This is where we find Nick O’Brien. I hope in my depiction of him, I have created a realistic and relatable protagonist, but left the door open as this series and character progress for Nick to improve his understanding and relationship with God. In fact, should this series be well received enough to prompt me to continue with a few other story ideas I have for Nick, his future holds a person who will be very influential in opening Nick’s eyes about a great many things.
No David G. Johnson novel would be complete without me taking the opportunity for those readers interested in getting more into the head and heart of the author to understand me better. If you have read the Afterword in my other books, much of this material will be familiar, but you might want to stick around for the beginning at least. I plan here to share a little bit different testimony than I have shared elsewhere. Not that I am “changing my story”, but rather it is a long story and I plan to focus a little more on different parts of it, because I want readers to know a little more about my ties to Catholicism and why I feel confident and comfortable writing a Catholic protagonist accurately. For those who have no interest in the Christian worldview, you won’t miss any secret spoilers by skipping the rest of the Afterword.
As a young child, my family was mostly areligious. We didn’t go to church, but growing up in the south, gospel music, bluegrass gospel, and TV preachers were an unavoidable part of the atmosphere. I love the music, but the preachers in their powder-blue suits and southern drawl that turned “God” into a three-syllable word just came off as used car salesmen. I thought that if God were real, He could find better agents than these clowns.
Then I used to hear my mom talk about belonging to the Catholic Church when she grew up. There was such reverence in her voice as she reflected on her earlier childhood. Her mother’s family had been Irish immigrants to New York, and I still had a few older relatives of my grandmother’s generation that retained a hint of the Irish brogue in their voice. I wanted roots, so I began to dig into Catholicism. Imagine my surprise when I discovered there was a decent-sized Catholic church right there in the middle of hillbilly country, Hendersonville, NC. I asked if we might go, and my parents agreed to take us to mass the next Sunday.
I suppose I couldn’t have been much older than sixth or seventh grade at the time. That church, while not a particularly impressive thing compared to the great cathedrals I have seen since then, to my young eyes, was beautiful. There was a sense of history, a sense of wonder, and a sense of reverence for God in that place the likes of which I never imagined. From that first visit, I knew that was where I was supposed to be. I began going to the church as often as possible, and even hanging around the priests after mass. I was confirmed and took my first communion after several weeks of studying Catholic catechism with the priests, particular the above-mentioned Father Kimbrough.
I couldn’t get enough. It wasn’t any particular spiritual epiphany with God, but I was an active fantasy role-playing gamer at the time, and the history, ritual, and mysticism of the Catholic church just resonated with me so strongly I wanted to be as much a part of it as I could. I became an altar boy and served regularly at the church. Despite a period of on-and-off atheism in college, I later returned to the church and became a Knight of Columbus, rising to the third degree out of four possible degrees as a Knight. It was only later, once I began earning money and wrapping my life around my own accomplishments, that my love and fascination for the Catholic Church was displaced by my love of money, love of myself, and serious doubts about the existence of God altogether.
Many people find faith in Jesus at the low points in their lives. I have heard it said that sometimes in order to get us to look up, God puts us flat on our back. While that is often the case, it was not the case with me. God found me on the mountaintop of my life. I was thirty-nine years old, a senior delivery manager for a major Information Technology company. I had a huge home in Southlake, Texas, a six-figure income, cars, vacations, travel, and money to spare. In essence, I had the American Dream. I had a wife and daughter and everything everyone thinks they want in life to be happy. And I was happy, too. I wasn’t looking for God because I figured I was doing pretty well without Him.
Due to my Catholic influences growing up, I knew a lot about God, but never really knew God. I was not even sure anymore that God even existed, but I was not arrogant enough to discount the possibility altogether. I was content to leave God alone as long as He left me alone.
I still kept in touch with Father Kimbrough right up until the mid-2000s and I still considered him a dear friend. He passed away in 2011, and if I have one regret it was not seeing my friend again before the end. The great news is, I fully expect to see him again, as Father Kimbrough was the absolute embodiment of a living Christian witness and I have absolutely no doubt he is rejoicing in the presence of God right now.
During high school I even contemplated attending Catholic Seminary upon graduating to become a priest. That had a lot to do with Father Kimbrough, as he was a very strong advocate for vocational ministry and led quite a number of young men under his influence into the priesthood. The fact that I was an irascible hellion kind of deterred me from following that course.
Upon reaching college, I felt my eyes were opened and I was set freed. In my introduction to Philosophy class I met Super Atheist, who introduced me to a book called Voltaire on Religion. Whatever nominal faith I had was quickly shattered as I went to religious leader after religious leader and found none of them had the apologetics skills to answer the challenges. I walked away from religion and embraced science, with occasional bouts of returning to Catholicism peppering that time. Ultimately, love of money and influence from more and more atheist friends led me to the point where those former beliefs were little more than fairy tales.
I actually marvel now how I exchanged the deep and caring wisdom Father Kimbrough had always shown me for my own shallow understanding of how I thought things worked. I, like many college students, was content with a shallowness of “proof” against the Bible akin to the depth that sound-bytes or campaign ads lend to one’s understanding of who a particular political candidate is. I was content with the taglines, propagandist memes, and superficial “statements of fact,” without ever having the intellectual integrity to truly dig into the evidence and examine the key assumptions underlying the “facts.”
Content in my smug self-righteousness, I careened through life, grabbing at every opportunity for advancement, looking for any chance to jump up to the next rung on the ladder. I wanted leadership, money, power and security for my family, and I missed no chances at getting it.
Then, when I was sitting on the top of the world looking over all I had achieved, God came to me. The words were almost audible in my soul: “What now?”
Those words rang like a death-knell in my spirit. What did He mean, “What now?” Why, I had everything. What now was enjoying all I had achieved. But there was a nagging in my heart that would not go away. I could look at creation and see clearly that there was too much design, too much that had to have come together just so for us to even be here. I remembered back to the stories from my youth about every person one day standing before our Creator and being judged for our life. Something deep inside me knew this was true.
More than that, I understood that on that day, whenever it came, God was not going to look at my resume. He was not going to check my bank statements, stock portfolios, real estate holdings, and judge by those things. He would not care how many cars, houses or international trips we had. He would judge me on the content of my character, and there I knew I was bankrupt.
I was selfish. Many of my successes had come at the cost of others. I wanted things that others had. I had not lived my life always honoring my parents. I lied. I had taken things that did not belong to me. I had lusted in my heart. And most of all, I had failed to honor God, my Creator, above all else. I was guilty. My relationship with my Creator was non-existent, and worse than that, I had no idea what to d
o about it.
I began frantically searching for how to reconnect with God. I went every Sunday to two or three services at different churches looking for truth. I visited Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches as well as non-denominational ones, hoping for someone to tell me how to fix my relationship with God. The saddest part of this story is that right there, in the buckle of the Bible Belt in NE Texas, it took three months before I finally heard the gospel.
I was sitting in my car outside one church, well before the services would start, waiting for what I fully expected to be another disappointment. I had the radio on a Christian station when suddenly I heard a Christian preacher and apologist who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. I heard what church he was pastoring at, punched it into the GPS, and off I went. I wound up at First Baptist Church Colleyville, TX to discover that there was a guest preacher that Sunday. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the guy I had heard on the radio had just stepped down that previous Thursday over some questionable real estate dealings, but I know now that was God’s divine appointment, because preaching that Sunday was Dr. Danny Forshee, at that time a professor of Evangelism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. For the first time that I could remember, I heard the gospel preached.
God truly prepared that day. Even though there were over a thousand people in attendance, there only seemed to be me, Dr. Forshee and the Holy Spirit having a private meeting. Even though I knew what this preacher had said was the truth and what I needed to do, my pride still prevented me, a senior manager, from walking down an aisle in front of “a bunch of Texas yahoos” (my prideful attitude at the time). But what I did do was fill out one of the cards in the pew and ask that a minister visit me in my home. Even though I was “seeking God”, my pride-filled heart still thought, “If God wants to meet with me, He can meet me on my home turf.”
The following Wednesday night, two people came out to visit me at my home, one of them being my dear friend to this day, Jeff Robinson, currently pastor of Rocky Mount Baptist Church in Rocky Mount, VA. Jeff and Dale, the minister of outreach at that time, shared with me for over two hours, by the end of which I was in tears at the thought that God could and would forgive me. My pride shattered and I prayed there in my living room that Jesus become the Lord of my life. I pledged that since He had given me thirty-nine years to come to know my separation from Him, to have the chance to repent and be restored, whatever time I had left I wanted to give to serving Him.
It has been years since then, and God allowed me to lead my family to Him and to serve him on various short and longer-term opportunities in four countries on three continents. We currently reside overseas and hope that opportunities to live abroad while writing and serving will continue to present themselves.
Now, I hope if you have read this far in the Afterword it is because God may have you searching for truth in your own life. I have deeply researched the historicity, the archeological evidence, and the truth claims of the Bible for many years and found the more I learn, the more reasonable and solid my faith has become. There are many resources along these lines, so I won’t do a disservice to the field of apologetics by trying to do a Cliff’s Notes version in an Afterword, but I do want to share a few basic truths with those seeking and open to hearing what the Bible has to say.
1) We are all sinners (Romans 3:10; 3:23). That is hard to hear, but the fact is there are two kinds of people in the world, perfect people and sinners. If you aren’t one, you are the other. If you truly believe you are the former, there isn’t much else to discuss. Most people, however, are honest enough to admit they have lied, they have not always honored their father and mother, they have lusted, they have coveted, they have hated someone. Any of these things puts you firmly in the category of sinner.
2) We cannot remove our own sin. God in the Bible says the wages of sin is death. If, like many of the other world religions teach, we could counterbalance or work off our own sin by praying, giving alms, making pilgrimages, doing good deeds, meditation, or whatever, then God lied in the Bible and Jesus died for nothing. In Matthew 26:39-44 Jesus prayed three times asking if there were any other way, and yet still He went to the cross and died. If there were any way apart from Jesus that man could be saved, Jesus would not have died upon the cross (Acts 4:12).
3) We will stand before God and be judged one day (Hebrews 9:27). God created us and He has the right to judge His creation. He takes no pleasure in the death of sinful man but truly desires that all may come to repentance and faith (Ezekiel 33:11). To that end God has made a way for our sin to be forgiven and for us to be restored to righteousness.
4) Jesus is that way (John 14:6). Jesus says “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” Some have called this narrow-minded, arrogant or elitist, but if we open our hearts and minds to the truth, God was not obligated to make any way for man to be saved. He did so because He loved the world and mankind (John 3:16) and wanted us to have a hope. Does a drowning man look at the person throwing them a rope from a lifeboat and say, “Don’t you have another way? That is very narrow-minded for you to only have one rope for me to choose from. I prefer a life preserver or life jacket instead.” How silly would that be? No, a drowning person would grab onto that rope and hold on for all they were worth and be very grateful to the person who had tossed it to them. Yet this is exactly what society has conditioned us to do in response to the gospel. We sneer at the rope and criticize the boat captain who has thrown it to us.
If you are seeking truth, then the one true truth that exists is Jesus. A way has been made for you by a loving God to be saved from judgment and wrath. All that is needed is for you to recognize and repent (turn away from) your sin and put your faith in Jesus Christ. Grab onto that rope and hold on for all you are worth. You can do that by saying a prayer wherever you are asking that God forgive your sins and draw you to Himself.
If you have, or are willing to do that, you have taken the first step. The road does not end there, however. Profession of faith in Christ is not a “get out of hell free” card. There is nothing in the Bible that mirrors the false teaching of “easy believism.” Faith in Christ means living your life for Him. Three times in John chapter 14, Jesus equates loving Him with obedience. So how do you know what to obey? You need discipleship. You need to find in your area a Bible-believing church and get plugged into not only Sunday services, but Bible study classes as well. Every day you eat food to nourish your body, in the same way set some time aside every day to spend in prayer and in God’s word to nourish your spirit.
You may have questions still. As you read and study you may have things come up that you don’t understand. Your first resource should be your local pastor or teacher at the church you attend. If you don’t find the answers there, I might suggest a few websites that might help. These are excellent resources for Christian apologetics and questions about the Christian life.
1) www.carm.org This is the website of the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry. It is an excellent site to find many answers to a broad range of questions.
2) www.reasonablefaith.org This is the website of Dr. William Lane Craig, noted Christian apologist and speaker.
3) Beyond those websites, if you have specific questions about the gospel or Christianity and cannot find the answers with either your local clergy or the above sites, you can contact me with questions at [email protected]. Please be aware, I am opening this email up to my readership as a resource and help. I will not argue or debate questions I feel are aimed in that direction, but will gladly do whatever I can to help sincere inquiries concerning biblical truth. There are numerous debate boards on Facebook and elsewhere for those looking for that, but this email address is for sincere seekers of truth who have earnestly sought answers elsewhere and yet have been unable to find those answers. I cannot promise to be able to answer every question, but coming from the background of a skeptic and having researched truth claims and st
udied apologetics for several years, I hope that I can be a resource to anyone sincerely seeking faith or struggling for answers. Your patience with my response times is appreciated, as I have a number of responsibilities on my plate, but ministering to seeking souls is a high priority.
Finally, for those who do not have specific faith-based questions but would like to send fan-mail, questions, comments, feedback, etc. specifically regarding the Chadash Chronicles books themselves, those types of responses can be sent to [email protected]. If there are things sent here requiring a response, please be patient and know I will do my best to respond. I also an author page up on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/DavidGlennJohnson, so feel free to drop by and like my page and keep your eyes out for new projects and new releases.
By His grace,
David G. Johnson
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The Woman In Blue (Nick O'Brien Case Files) Page 19
