After more than forty years of being oppressed by substandard nutrition and deprived of physical activity, my body has taken to the streets. One after another, in remarkable synchronization, my muscles have begun to cramp. It started with my neck, moved down to my shoulders, and at some point even reached my feet. My wife came home one day to find me lying on my back like a dead cockroach. It took her twenty minutes to understand that something was wrong with me, and when she did, the first thing she said was, “You had it coming.”

And that is the thing about life. You go walking along, thinking people are talking a language and exchanging ideas, but the whole time there is this deeper language people are really talking, and that language has nothing to do with ethics, fashion, or politics, but what it really has to do with is feeling important and valuable. What if the economy we are really dealing in life, what if the language we are really speaking in life, what if what we really want in life is relational?

I began to wonder if becoming a Christian did not work more like falling in love than agreeing with a list of true principles. I had met a lot of people who agreed with all those true principles, and they were jerks, and a lot of other people who believed in those principles, but who also claimed to love Jesus, who were not jerks. It seems like something else has to take place in the heart for somebody to become a believer, for somebody to understand the gospel of Jesus. It began to seem like more than just a cerebral exercise. What if the gospel of Jesus was an invitation to know God?