I've now finished my physics degree, a course I originally wanted to do because I thought that by learning more about it I could convince myself that God wasn't there, or at least wasn't necessary.
During one of my chess outings for Scotland (to Bratislava), I shared a room with a friend who's a Christian. Two things struck me :
I realised that I'd never actually read a proper Bible (without pictures and with all the bits in) as a grown-up : all I had to go on were the stories I'd heard or read when I was younger. I thought, well, if God really exists then I'm missing out, and if he doesn't then I'm right. So, when I got back from the chess tournament, I decided to have a go at reading the Bible to see if it made any sense. I knew enough to start with the New Testament, but the only copy that we had in our house was a really old one, and it was worse then Shakespeare So I gave up on that at around Matthew chapter 9!
Thinking back to Bratislava, I was also beginning to realise that I wasn't so perfect either, and that it wasn't just other people who did wrong things and messed things up : I could see that in my life too. I began to realise that the ideas I'd formulated about life just wouldn't work if everyone adopted them. A whole society of people who thought they were more important than everyone else and who saw the faults in everyone but themselves would degenerate rapidly (cf the Dostoyevsky book 'Crime and Punishment').
A couple of weeks later, I was tidying my room (a rare event), and the Gideon's Bible we'd been given in 1st year at school turned up at the back of a drawer. Wow : it was in English! It was readable! It had a suggested order for reading the bits in! As input, I also had a number of copies of a computer magazine edited by a Christian which included a 'God-Slot' every month. These were thought-provoking and challenging and dealt with a lot of the questions I had about Christianity, and a lot of the questions I'd never thought of.
As I read my way through the New Testament, I saw that if everyone in the world followed the moral guidelines laid down in it then the world would work. But I still saw it as a book of rules, like Jesus' teaching, with some history in it too.
The big turning point came when I read a particular 'God-Slot' in the computer magazine, which was about Jesus and his death on the cross. This had always confused me as a child, and it was a question that I still hadn't managed to answer. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, the pharisees and the other religious leaders said to him that if he was really the Son of God, then he should take himself down off of the cross and prove it to them. Now I'd always thought, right, if he was God, then he would have done that, and everyone would have believed him and followed him. But he didn't : he stayed up there and died, and I still just didn't get it!
The magazine article explained how God is holy and righteous, and has to judge us all fairly according to his absolute standards. However, no matter how hard we try, we cannot lead perfect lives (yes, I agreed with that by now) and since God is perfect, we can never come into his presence because of what we've done. He cannot accept us as we are. However, he still loves us and wants us to know him, so he sent his Son, Jesus, who was crucified and then rose from the dead. We were the ones who deserved to be up there on that cross, dying for the things we've done, but he went and died in our place to put us right with God.
Suddenly, lots of things made sense! I now understood what Christians believe and why. It took me a while - several more weeks - to really take it on board. When I had decided that it was true, I asked God to forgive me, thanked him that Jesus had died for me, and said that I wanted to live my life his way from then on : that's when I became a Christian. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, as it meant admitting that I'd been completely wrong, which is never easy, and that I wasn't going to be doing things entirely my own way in the future. However, it was also the best thing I've ever done!