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 ====== History: Your and My Journey to Faith ... ======
-Saturday, Oct 30, 2019.
+Saturday, Nov 30, 2019. When I was in school, history seemed very boring to me. I had no interest
+in some wars in the past. Why should it be exciting to learn about some emperors who lived 800 years
+ago? I did not have any access to these things. No, history was not my concern. Also, Christian
+faith was not my main concern, though I was part of the Lutheran church. I was interested, yes. But
+I could not see you to make progress, I did not know what to think.
+What is your access to history? And what is your opinion about the Christian faith? Do you
+have access to faith? Or perhaps you do not really know it? Some people are very much opposed
+to faith.
+Personally, I was unclear about Christian faith in my teen years. I had learned about it in school and in a Lutheran church. But it was not clear to me. I have not been against faith. But from the age
+of 14 I considered it to be quite unclear what to believe. Who was God? Was God love? What was
+the meaning of that sentence? So my personal history can be characterized by many questions
+which the church as I knew it could not answer.
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-** ... **
+** Path to Faith ... **
+I looked deeper into faith during the last three years of German high-school education, even
+did my final exams in theology. I could repeat the theories of modern theological schools. But I did
+not understand who God should be. I could not grasp his truth or what these theories could really mean.
+Looking back, of course I have been in contact with Christianity. And some people had their personal
+faith. But still, I did not really understand the biblical books. They seemed to be gray to me,
+inaccessible, somehow enciphered. The theology of Barth or Bultman or others did not really help
+me. It more seemed to pull me away from reality. Their goal was to bring the old Christian message
+into a new critical time. But what they actually did is to convince me that somehow one should
+look more closely and find out, what the real truth was behind all of this. Their particular
+construction did not convince me, that was clear.
+At that time I even attended big youth church events. I listened to the mainly political messages.
+When I started to study at university, I attended some evenings organized by the Lutheran
+student church. But these events were as critical as the theory I knew from school. Again,
+the concept did not convince me. This is my personal history - and probably many people on
+this earth have a similar history in the sense that they do not understand Christian faith
+and that the whole history of mankind is of second or third priority to them.
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-** ... **
+** What did convince me? ... **
+At some point I started to pray. Looking back, I do not know how I got to the idea that I should
+ask God to show me who he was. But I got to the idea and I prayed to the God of this Universe, that
+if he exists, I want to get to know him.
+In the weeks after this prayer, I suddenly got to know various Christian house groups.
+Before that, I had never attended Christian bible study groups - after confirmation at the age
+of about 14 years. But now, I realized that there are various student groups studying the bible.
+So I attended some of them, started to read the New Testament (and also the Old Testament) and
+study the biblical books and stories.
+I have to emphasise the point that Christian faith is more than just listening to some story and
+believing some facts it reports. It is more in the sense that it is about personal decisions. It
+is about what is important to you, how you see yourself and others. It is about the eternal
+God, and how you relate to him.
+I started to listen to Jesus, to all his words and speeches recorded in the New Testament. I was
+fascinated by this guy. He seemed to have a sincere faith. His faith was quite far reaching. If
+you ask me what convinced me to believe, it was Jesus himself. Somehow you can trust this guy.
+You can trust him more than any other human I have ever met or heard about.
+At some point in my life I realized that I cannot succeed to live my life by the standards which
+I thought to be good and justified. I just could not do it, it was impossible to me. At that point
+in time I trusted my life into the hands of Jesus. That is the core of faith: to trust your
+life into his hands. That is much more than theoretical knowledge. It is more than historical
+knowledge, and it is more than experience or truth or facts. You need to know him - how could
+you trust him if you had no knowledge about him, if you did not know him at all. But then,
+this faith step is much more than just an abstract acceptance of some truth. It is a personal
+involvement with God through Jesus.
+My personal journey to faith was characterized by helpful other students, who were ready to
+explain their idea about Christian faith to me. And then the biblical books talked to me directly.
+I started to understand. First, there were only parts here and there, which suddenly made sense
+to me. I continued to read the book, study it chapter by chapter. And more and more if it became
+clear. The whole book did not look gray any more, but it seemed to be full of light, full of
+life. I will tell much more about this, about the experience which followed this time of search
+and study.
+Today I can say that I have been a Christian believer for many years, and also my relationship to
+history as well has completely changed. Reading about God and his journey with mankind has become
+a fascinating daily exercise to me, and the whole history of mankind became extremely exciting
+with my own love to and involvement with her, who is loved so deeply by the eternal God and Saviour.
 (Roland Potthast)