Over the next few years, I slowly started to question certain elements of the Christian theology I'd grown up with. It wasn’t a combative skepticism. Rather, quietly, mostly within my own thoughts, I began really searching for an understanding of how God and prayer worked. On a youth group retreat, I remember wondering what happened when we asked an omniscient God for something. I came up with a simplified scenario and presented it to one of the youth counselors: "Let's say I ask God for a bologna sandwich. Since He already knows everything, is there really a point where He decides whether or not I get that sandwich? Or is it like He decides I can have it, goes to His fridge and finds it already made — because He somehow knew He would grant my request — even though He temporarily didn't know what He would decide when I asked Him…?” Her answer was essentially that we can’t understand how God works. But that was exactly what I was being led to do.

Another milestone in my search came during a book club-like activity run by the Protestant student group I belonged to during my first year of college. We were reading and discussing a book that was supposed to address the “hard questions” of Christian theology. For instance, were all non-Christians going to hell? As I thought it over, it didn’t seem right to me that someone would be sentenced to suffer eternally simply because they didn’t know about Christianity. What if someone lived his whole life somewhere remote and had no contact with a single Christian or Bible or anything? But the Bible does tell us that Christ Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me” (John 14:6). While I can’t remember what the book had to say about it, I do remember a gentle thought coming to me: Maybe when Jesus said that, it meant his way of life — living our lives as Jesus lived his — is how we come to the Father. By being a Christian — even if you don’t have that particular word for it. I shared this thought — still posed as a “maybe”—with the group. Although I know we were all earnestly searching to better understand Christianity, I suppose the idea diverged too far from the theology of this group's denomination, so the sponsor of the group quickly dismissed it. Later I would look back on this incident as my first instance of glimpsing the inspired word of the Bible.