“…I could no longer question His existence. I hadn’t gone through any human or heavenly intermediary to get this. No one was trying to convert me to anything. I hadn’t even told anyone I was searching for anything. And frankly, anything is what I was searching for, not specifically God.”

I deeply love my Roman Catholic family and friends. Some of my most treasured early childhood memories are those of my parents carefully explaining the Trinity to me at the dinner table, and it turns out they did a wonderful job. My greatest thrill, after seeing the Lord Himself, would be to see every single one of them in His kingdom.

But I’m also committed to the Reformation doctrines of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone (sola gratia, sola fide, solo Christo). Before the Holy Spirit caused these truths to break forth in my heart I had descended into a youthful rebellious agnosticism and was held captive by my sins.

It was God who pursued me as I ran from Him. And I ran from Him through junior high and well into high school.

I became openly obstinate about it, even rebelling in church one day and influencing my younger brother Dave to follow me, leading to an open conflict with my dad that didn’t end well for the two of us. It was obviously my fault for starting it, not Dave’s.

Then, 50 years ago this past February, on the day after Valentine’s Day, a cloudy, drizzly, unusually mild winter’s day in the Chicago area, my dad collapsed and died of a heart attack in the living room of our home.

When it happened, my mom called out to me as she ran to the phone, “Ronald, help your father!”

I ran out of my first-floor bedroom and found him on the sofa, his body in odd contortions and a strange gurgling sound coming from his mouth.

I stood there in puzzled terror until my mom returned from calling for the ambulance. I had no idea that he was having a heart attack even as my mom grabbed his head and started prying his tongue out from his throat. I don’t think she knew, either.

I apologize for including these details, but they’ve haunted me for decades.

We moved him to the floor, and I tried giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but I only saw his open lifeless eyes staring back up at me no matter how many times I tried.

I couldn’t help him, and it seemed to take forever for the paramedics to arrive.

My three brothers and I went to a neighbor’s house as my mom accompanied my dad in the ambulance. When she came back to the neighbor’s house with one of our priests, I still didn’t get it. When the neighbors left the room, she told us he was dead. I was in shock.

He was 38. I was almost 16. Valentine’s Day has never been the same for me since.

When we arrived back home, I was the first to enter the house. I found my maternal grandfather, a World War II veteran who had served at Guadal Canal, standing with his face wedged between the wrought iron poles of the railing next to the front door, weeping at the top of his lungs. It shook me, so I grabbed him and hugged him to try to settle him down.

My mom’s parents loved my dad so much! Both of his parents had died due to complications from alcoholism four years earlier.

When I saw videos of Erika Kirk’s body draped over her husband Charlie’s open coffin this past September, whispering her love to his absent soul, it was a page out of my own life, from our first night at the funeral home 50 years earlier.

It caused me to once again relive that entire weekend: our house filled with family and friends who had rushed in to weep loudly at our front door with my mom and to sit and just be with us, us going to pick out his casket, the two-night wake, the mile-long car line from the funeral home to the church, the packed mass, the equally long car line from the church to the cemetery on a dull, gray Monday, my grandparents fumbling for a tip to give to the kind limo driver who drove us back home and then waited in awkwardly polite appreciation as my grandmother hurried into the house to bring it back for him as he chatted with my grandfather.

I remember it all.

And then, the pall that accompanied the new emptiness that had taken up residence in our home as we went back in and the door closed behind us and would remain with us day after day after day, our companion at every family meal.

As I watched my mom descend into a grief far deeper than my adolescent mind could comprehend, my three younger brothers and I feeling helpless as she sat alone in our dining room after dinner tearfully playing slow games of solitaire, it completely took the wind out of the sails of my rebellion.

In my ungrateful skepticism, I had prided myself on requiring rational, scientific answers for questions about the universe, including how it originated, oblivious to how that approach was inconsistent with my own moralistic judgmentalism and desire for ultimate meaning.

I knew intuitively that my empirical requirements could never satisfy a claim to full-blown atheism, so I retreated into what I thought was relative epistemic safety, the feigned humility of agnosticism.

These walls around my heart were still standing several weeks after my dad’s death as the five of us gathered in front of his new grave. We had come to see the simple, flat marker with his name and the dates of his birth and death.

My mom said, “I want you to know that your father is not down there. He’s up in heaven.”

I dared not say what my beleaguered mind was still arguing back, “How do we know that?”

But though the walls were still standing, they were wobbling. They wobbled from the force of other unwelcome questions that came knocking on them.

How could my dad just be gone?  How could his personality simply cease to exist?

How could everything that made my dad who he was—this man whom I saw day after day, who gave me his first name, a man whom I had often resented, not fully understanding just how much I really wanted and needed him, who had just a few months earlier told me in no uncertain terms that he loved me—how could he and his consciousness simply have evaporated into the impersonal ether of an uncaring universe?

My old answers weren’t working. My mind sensed it needed new answers. And its resistance was weakening.

I had always lived through one form of emotional turmoil or another, whether it was loneliness or being bullied at school or being in trouble with my parents.

And now this. I wanted it to end.

I bought and read self-help books. I talked to one of our priests who came for dinner one night and to the few people in our church I was close to due to family and neighborhood connections, not because I was particularly involved in the church.

I was looking for an answer—any answer—something that worked, something that would help me make sense of life and show me how to think and live.

One day my mom announced that she was going to a neighborhood ladies’ Bible study during the week.

Really? I didn’t know people did that kind of thing. “Uhm, okay. Have a nice time.”

A kind Lutheran lady with a strong evangelical faith had invited her. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole Bible study thing, but I thought it was good for her to get out and meet people. She wasn’t eating much and was a shadow of her former self; maybe they could help her.

They gave her literature to read. She brought it home and left it on the landing in the foyer next to the staircase. I would sneak out of my room to look at it when no one was around. Looking for…something.

This wasn’t the first time I was exposed to evangelical literature, but it was the first time I read it in hope of finding anything.

On one of my dad’s wake nights, our older cousin Chuck came. My brother Dave and I had idolized him as kids. He taught us how to do cool things, like snap towels at each other. We hadn’t seen him for a few years.

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