Sunday, Continuing One Woman's Journey From Atheism to Faith

ALL THAT YEAR, JOSH HAD PREACHED THE GOSPEL BY LIVING IT. By being the best fencing coach I ever had, by caring about me---not as a potential convert, but as me, a unique individual---and treating me always, always with respect. You can't fake respect when you train with someone three hours at a stretch, two evenings a week, plus weekend tournaments, for a whole year. If your honesty, patience and compassion are a mask, it is sure to come off at some point when you're dealing with an argumentative, stubborn, hot-tempered fencer. (That would be me, in case you're wondering.)

That's why the idea of building relationships so that you can share the Gospel rings false to me. If the relationship doesn't come first, it becomes salesmanship, with Jesus as the product. Ugh. If that had been what my coach was doing, I would have noticed---and felt betrayed. But it wasn't. Josh wasn't trying to sell me anything; he just carried on being the person Christ called him to be, and I couldn't help notice.

I didn't respect Christians. I respected Josh and Heidi...who were Christians. Something didn't track. Might some of my ideas about Christianity be wrong?

By itself, the discovery that my coach was a Christian was something I could have shrugged off. But something had woken up in me as I was reading those poems that spoke so powerfully about the experience of knowing God. For the first time in my life, I wanted to think and talk about questions of faith. My inclination to talk about these issues---half-embarrassed as I was by my own interest---took coherent shape: coach was a person I thought I could talk to.

I began tentatively edging around the subject in casual conversation. I recognized even then that it was out of character for me to want to discuss anything related to religion, and yet I did want to. I just didn't have the slightest clue how to begin.

Little did I know the icebreaker would take the form of one of my worst fencing performances ever.

---Holly Ordway, Not God's Type, A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith