Something Had Changed Within Me

From David Aikman’s interview on Booknotes:

“I was a militant atheist as an undergraduate, and I used to argue with a very gentle Anglican clergyman, trying to persuade him to be an atheist. And he wasn't very impressed with that. But he was very gracious and he would never argue back. He would always agree with me. And I was kind of frustrated.

And one day, after I graduated from college, he was in his study, just saying, `May I read some passages from Scripture?' And I said, `Well, I'm safe here. He's not going to preach at me.' And he read some of the passages from the Gospels, where Jesus is talking very intimately to his disciples, like, you know, `I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.' And I'd heard this stuff before, but somehow at that point it seemed as though Jesus was alive and he was real to me, in a way that I could no more deny than I could deny the existence of my parents. And I knew something had changed within me and I never looked back.“