Discernment Desired on an Autobiographical Project

I am writing an autobiography of myself and how I came to Jesus Christ. I have decided to post a link to my first chapter here before taking it to writer's boards, because of the discernment that I have been helped by on this message board. I want to weigh whether I am approaching the events in my life properly from a solidly biblical and spiritual angle.

I know reading so much personal text can be time consuming, but I hope that some people might find it in their time to read this chapter in order to help me understand whether I am approaching this project properly. This seems especially pertinent now that my so-called prophecy has been shown to have been a demonic manifestation coupled with aspects of mental illness.

My hope is that my story will help many other people come to Jesus Christ themselves with my own testimony.

Here is the link.

https://missionaloperations10.wordpress.com/

Also, I would prefer to have conversation on this message board as opposed to my blog page.

 

I understand that I got no takers on helping on this project, but I did want to post an excerpt of the key answered pray in my life that caused me to abandon atheism for advice on how to approach the topic from a biblical standpoint.

My biggest problem is that I kind of live in a bubble concerning my own journey. That is to say the amazing events I go through as God has pursued me with impossible love, such as the one you can read of below, seem beyond all words in a way but something I live with day to day anyway.


How God Saved Me From Atheism Excerpt

I’ll begin by explaining that I was an atheist who flirted with Deism as early as the beginning of high school, despite having grown up in a family that tried to raise me to be a Christian. I was also a very immoral person. As a high school student I thought that men like Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, or Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s top general, were heroic, though flawed men who were worth following. I desired to have been one of their soldiers. I viewed men like Julius Caesar, the cruel dictator of the Roman Empire, and Alexander the Great, the bloody conqueror of numerous cities, as virtuous men that were worth emulating. I also envied Hitler for the fact he ruled an enormous empire, and I even longed for the conquest of the world by a one world government because I thought it would lead to a better world. I thought life was about enjoying things as much as you could before dying and becoming nothing more than worm food. In addition, I was a staunch liberal who thought that abortion should be legal, and who thought homosexuality and other sexual sins were just fine if people kept them monogamous. I was also a very lustful and obsessive person since middle school. However, I finally understood how evil I was when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened. That day I wrestled with my thoughts all day at high school. The problem was that I believed that the terrorist attacks were good in the end, even praying as an atheist for more blood and planes, because in my mind the attacks meant that many people had been freed from suffering in this world. I figured pain makes this life meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

I finally understood on 9/11/2001 that what I really wanted as an atheist was for people to lose their lives and be free from suffering in this world. Too cowardly to join the military, I was planning on taking my murderous impulses to weapons engineering for a big defense contractor as the way I could take lives legally in order to help erase suffering. I signed up for an aerospace engineering degree when I went to college with the desire to design war planes and space ships. Space ships being what I saw as the great hope of humanity to live lives of meaning despite the problem of pain. However, if you knew me you would have had a hard time understanding these murderous desires, as I was such a nice guy to people face to face and I became such a demon when they were people far away from me. Later on in college, I became enamored with the idea of being a domestic terrorist armed with weapons of mass destruction, and I desperately wanted to acquire such weapons to murder millions of Americans. However, the little research I did on the subject proved it was almost impossible to do, but I sorely wanted to switch my degree to nanotechnology, biology, or nuclear engineering to see if I could become a terrorist with the knowledge I would gain.

Now, around this time I had two Christian friends, a couple, and I became interested in learning more about their faith. So, I decided to ask them how to understand Christianity. They told me to read the Bible starting with the Gospels and pray, and I would see that a Christian life would grow on me as it had for them. I also asked them for something philosophical to read that summed up Christianity and they gave me the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Now, I did pray, but I found that in my heart I believed God existed to me, but in my mind He did not. This meant that my prayers felt both conflicted and pointless. I also tried reading the bible, but I started with Genesis. As a result, I found that my very scientific mind hated the first few chapters of Genesis as they seemed against science. Yet, even as an atheist, I found myself trying to prove the bible was right using science in order to regain trust in the bible as a holy book that contained the truth. This was because I had been raised to believe the bible was a holy book of the truth by my parents. However, the result of reading the bible seriously was that I began to lose confidence in it.

Here I must stop to say that I kid you not, this is a true story, as it will seem beyond belief. Now, it was August 2004 and hurricane Charley was barreling up the coast preparing to hit Tampa, but on a whim while watching TV I decided to pray a prayer that tested God to see if He existed. Now, I wanted to be in a high category hurricane to live through the experience, so I prayed that instead of hitting Tampa, hurricane Charley would hit Orlando. Miraculously enough, the hurricane changed course and barreled towards Punta Gorda instead of Tampa. I was shocked at the time. Later, as I looked at hurricane Charley barreling away from Orlando and leave my house behind I knew that I had encountered God. However, even after this miracle, I still did not have much faith in God. However, as only God could arrange, my two Christian friends knew a family whose house had been condemned, because hurricane Charley had put a tree through their roof. I decided to help them evacuate this house out of guilt for what I had prayed for.

The thing that struck me the most during this evacuation was that I saw the love Believers have for each other, as this family’s church showed up to help her move her stuff out of her condemned home and they even got a moving truck for her. This, despite everyone being busy with their own homes and clean up after the hurricane. I felt as if I had never seen such love before among the people who weren’t best friends or immediate family. Yet, after a day of helping evacuate the family’s house, I still had so much unbelief concerning God. On the way home as I was driven by my friends, I mulled over what I had been through. I acknowledged at last that there was hope out there, real hope in the person of a God who loves us, hope for an afterlife, and hope for a just and righteous world in the end. However, even after this amazing miracle of the weather, I was still unsure if God existed in my mind. So, on the way home, in the darkest feeling I have ever had, I prayed for two more hurricanes to hit Orlando that year to prove that God existed. Beyond all belief, two more hurricanes, Frances and Jeanne, did hit Orlando that year in answer to this prayer.



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Thank you for any comments on how I can stay biblical about sharing this experience and writing about it.