On Experience: Tailor made frustration

I'm intrigued at how different everyones entry into Christianity is. It's the only way it could work, really. Even so, it seems that we all crave a universal "religious" experience; reliable, comforting, quantifiable. A dependable escape from what can be a really difficult sequence of events - life.

Instead though we are confronted with an ordeal that seems tailor made to freak us out, rudely cutting through the accepted, civilized channels for spirituality - you know, the kind of polite revelations we see in Heat magazine and on the V.T's before each song in X-factor.

The issue of preconceptions has been the biggest for me. I thought I would be able to deftly sum-up whatever religious experience I was in for through years of hard, dedicated casual reading of occasional pop science. Was I going to let my mind be fooled into thinking I was being supernaturally influenced? No way, last month? I read a 200-page book about the power of suggestion. That's right, God, contend with that. My mind is a fortress.

I was a fortress in a way, albeit one perhaps ready to accept that the Trojan horse of a book 'The case for Christ' might just have a point, and may even circumvent the aimed arrows of my impenetrable intellectual prowess - a prowess built upon years of hardcore, detailed investigation. Like this article I once read in WHsmiths, and that bit of an interview I saw on tele.

So we find that the response we get to some open-hearted investigation at first feels self-propagated - how could these ridiculously bespoke feelings be generated anywhere other than my own mind? - but then may also be the answer from a God that knows us very well indeed. Hardly a revelation, but that's why I'm not sat here writing "The Bible II: ye' ain't got no game against these metaphors".

Prayer is much the same. God's response is often seemingly so in tune with my current situation that I inherently question whether it was even an answer or just the natural unfolding of events. Faith wouldn't be faith without that question, so I don't mull over it for too long.