Written by Dr. Henry Cloud in the first line of the preface to his new book “Why I Believe: A Psychologist’s Thoughts on Suffering, Miracles, Science, and Faith.”
The following 761 words are the above preface. I’m offering them to you for your reflection and consideration in your life this week. You may experience no engagement and totally dismiss these words, or perhaps, they may cause you to identify, contemplate, even create new neural pathways you’ve not considered prior. More coming …. Enjoy
I have an issue … and this book is my attempt to solve it.
I have had this issue since I was about ten years old … and although it is better, it is still unresolved in my heart with so many of you … my friends. I won’t name you by name here, but maybe you will find yourself in these pages. And for those who read this book whom I don’t know, if you fit the description of how I describe my friends, then come along for the ride. We would probably be friends anyway. But, enough about you for a moment … I want to talk about me and my problem.
Here it is in a nutshell: I love God, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that He is real. He has proven that to me for decades. That is not my problem.
My problem is that I love my friends, and many of them do not know God, at least in any way that they have told me about. So the problem is this: I want them to know Him and know that He is real. I want them to have a relationship with Him and know how incredible that is.
So why is that a problem? Simple … I often do not know how to tell them.
“Wait …” you might say. “You have told millions of people about God in talks and books and media, so how is it that you don’t even know how to tell your own friends about Him?”
Here is the simple answer … the audiences sign up to hear what I think about God. My friends don’t.
They sign up just to be my friend. And I love that. That is why I signed up with them as well. They rock … my friends are the coolest people in the world. They are smart, funny, talented … many of them do amazing things in some field of endeavor, in their families, or some other way. Others don’t set any records at all … they are just normal folks, and awesome as people. But all of them have one thing in common: they have the greatest hearts. They are honest, caring, and real. I love hanging out with them. And for some strange reason, they like to hang out with me as well.
Which brings me to the point. When we do hang out together, they did not come to talk about God. They just came to be together … to play golf, have dinner, talk about life. And so, my problem is that I don’t want to bug them or make them uncomfortable by telling them What I want them to know about God. And I especially don’t want to make them feel so weird that they would not want to hang out anymore … thinking I’m trying to “convert them,” as one of my good friends said one time. (We laugh about it now … but at a party one time, he told a group that when he met me twenty years ago, he googled me and all this “faith” stuff came up along with me being an author and psychologist. He thought, “Oh no … He’s one of those, and he’s going to try to convert me.”) But as he told that story to another friend at a party at my house recently, he said, “I finally figured out that he [meaning me] was sort of normal and wasn’t trying to do that.” He and I and the other people in the conversation just laughed.
That conversation was funny … and I would never want to put pressure on anyone, make them feel uneasy, or weird, or judged for their own beliefs. So, for those reasons I often have this problem: Even thought they do not want to mfeel weird, and I do not want to make them feel that way, I still want my friends to know that God is real, and I want them to meet Him on their terms.
And I struggle with that.
But that is not being a good friend, either … a good friend does share what they think their friend would love to know and have it if they knew, right? But I often don’t. And what do I know? They even might want to know what I think about God.
S, I decided to solve my problem. I am writing down some of my thoughts about God … for my friends. The stuff we never talk about.
Next Up:
The book’s Introduction. After that, you’ll have to buy the book.