Matthew Nath – Author

Ok, back again.  Thanks again for reading. I pray that my experience is helpful to someone out there.  And maybe not you personally, but there might be people around you struggling with similar things to what I struggled with.  Sharing these articles with them might help.  Or maybe sharing some of these ideas with them in conversation?  Before I go on, I did want to further emphasize that this is my personal testimony, my unique experiences as I’ve grown to learn about the Truth.  And coming to identify that Truth to be the person of Jesus Christ.

To catch you up, I had drifted far from God.  I called myself a Christian but I was putting no effort whatsoever into my relationship with Christ. I put no trust in Christ but was trying to do everything under my own power.  And I was failing miserably.  Life was not going well in general when Tracie brought us to church.  I recognized it as a good thing, but couldn’t tell you why.  And that bothered me.  I wanted to know why it was good.  What made it good?  What was “good?” So I started looking and listening to anything I could find about quality and good.  And who was I in relation to that good, because I sure didn’t feel like I deserved it.

The first true thing I remember that stuck was from Jordan Peterson.  He was doing an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast.  I’d been listening for about a year, interested in the passionate experts he brought on. I remember this one guy who spent 3 hours talking to Joe about the life and death cycle of mushrooms and it was fascinating.  When he interviewed Jordan Peterson, I listened to him explain a view of the world in a way that I’d not heard before.  It helped me understand things in a new way.

For the first time, I understood that my actions in this world are real; they have a real, tangible effect on this world.  His words painted a picture in my mind of the entirety of existence balanced on a scale.  Think like the pictures that the flat earther’s present to us, but balancing on a ball.  Every time I did something hurtful, it pushed a stone closer to the outside edge, throwing things further off balance.

My actions had consequences.  And not just the big ones, but the tiny ones too.

I began to feel to true weight of my sins.  I looked back and saw a trail of pain and destruction through many of my previous relationships.  Sure there were times I was nice and kind, but far more often I was selfish, gluttonous, angry, lustful, prideful, dark.  I feel like I epitomized a classical idea that I’ve more recently heard, which says the way to be the best version of yourself is to appear kind in public, but take advantage of others in secret.  Then you get the public praise and the private gains.  That’s what I feel like I was doing.  And I truly realized that for the first time.

That weight was heavy.  This is where nihilism entered the picture.  I started to believe that I’m too small.  On something so massive, I’ll never be able to even make a dent.  What’s the point of trying.  Nothing I do could ever matter anyways, so I might as well try to enjoy myself, right?  I even used Christ to justify it for a while, thinking: He already died for my sins, knew I was going to sin when I did and when I do, and I’ll never be perfect anyways, so why try?

I had believed that lie for a LONG time.  I believed that I was too small for God to use in any real way so I might as well just enjoy myself.  The problem is, I obviously suck at that.  And if I couldn’t figure something out, I was about to end up completely alone.  I honestly can’t tell you now what was holding me back for that time, but I looked for a long time in a lot of places outside the church.  I needed to know what was true and what was good.

The question I tried to answer became, how do I know what’s good?  Jordan Peterson was my first secular source that pointed me to Christ.  The second is a book series called “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila” by Robert Pirsig.  The books are too long to even summarize here, but the final conclusion at the end of two books was: “Good is a noun.”  For me, that was hugely transformative.  A secular author, scientist, philosopher, had painstakingly researched for many years of his life, and that was his final conclusion.  Good is a thing.  And he ends it there.  And, sadly, I do as well.  More next time!