Growing up in a strong Catholic community in Philadelphia, God and religion were not just things we heard about or believed in—they were woven into the very fabric of our life. Home life, school life—even participation on athletic teams—were all directly related to our Catholic religion.

Some of us, however, felt the desire to participate more directly in the things of God and religion. As an elementary school boy, I was one of those. I very much believed in and embraced the things I was being taught and wanted to be more closely involved. First, I became a choirboy. To wear the long red cassock and white top with a high, stiff collar and sing a Mass in Latin was just wonderful. Next, I became an altar boy. Serving Mass right on the altar with the priest, the vestments, the incense, and the pomp and circumstance, I remember thinking, This is to be close to God.

Although religion is very good at attracting our attention with outward things through our physical senses—seeing, touching, smelling, hearing, tasting—these outward things alone can never keep our attention. This is because they have no reality. So, when I moved on to high school, I began to have some questions about the things I believed. The outward things that I had embraced as an altar boy and choirboy now seemed more like obstacles that kept me from contacting God. It seemed that if God were real, He would want to have a real, personal relationship with us.

When I approached the religious men who taught me in high school with my questions and concerns, they didn't seem to know what to make of them. Their response was to sign me up for a weekend retreat at the local Catholic seminary for young men who were considered potential candidates for the priesthood. I took this very seriously. There at the retreat, there was time for private reflection and one-on-one conversations with the priests. In these talks, I asked a lot of questions, and they honestly tried to answer them. But in the end, all they could tell me was that God is ultimately a mystery and we aren't supposed to understand it all.

From that time on, I began to drift away from the God and religion I had always believed in. It wasn't that I got angry and decided to forget about it all; it was just that God had become like a far-off, distant creature to me. It seemed that He might not have even known I was here—that He was so removed from us that I would have to go through intermediaries and a series of rituals in order to appease Him or gain His favor. If I cannot know God in a personal, intimate way, I asked myself, what is the point? My inward sense was right, but I was still a long way from the truth.

By my freshman year at Villanova University, my interest in God and religion had almost completely faded. Nevertheless, nature abhors a vacuum, and I was a big hole waiting to be filled. The vacuum—the hunger for reality—had been created. Now I was trying to fill the hole. It was the late 1960s, and the rising counterculture movement began to get my attention. As I listened to its proponents and began to read the literature, it seemed to make sense to me. "Man is his own answer to everything," they said. All we had to do was get it together and make it right. By the end of my second year in college, I had "turned on, tuned in," and decided it was time to drop out. For the next year, I wandered in a world of "be ins," "earth days," and demonstrations against the war. But through it all, I had this "itch" that I just couldn't "scratch." What's it all about? I would ask myself. Why am I here? The things I was pursuing were vanity, and that vacuum—the eternity in my heart—was beginning to rise up to question them.

It was at a huge May Day demonstration in Washington, D.C., in 1971 that I made a fateful decision. The demonstration had turned violent and was a disaster. I was disillusioned. Driving home with some friends, I told them I'd had it with everything and was leaving the country. A few months later, I was in Europe. With nothing but a backpack and sleeping bag, I was alone, wondering what I was doing there. In the words of a popular song at the time, I was "on the road to find out."

I spent several months hitchhiking through Germany, Italy, Greece, and Spain, finally ending up in Amsterdam, Holland, in the spring of 1972. I had experienced a lot in my travels and was a lot worse for the wear. And still the emptiness within me persisted. At the age of 21, I felt like an old man whose options had run out.

One day in Amsterdam, as I sat on Dam Square with a multitude of people from all over the world, I was approached by some young people. They had a guitar and sang me a song. Then one of them asked me if I knew Jesus. It was the first time in my life I could remember anyone asking me that question. Religion had always told me that I believed in God but never asked if I knew Him. What was more of a surprise to me than their question was my answer: "I believe in God, but I don't know Him or whether He knows me."

After all this time, I still believed in God. But who and where was He? At this point they did something no one had ever done with me: they opened a Bible and began to show me what it said about Jesus. In my entire religious upbringing and in all the reading I had done up to that point, I had never looked much at the Bible. As I read what they showed me, the words seemed to jump off the page and come alive. I had never heard anything like it before. That day I found the answer I was seeking—I found God.

In John 10:9, Jesus said that He was the door out of the sheepfold and if anyone entered through Him, they would find pasture. Revelation 3:20 says that we have a door and that Jesus is knocking on it, and that if we open it, He will come in to us. On that day in Amsterdam, I opened the door of my heart to Jesus Christ and He came in. And when He walked in, I walked out of religion—the "sheepfold"—that had separated me from God—the "green pasture"—for so many years.

It has been 29 years since I opened my heart to Jesus that day in Amsterdam. I have spent that time enjoying the Lord Jesus in His Word (the Bible) and in genuine, personal fellowship with Him in my spirit. By opening the door of my heart, the Lord Jesus came in, and I came to know God Himself—the God who is real, who is living, and who is so very near. My hunger has been satisfied and my questions have been answered by the only One who was ever able to do so in the first place—Jesus Christ.

D.P.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

To desire God is not religious; to desire God is human. If you would like to enter into a real and living experience of Him, it is very simple. All you must do is open to Him and pray the following:

"O Lord Jesus, I love You! Thank You that You became a man to die for my sins. Thank You that in resurrection, You became the life-giving Spirit. Lord Jesus, come into me! Free me from religion and fill me with real life and freedom. Bring me into the full experience of all that You are. Lord Jesus, thank You for saving me!"