Encounter With Light III

One day later there came the second intellectual breakthrough: it was the rather chilling realisation that I could not go back. In my old easy-going theism, I had regarded Christianity as a sort of fairy tale; and I had neither accepted nor rejected Jesus, since I had never, in fact, encountered him. Now I had. The position was not, as I had been comfortably thinking all these months, merely a question of whether I was to accept the Messiah or not. It was a question of whether I was to accept Him-or reject. My God! There was a gap behind me, too. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble-but what of the leap to rejection? There might be no certainty that He was not. If I were to accept, I might and probably would face the thought through the years: ‘Perhaps, after all, it’s a lie; I’ve been had!’ But if I were to reject, I would certainly face the haunting, terrible thought: ‘Perhaps it’s true-and I have rejected my God!’

Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, 98.