The Spiritual Pilgrim: A Journey from Cynical Realism to "Born Again" Christian Faith

My Story. As the subtitle indicates, this is a personal story of a journey from cynical realism to a born-again Christian faith. It started with the loss of my goal of becoming a Christian minister, thanks to a dispiriting Bible course taught by a professor who then committed suicide - all in my first year of college! But my world nonetheless soon moved well beyond my bruised Middle America, through years of hard work and doctoral studies in Washington DC and through extensive travel, study and work abroad. And I was able to fine-tune a quite tough understanding of man's political and social dynamics, serving as an international studies professor and as an international political risk consultant to various American corporations.

But that well-constructed world would ultimately disintegrate, thanks to forces well beyond my control, when the American economy crashed at the end of the 1970s. This left me exhausted and deeply alienated from that same world.

And then Christ showed up in the strangest of places and in the oddest of people. In the latter I saw Jesus, a Savior that I wanted dearly to be part of my own life. And thus I found myself heading down a very new path, led by God himself ... to want to work among society's rejects - whom I could now easily sympathize with! But I also had to learn to wait for God to open life's doors, something I, as traditionally a high achiever, found very difficult. But a few hard knocks here and there (some of them from rather legalistic Christians I was called to pastor!) brought me to an ever-stronger relationship with God ... and the surrounding world. Thus I finally was able to put the professional world in its secondary place, and take up my greater duties as a husband and father, and finally as a teacher of life's hard realities, but also life's awesome blessings in Jesus Christ, to a rising generation set before me in a Christian classroom. And now I write, in order to reach an ever wider-audience with that same Good News!