Why I believe in the Living God
Chapter I. The Fall from Grace
My name is Philip Eric Jones, and I am living proof that God is real, answers prayers, and has healing power.
On June 19, 1976, I was admitted to Ben Taub Hospital in Houston, Texas, diagnosed as psychotic. Psychosis is a life-threatening mental illness, for which medical science has no cure. Very few psychotics recover to live any semblance of a normal life. But I did. I trace my recovery to the day I discovered that there is a living God, who hears and answers prayers.
Before being hospitalized, I had graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa, and with special honors in my major field -- psychology, ironically enough. I had (and I assume I still have) a Mensa-level IQ. Unfortunately, I was also a drug abuser, and had unhealthy relationships with both my parents.
Where God was concerned, I was agnostic. There might be a God, but I was skeptical. I was unconvinced by the philosophical proofs of God's existence, and had neither seen, heard, nor felt any convincing evidence of God's existence in my life. I could readily see how the concept of God functioned as a useful myth, which served to keep simple-minded people honest. However, I saw no more reason to believe in the actual existence of a God than to believe in Santa Claus. And based in part on my experience with Santa Claus, I was not willing to blindly believe in God.
I was an earnest seeker, however. Raised in the Methodist church, and encouraged by my parents to think, doubt, and question, I had visited numerous churches in my teen years, seeking a place where my questions could be answered. I found only that I thought about these things much more deeply than anyone else in the little town where I grew up. In my college years, I continued to explore, keeping an open mind, and finding a little here and a little there, but nothing that settled the question.
Landing in the hospital changed everything in my life. Up until I was hospitalized for psychosis and declared officially insane, as far as I could tell, I was on track to be President of the United States. The undeniable fact of my illness, however, woke me up to the fact that I was far off track. It left me questioning even the most basic thoughts and perceptions of my mind. I had to fundamentally re-examine everything, and my own mind was my worst enemy. Since medical science had no cure, it was basically up to me to recover, yet I could not trust myself. No one can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, yet that was my task. Either that, or resign myself to a long life in the living hell I found myself in. Or commit suicide -- an option I soon tried.
After a short time in the hospital, I was released to outpatient care -- which meant I had to visit a psychiatrist once a week -- and I went home to live with my parents. Their home was a toxic environment for me, but I had no realistic alternative, until I found a job -- not an easy undertaking for a mental patient.
Searching for bedrock on which to rebuild my mind, I turned to the Bible. It only confused me further, as I watched God stand by and let Jacob's theft of Esau's birthright stand, and apparently go not only unpunished, but actually rewarded – or so it seemed to me at the time.
After a few weeks in my parents' home, working a series of temporary jobs as a farm hand, I decided to end my life. Late one night, I left a brief note, took a very sharp-looking knife from the kitchen, and went out the back door. My parents' house was in the country, reachable only by a dirt road that ran a quarter of a mile to the nearest paved road. The night was hot and humid, and deathly still. There wasn't the slightest breeze. The air was like a warm blanket on a hot night -- unwelcome, oppressive, and inescapable. I walked down the dirt road, dressed only in my underwear. The dog came with me.
I sat down on a low wall over a drainage ditch. I looked up at the formless clouds that covered the entire sky, and asked any God that might exist to have mercy on me. I received no reassurance. Then with my right hand, I dragged the knife across my left wrist.
Nothing happened. No cut, not even a scratch. I tried again, two or three times, before I realized that the knife that looked so sharp was scarcely sharper than a butter knife. If I really wanted to kill myself, I would have to bash my wrists with the point of the knife. I was so depressed, I didn't have the energy for that, nor was I sure that I could burst the vein, or accomplish anything other than mangling my wrist. I didn't hate myself enough to try ending my life that way. So I gave up the attempt.
I was a failure at suicide. What an odd feeling that was. As I walked back up the dirt road toward the house, I realized that if I had succeeded in killing myself, it might not have solved my problem. In fact, for all I knew, I might have simply locked myself into the problem forever. I made some crucial decisions then. I decided that I never wanted to be tempted to suicide again, and therefore I would embrace life and all that is life-giving. This is probably the best decision I ever made in my life. Most people make this decision naturally and subconsciously. It doesn't occur to them to live any other way. I made this decision consciously and deliberately, after deliberately throwing my life away for 20 years.
I started naming off in my mind all the things that are life-giving -- laughter, song, beauty, friends, children, and most of all, love. I considered love to be the most life-giving thing there is, and the more I thought about it, the more convinced of this I became.
Not long after this, at the urging of my psychiatrist, I found a job. I had worked my way through college as a clerk in a bank in downtown Houston. In my condition, with a history of mental illness, and a bachelor's degree that qualified me for little other than graduate school, I decided to see if I could get my old job back. Fortunately, I was well remembered by the managers and they were indeed hiring. I lied on the job application, saying I had no history of mental illness. Sue me. I was hired.
I immediately moved out of my parents' house. Although I was moving in a better direction now, I was still extremely fragile and very depressed. I was still abusing drugs, and most of the issues that had led to my psychosis were still unresolved.
One lonely night, I called an old girlfriend named Cindy. She was not home. Her mother answered the phone. I had met her mother only once, briefly. We barely knew each other. To this day I don't even know her first name. I know only that in the autumn of 1976, she was Mrs. Stuart Robbins of Conroe, Texas.
The conversation was friendly and low-key. Mrs. Robbins advised me to forget about Cindy, and move on with my life. Then the conversation turned to God, I don't recall how. But Mrs. Robbins was respectful of my feelings, and thought perhaps I would be uncomfortable talking about that topic. I said cheerfully, "I don't mind talking about religion."
She said, "I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about a relationship."
I said something really intelligent, like, "Huh? A relationship?"
Mrs. Robbins patiently explained that since God is alive, anyone can have a relationship with God, just as one can have a relationship with a friend, or a pet, or a houseplant. You have a relationship with a friend by talking and doing things together. With a pet, by feeding, petting, and so on. With a houseplant by providing the right amount of sunlight and water, watching carefully for signs of health, and enjoying the beauty and enriched breathing air the plant provides. And you can have a relationship with God through prayer. She suggested that if I wanted to know whether God exists or not, I should just pray, and ask "Him" to manifest "Himself." (I use the masculine pronouns to refer to God, not because I believe God is male, but because this is standard English usage for a noun of undetermined gender, and because it is the traditional usage of the Bible.)
This was a totally novel idea to me, and I decided to give it a try. If there was a God, I could certainly use "His" help. And if there was an answer to my prayers, then God must not only exist, but live, and care.
Chapter II. The Great Experiment
Numerous problems presented themselves. If I prayed for something, and it came to pass, how could I know whether it was God answering my prayer, or whether it was caused by something else? Well, fortunately, I had been trained in exactly this type of critical thinking in college, and I was very good at it. I knew how to design research methods so as to eliminate what scientists call "confounding variables."
On the other hand, if I prayed for something, and it didn't come to pass, did that necessarily mean God was not answering my prayers? Or could it mean that the answer was simply, "No"? I concluded that a non-answered prayer would not be conclusive proof in either direction. But an answered prayer would be conclusive proof of God's existence and love.
The proposition that "God answers prayer" is a testable hypothesis. I wanted to avoid the "alpha error" of believing God exists when "He" doesn't. If I put my trust in a non-existent God, I would end up taking risks that might prove foolish or even fatal. But I also wanted to avoid the "beta error" of concluding that God does not exist when in reality "He" does. If I made that mistake, I would miss out on a tremendous resource, at the very least. So I applied all my intelligence, all my university training, and all my intellectual honesty, to the task of determining whether anyone was answering my prayers.
The first question was what to pray for. I prayed for an angel to appear on the ceiling, for an audible voice, for objects in the room to be moved from one place to another. None of this happened. This did not prove God's non-existence, of course, but it led to the all-important question, "Why didn't God answer that prayer?" Which led to the further question, "Why should "He"?"
If God exists, then God surely has more important things to do than simply prove "His" existence to me. So there is no particular reason God should answer the kinds of prayers I had been praying.
In fact, God may perhaps prefer not to prove "Himself" at all, but instead to leave a gap that can be bridged only by faith. Like a Cossack leaping over a chasm (anybody seen "Taurus Bulba"?), the question becomes, just how wide a gap does God expect me to jump? I had no way of knowing, but reasoned that if God knows my mind well enough to hear my prayers -- which I did not speak out loud -- then surely God knew the gap would have to be a lot narrower, for me to get across it without plunging to my death! At the same time, if God is a God of Truth, then "He" must not object to my trying my best to narrow the gap by inquiring as scientifically as possible. In fact, "He" must welcome and honor my earnest desire to know. And "He" would not hide from me, except as necessary to ensure faith. (Jesus said, “Seek, and ye shall find.”) Thus, my inquiries might never "prove" anything. The best I could expect would be to reduce the uncertainty.
But that's fine! Science is not about proving anything. It is about reducing uncertainty. Science seeks to establish heavy odds that the tested hypothesis is true. In experimental psychology, if the odds can be ascertained to be 19 to 1 in favor of a conclusion, then that conclusion is considered true, even though there is still a 5 percent chance it is false.
If I were asking God for idle proofs of "His" existence, there was no reason to think that any would be forthcoming. But what kind of prayer could God wish to answer? If God is love -- as nearly everyone says -- then a prayer motivated by love would be consistent with God's will and nature. And if God answered a prayer motivated by love, there would be the added attraction of a benefit to someone I care for, in addition to myself. In fact, if the prayer were not motivated by love, there would be no reason why God should answer it. If the prayer was motivated by love, there was at least a chance.
So my first criterion for testing the hypothesis that God exists is:
(1) Pray for something that would be of benefit to someone besides myself.
In order to eliminate confounding variables, two other criteria presented themselves pretty obviously:
(2) Pray for something that, in my judgement, is unlikely to happen in the normal course of events.
If I pray for something I consider likely to happen on its own, and the thing comes to pass, would I consider it an answered prayer? Not if I have any intellectual honesty at all! Instead, I would say it was going to happen anyway. But if I considered it unlikely to happen, and it came to pass after I prayed for it, would it prove that God had answered my prayer? No, but it would substantially increase the likelihood. It would be strong evidence.
(3) Pray for something that is not within my control.
If I can do something myself, why pray for God to do it? In the first place, if God exists, "He" is certainly not my valet, or someone for me to send to do the things I am not willing to do for myself. If we extend this logic, then I should do everything I can do, to influence matters toward the accomplishment of that for which I pray. Otherwise I am asking God to do something that I can do myself. It is vanity at best, and sin at worst, to pray for God to do something, then neglect to do my utmost to help bring it about.
But if I can be an agent assisting God to answer prayers, then so can everybody else. In fact, as I thought about this principle in more depth, I realized that anyone who treats me in a loving way is an agent of God in my life. So if I wanted my prayers answered, I must not only do my own part, but also put others in a position to be God's agents in answering the prayer also. The God of Love answers prayers by pulling strings. Heart strings.
(This reminds me of a good story. Once there was a man whose neighborhood was flooding, due to torrential rains. As the waters rose, he moved to the second story of his house, and a woman came by in a rowboat, offering him a ride to safety. The man refused, saying that he trusted God to save him. The waters continued to rise, and the man climbed up on his roof. A speedboat came by, and the pilot offered him a ride to safety. Again he refused, for the same reason: God would save him. The waters continued to rise. The man climbed to the top of his chimney, and as the waters lapped about his shoe soles, a helicopter flew over, and the pilot lowered a ladder and shouted an offer to take the man to safety. Again he refused, for the same reason. The waters kept rising. He drowned.
If Jesus had told this story, he might have ended it right there, as a challenge for our understanding. For those of you who don't yet understand, here is the punch line: Upon reaching the Pearly Gates, the drowned man angrily demanded of St. Peter to know why God had not saved him, particularly in light of his great faith. St. Peter was taken aback, then hurriedly flipped through his book. "There must be some mistake," Peter said. "According to this, we sent a rowboat, a speedboat, and a helicopter.")
I also decided that if I wanted to give God the maximum chance of answering a prayer, I should pray in accordance with the teachings of the spiritual masters. Since the only spiritual master whose teaching I knew was Jesus, I chose his teachings to follow.
(4) Pray forgiving someone for something I am holding against them.
Jesus taught that if we want our prayers to be answered, we must forgive our brothers and sisters from our hearts. I have learned a lot about forgiveness over the years, enough to know that it rarely happens like the snap of a finger or like the flip of a switch. Far more often, it is a lengthy process. Yet the decision to forgive is the beginning of that process, and thus the decision to forgive is, in and of itself, an act of forgiveness. So I would first think of something I was angry about, and choose to forgive that, so that my prayer would have the maximum chance of being answered.
(5) Pray believing it has already been done.
Jesus taught that if we pray believing that it has already been done, it will be done for us as we ask. But for me, this presented a Catch-22. I was praying in order to discover whether God exists or not. Therefore, in all intellectual honesty, I could not say I believed it would happen as I asked, much less that it was already done. If God exists, "He" would not be fooled by any such false claim.
In all intellectual honesty, the most I could do was suspend my disbelief. If God exists, and is a God of Justice, and a God of Truth, this would have to be good enough, because it was the most I could do. And if God would answer the prayers of such a man as me, then apparently faith is not an all-or-nothing proposition after all, but a matter of giving God the benefit of the doubt.
We all know how to suspend disbelief. We do it every day, when we watch fiction on our TV or movie screen, or read a fictional story. We know rationally that the story is not really happening, and never did, and never will. But we suspend our disbelief so that we can experience fully all that the story has to say to us.
In the same way, an agnostic seeking to know the truth about God can suspend his or her disbelief, in order to see what difference it makes. Could a God of Justice and Truth ask for more?
Chapter 3: The Results
Following these 5 criteria conscientiously, I prayed. Unfortunately, I can't now remember the first thing I prayed for, nor the second, nor the third. What I do remember is that, in each instance, something odd eventually happened. In every case, it was something subtle, that would have been easy to miss had I not been watching closely, with suspended disbelief. Each time, I would ask myself, "Was that God answering my prayer?"
Examining the question carefully, I had to admit it could have been an answered prayer, but I could never say for sure that it was. It might have been a coincidence, a quirky random roll of the cosmic dice. So I would repeat the experiment, with a different prayer request this time, following the same 5 criteria.
Eventually, after about 5 of these occurences, the Coincidence explanation began to look pretty shaky. Yet although the evidence was starting to weigh in favor of the conclusion that God exists and answers prayers, still I was not convinced.
I do remember the two prayers I tried at this time, which finally put me over the top.
In late May of 1978, my then-wife Kathy was pregnant with our first child. We lived in an upstairs apartment in Austin, Texas. We had located a small house for rent, and decided to move, since we didn't want to be climbing up and down stairs with an infant. Because I was working full-time and she was staying home, most of the work of packing for the move fell to Kathy. In Texas, the summer heat usually sets in by early-to-mid May, and in 1978 it was in full swing when our central air conditioning unit broke down, on a Sunday.
Kathy had worked for the apartment complex as a manager, and knew that broken air conditioners were not the highest repair priority, by any means. I grew concerned for Kathy's health, trying to pack in that heat, while 7 months pregnant. I sent up a prayer, telling God that if "He" would get the air conditioner fixed by Wednesday, I would call "Him" Lord.
As we saw in the discussion of criterion (3) above, I was responsible for doing all I could, even though it was out of my control, and for putting others in a position to be God's agents also. So I called the office, even though it was Sunday and there was nobody there, and left a message on the answering machine, reporting the problem and mentioning that my wife was pregnant.
A short time later, that same afternoon, we got a call. It was the maintenance supervisor of the complex. He said he would be right over to take a look at the problem. When he got to our apartment, he mentioned it was his day off, and he was driving past the complex, and something just told him to stop into the office and check his messages. When he learned that there was a pregnant woman involved, he decided to act immediately.
He set about diagnosing the problem, and in a few minutes, he was certain that he knew what to do. However, he could not fix it that day, because he did not have the needed part. He said he would send his assistant over the next day, to install the replacement part.
First thing Monday morning, a young man knocked on our door. He was the assistant, and he had the part with him. In about 15 minutes' time, he had done the repair work, and the air conditioner was back in operation.
You have no idea how impressed I was. I had prayed for the air conditioner to be fixed by Wednesday, and considered that unlikely. Instead, it had been fixed in the shortest time humanly possible.
The evidence now seemed to be heavily in favor of the proposition that God does indeed answer prayers, and I was starting to really admire the God my suspended disbelief was allowing me to see. But I had lingering doubts. I still was not totally convinced.
Then came the incident that put me over the top.
My son Aaron was born in July, 1978, barely a month after we moved out of the apartment. He was the first grandchild born on either side of the family, and all the relatives wanted to come see him, including my father's parents, whom I loved very much. However, before they made the 4-hour trip to Austin from East Texas, my grandfather caught a cold, and at his advanced age (77), the cold developed into emphysema. He was hospitalized.
Since he could not come to see Aaron, we decided to take Aaron to see him. When we arrived, my grandfather was in poor condition. For long periods of time, his lungs were so filled with fluid that he would have to struggle for every breath. He constantly felt on the verge of drowning, and he grew weary of the struggle. Reports from those who had visited him indicated he was losing his will to live.
So I prayed. This time, I prayed that my son would smile at my grandfather, and my grandfather would recover the will to live.
This certainly fit the criteria. I could not control it, and it was unlikely. By this time, my son was 3 months old. In all that time, we had seen him smile only once, at the most. For Aaron to smile was a very rare event. He didn't cry much either. He was mostly a pretty placid child. (If Kathy or I had known how to make him smile, he would have smiled a great deal more by this time!)
We went to visit my grandfather at the hospital. My grandmother and my parents were with us. My grandmother carried Aaron into the room. She tipped Aaron over sideways to show him to my grandfather. Aaron didn't like being held like that, and acted as if he were about to cry. So my grandmother quickly snatched him up, and carried him over to the window to calm him. He didn't cry. There was an awkward pause, and after staying for just a few minutes, we all left.
My prayer had not been answered. As I pondered this, I realized the story was not over yet. We would be staying in town for two more nights, and there would be another opportunity to visit my grandfather.
The next day, we all visited the hospital again. Before Kathy and I had decided to make the trip to East Texas, my grandfather had complained, "By the time I get to see him, he'll be wearing a bow tie." So my wife and my grandmother conspired to make him a little black bow tie, and pinned it to his blue corduroy outfit. We all went together again, including my parents. This time, I carried Aaron into the room.
My grandfather was sitting up in his bed, which was cranked up into a sitting position. I sat on the edge of the bed, with Aaron sitting in my lap, facing my grandfather. Their eyes locked on each other, and they both started grinning immediately. My son continued to smile non-stop for 45 minutes. Everybody wanted pictures of the baby with his ancestors, so a series of pictures was taken. First with everybody, then with just the men, then with just the women, and so on. In every one of those pictures, my son is smiling a fat little baby smile.
That did it for me. I was now convinced that God answers prayers, that "He" is intimately aware of the details of our lives., and that "He" is a God of tender mercy and healing power.
Walking in a daily relationship with this God, I gradually healed from mental illness, so that now I am as sane as the average person (and I know, that’s not saying much!) I have been blessed with a succession of good jobs, getting better and better. After 19 years of cleaning me up, God put me to work in this ministry, putting my musical gifts in service to him. And he has sustained me in that work for 25 years now. My son is grown and has 3 kids of his own.
By the way, my grandfather left the hospital a short time later, and although his recovery was slow, he eventually got over his emphysema. He lived 17 more years, dying at the age of 94, from natural causes.
What God has done for me, "He" will surely do for you.
