5 year old son: Mommy, who made God?

7 year old daughter: Ask him when you see him.

My daughter knew me enough to know that would be my exact response. Still two years later, I find myself still wondering the actual response to that question …

My faith has had many twists and turns over the years and I know the rollercoaster of thoughts and emotions will continue until I take my last breath.

I can say I firmly believe in God and in Jesus Christ and in The Holy Spirit. I just wish there wasn’t room to have so many different interpretation of the God’s word. I wish it were as easy as, “Do This and Not That” over and beyond the guidance given in The Ten Commandment.

I also wish I could fervently defend the gospel as I share it. During some random bouts of insomnia, I found myself reading about Zoroaster, Horus, and other stories detailing seemingly similar aspects of Christianity. Naturally, I had questions and started to dig deeper. My search didn’t turn up with anything significant and I started to feel like a fraud. How could I defend something I couldn’t explain?

I am not an official member of any church. I visit two churches regularly however with the goal of choosing one as my church home. I also follow many spiritual / religious leaders on social media. Naturally, I thought surely one of these people who boldly profess Jesus’s name in public can explain why His story was thee original or the one and only. I have even reached out to these people before to ask them more ‘simple’ biblical questions and have received a timely response. So, I asked / messaged a couple of the aforementioned Christian leaders with questions like, “Can you compare and contrast the story of Horus and Jesus?” “Are there really other virgins births in other religions?”

I was overwhelmingly met with silence.

In the meantime, I was also doing my own research but couldn’t find anything substantial. Finally, someone from Joyce Myer’s outreach team got back to me and told me I should be looking into the field of Apologetics and provided some popular Christian bookstore suggestions to further my research.

According to Wikipedia, “Christian apologetics is a branch of Christian theology that defends Christianity against objections.”

Finally, I was getting somewhere.

I eventually came across an interview featured on the Dallas Theological Seminary’s website. I read the transcripts and immediately felt heard. Not only were some of my questions answered, I also found a new interest in the field of Apologetics. What was particularly appealing was that one of the panelists, Mary Jo Sharp, was a former atheist.

I am still going to conduct my own investigations but there is a comfort in knowing I am not the only ones asking these questions and that there are people researching everyday to find empirical answers to my inquiries.

So as I continue my quest I leave you with these questions: How do you know God is real? How do you defend the gospel to others?