Christian Viewpoint: There are some things we simply cannot understand
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When Paul Haringman, Inverness Presbytery's mission development worker, went to get his hair cut, he asked the barber how he was.
Josh (not his real name) replied: "Amazing".
“Tell me more!” Paul responded. And as his scissors busily snipped, Josh shared his story.
At the beginning, it seemed anything but amazing. Josh talked about the successful job he’d held down, his prosperous lifestyle, but then described how over the years his life fell apart through a series of foolish decisions (“Left hand choices” he called them, as opposed to the “right hand choices” he felt unable to make). In March 2021 his life collapsed in chaos, and he lost career, house, marriage, everything.
Two years earlier, as he motorcycled along the autobahn to Berlin, planning to take his own life there, his machine began wobbling uncontrollably. “This is it,” he thought. “I’m going to die.” Suddenly, the wobbling stopped, and Josh regained control. He caught sight of his face in the mirror, laughed, and then wept with a deep sense of relief. He didn’t want to die!
And after his life imploded that March, there came a sense of beginning again, almost as though he had died and become a new person. “The barbering’s the rebirth of me,” he says. It seemed somehow as though by “nudges” and “itches” (and a wobbling bike?) he was being “led”.
“What does that feel like?” Paul asked, intrigued. “Like an energy?”
“No, it’s more personal than that.”
“Could it be God?” Paul asked.
As the two spoke recently at Culloden-Balloch Baptist Church, we heard that Paul was the first person ever to talk to Josh about God, although his mother became a Christian late in life and prayed for him.
Paul is in the habit of asking people, with deep sincerity, “How are you?”” and then simply listening, sensitive to any evidence of God at work in their lives.
Josh and Paul became friends, and his journey continued. He dared to pray: “God today, please reveal yourself to me.” Soon this daily prayer developed into a relaxed conversation with God. He realised that things he’d learned before meeting Paul – the choice between two ways, for example, the sense of dying and beginning again – are central to the teaching of Jesus.
Josh devoured videos about the Bible and Christian faith. As a questioner, always looking for scientific answers, he realised there are some things we simply can’t understand: but we don’t have to, because God has our back.
This peaceful, deeply-empathic man now has conversations with many people in whose lives, he discovers, God is already “nudging.” The majority of these exchanges end “in faith of some description.”
