My Background
I was born and raised in a Muslim country. My father was not a religious man in any serious sense. The only times I remember seeing him pray were during crises, perhaps once every few years. When he passed away, he had chosen to have his funeral done according to Chinese folk religion.
My mother is a devout Buddhist, who had formally taken refuge in Mahayana Buddhism. At that time, none of my siblings were religious, and neither was anyone close to me.
My exposure to Christianity was minimal. I attended a Christian preschool when I was very young, but all I remember from it is learning my ABCs and numbers. I did not grow up hearing Bible stories or receiving Christian teaching. In my teenage years, my mother taught me Buddhist ideas while driving me to school. My English tuition teacher was a Christian, but we never spoke about Christianity.
Christianity was not part of my formative years.
Early Encounters with Christianity
As a teenager, I had a girlfriend who brought me to church once. By temperament, I am not the kind of person that accepts anything without challenge. I argued with what was taught that day and she thought I hated church, so we never went back again.
In my early university years, I moved into housing near campus. Some evangelists knocked on my door and I let them in. For a few weeks, they came by regularly and we read the Bible together.
For reasons I never understood, they focused heavily on the Trinity and sin instead of easier topics. At the time, the Trinity sounded to me like a formal contradiction in plain sight. I also pushed hard on the question of sin. I remember asking whether a newborn baby was already guilty of sin. They said yes. I asked why, and the answer I got traced back to Adam and Eve. My response was that no one should be responsible for the wrongdoing of someone else and I told them not to come back.
At my father’s request, I also joined the university’s Christian fellowship briefly. The group seemed unusually warm and friendly. But after one meeting, a young woman who had been especially friendly to me publicly criticized me for taking a snack in the hallway. I was not offended by being criticized, that was not the issue. What struck me was the sudden contrast between outward friendliness and inner hostility. I thought: hypocrites. That was the last time I gave Christianity any serious thought for a very long time.
Atheistic Naturalism
Like many highly educated secular people today, I adopted naturalism as the default worldview. Technically, I would have called myself agnostic, but in practice I lived as an atheist. Some would call that agnostic atheism.
From within this framework, religion is clearly nothing more than tradition, psychological comfort, and in many cases an enterprise for smooth talkers to profit in the name of some god.
Human progress, as far as I could tell, was driven by human effort alone.
For roughly three decades of my life, I had little reason to consider Christianity or any religion at all.
The Unraveling Begins
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I volunteered for a year on a permaculture project. After the lockdowns ended, I made a business proposal to formalize the relationship. The response surprised me. In substance, it was: “convert, or you do not qualify.”
I did not understand it. I thought I had already proven my value. That response forced me to examine their religion seriously for the first time in my life. For two weeks, I gave it the strongest steelman I could. It did not survive examination.
Around the same time, I was also studying Maps of Meaning. The book opened my eyes to something I never realized, that the ideas people have are never just ideas. They are beliefs, interpretive lenses, assumed structures through which reality is understood.
That realization hit me hard. Atheistic naturalism was also a system of beliefs laden with assumptions. It was neither neutral nor privileged. It too was a system of beliefs that never justified itself.
So I had to stress test what I believed.
It did not go well, to put it mildly. There were some questions it handled poorly, and some it could not answer at all. I found myself unable to justify my own worldview with the confidence I once thought I had.
The Search for Truth
At that point, I no longer knew what was true.
For several years, I remained in a state of deep uncertainty about what was true. But by then, I had become good at testing belief systems. What began as doubt turned into a long search for truth. If I could not trust my assumptions, then I would test every system of belief that claimed to explain reality.
I did not know at that time, but I was already seeking God.
That search took years. I examined all the major religions, secular worldviews, and various philosophies. I researched, studied and thought about them long and hard. I examined their strengths, and pressured their weaknesses until they broke.
One by one, they broke. Some were incoherent, some were contradictory, some incomplete. All failed to fully account for the strangeness of our world and history.
Except for one. It refused to break.
It was the only one left standing. I just could not find the flaw that would let me conclude that it was demonstrably false, self-contradictory or impossible, unless I imported assumptions about what was and what was not possible. And this time, I was not willing to assume anything I could not justify.
And then there was Jesus.
I did not know what to do with this man. I could not fit him into any category I had. I could not dismiss him as a fictional character, a fraudster, a poorly treated rabbi, a mythologized historical person or a religious opportunist. No boxes fit neatly.
By this point, I was already out of options. Every other serious contender had collapsed. I suspected that the Christian story had to at least be potentially true. But suspicion is not belief. I could not make myself believe; I needed certainty. I could not force conviction unless I was certain.
The Night that Everything Changed
On the night of 23 March 2025, I learned about the Trilemma.
For many people, the Trilemma is an abstract intellectual exercise, because there is always the escape route of, “perhaps another religion is also true.” But for me, that escape route was long gone. I had already spent years testing the alternatives.
Jesus Christ was either telling the truth, or I had to condemn Him as a liar, lunatic, or mythologized character. I could no longer escape what I had come to see without giving up my intellectual honesty. The search was over.
When I looked at the clock and saw it was 11:59 PM, I knew I had to pray. In the middle of that prayer, what felt like a bolt of lightning struck my mind.
I wept uncontrollably. I could not hold it back. Next to my sleeping son, I wept harder than I ever had in my life.
At midnight on 24 March 2025. I was a Christian. Not because I wanted religion, and not because I desired belief, but because I could no longer deny the truth.
Written in 23 March 2026