outside of it.  We took delight in pushing each other, in competing for good grades, in entertaining ourselves and (I would later find out) our class and professor with our antics.

Over time, the debate turned into dialogue turned into affinity.  We disagreed acutely on matters of faith; we agreed on nearly everything else.  We spent hours past midnight chatting on Messenger before texting was a thing; we lent each other books, cracked jokes that only the two of us could understand, exchanged glances during sessions with a particularly difficult professor.

Most of my Christian friends worried aloud about it all: my new friend was known for his green eyes, razor intellect, and devastatingly dry sense of humor…and also for his goth aesthetic and outspoken critiques of the Christian faith.  When he showed up to class one day in a spiked collar, a Bible study acquaintance very worriedly asked me if he was a Satanist.

“No,” I reassured them, “just an atheist.”   They seemed oddly relieved.

But faith, or the lack thereof, was what ran our friendship aground.  An evangelical at the time, fully versed in the school of bringing people to Christ, I drained an enormous amount of effort and energy into bringing this man to Jesus in every way I could think of.  I explicated Scripture.  I sent him apologetics texts.  I won intellectual debates over faith that went on for hours.  I prayed for him as much as I have every prayed for anyone.  I bought him a Bible. 

It wasn’t enough.  On a night that I still remember quite vividly, he took a deep breath and risked being honest with me: “I know how strongly you feel about your faith.  I respect it.  So I’ve listened hard and genuinely tried to be open to everything you’ve said about it and everything I’ve read, but I just don’t believe in God.  And I can’t lie about that, as much as I wish I could.  You’re not going to change my mind.  Can you be okay with that?”

I can’t say I handled it well.  I burst into tears.

We drifted apart, after that. We still had our talks, our conversations—neither of us ever consciously pulled back—but none of them were about faith or religion or anything particularly deep or meaningful.  The finality of that discussion meant something to both of us.  He spent more time with his other friends.  I turned to my campus Christian groups and hobbies.  When we went home for the summer, communication was sporadic.  Months passed.

In fall, days after returning to campus, we bumped into each other.  We exchanged hesitant smiles and awkward smile talk.  And then, as I was turning to leave, he said: “I started reading that Bible you gave me, over the summer.”

“Okay,” I said, uncertainly.  I dared say nothing else.

Then, at a party hosted by a scholarly organization we both belonged to, we stumbled into each other again.  The banter came a little easier, this time.  Afterward, we started speaking on Messenger again in little snippets about classes and books. 

My friend Sarah, sitting on my bed during one of these chats, looked up from her Bible.  In our evangelical circles, she was known for being charismatic and contemplative and believing God gave her prophetic words.  We loved her; we often did not take her seriously. 

“Hey,” she said with great conviction.  “He’s in love with you.”

I snorted and kept typing. “Okay.”

Sarah was not in the least ruffled.  She leaned forward and put her hands on my shoulders, drawing my attention to her.  “I mean it.  God gave me a word.  He’s meant for you. You’re going to marry him.”

I ignored her.

A week later, he called me and asked if he could come to my small group Bible study.  “Of course,” I said, bewildered.  A month after that, he asked if he could come to a campus Christian meeting I attended.  And in the first five minutes of the meeting, the guest speaker for the event—who knew not a single one of us and had been brought in from five hours away—paused. 

“I have a message to share tonight,” he said, “but—I’m sorry.  This is unusual.  God is convicting me that someone is here who wants to follow Christ.   I never start with an invitation, but if there’s anyone here—”

And my best friend, the college’s most notorious atheist, raised his hand.

Afterward, when he was done politely dodging hugs from groups of Christians he’d never met and being otherwise celebrated and cheered, I pulled him aside in bewilderment.  In the most un-Christian response to a conversion anyone has probably ever exhibited, I hissed, “What is this all about?  What are you doing?  Are you sure?  You can’t just do this if you don’t mean it—”

“I’m sure.”  He was so incredibly calm.  I lost my entire mind.

“What?  Did you forget our entire conversation before summer?  ‘I don’t believe in God’?  ‘I’m not going to change my mind’?”   

He gave me a helpless look.  “I know what I said.  I wasn’t lying then.  And I have too much integrity to lie now.  I don’t know.  I just started reading the Bible and then I felt this urge to try and pray and—none of the arguments ever made any intellectual sense to me.  They still don’t, actually.  There’s nothing that could talk me into it.  But I think I met Christ.  And now, I understand.”

I will confess I didn’t entirely believe him.  But I watched with astonishment as, a week later, he started weeding out particular albums and musicians from his music collection.  I watched as he professed his Christian faith to his atheist friends as clearly and calmly as he’d expressed his disbelief—and weathered their scorn without batting an eye.  I watched him delve into Scripture with as much care as he read Nietzsche and Foucault and Derrida.

Only a few weeks after that, he called me in the evening.  We talked for two hours straight, he shared snippets of poems he had written, and neither of us could bring ourselves to hang up.  “Want to go for a walk?” he asked.

We were holding hands before we made our first circuit of the campus.

When we finally got back to the lobby of my dorm, after a drive out to an all-night diner for breakfast and hours spent wandering the campus together, we hugged and then couldn’t seem to let each other go.  Sometime during that long embrace, when I opened my eyes briefly, I saw Sarah over his shoulder heading up to the lobby.  Our eyes met.  She gave me two thumbs up.

She was righter than right.  Over two decades later, I still wake up and look into his eyes every morning. Over two decades later, his integrity and love of God has endured and at times even upheld mine.  And I marvel at the delicate works of God.

Who, indeed, can touch the great mystery?  The encounter with God is the heart of everything.  Only God can initiate it, and I believe it is distinct to every individual: an inescapable invitation that, I believe, surpasses all other obstacles and beliefs to speak directly to the heart and to the spirit.  Christians can facilitate that encounter, we can pray for it to occur, can hope individuals respond in kind—but in the end, we must each meet God ourselves alone, gazing into the face of love and making our own choice about how to respond. 

The man who was my best friend and is now both that and the great love of my life taught me: words and will aren’t enough.

Only God can do God’s work.  No amount of wishing or hoping or effort on our part will amount to anything without the support and help of the Spirit.  Because only the Spirit could have taken a man of great integrity—who came by his understanding of the world with great thought and care and conviction—and created in him a new perspective, a new sense of everything.  Only the Spirit could have bought two unlike people together, woven their lives and hearts into one, in such a strange and curious way.

I love our love story.  I love it because it is a reminder that God is the love story behind all of the love stories I know.  The great Encounter speaks into all the others, great and small.  Praise be to God.