Synopsis "With God Again: My Journey Away From God and Back"
Many believers can relate to the process of exploring the world "outside" of faith and finding good, seemingly normal human beings who they were raised to view as "other" - homosexuals, Muslims, atheists, secularists, liberals, and city people. This universal story, where an individual raised to believe in God has to reconcile their inherited belief with their world, points to every generation's struggle. It seems that Christianity is designed for a beautiful but confounding re-construction of faith, generation by generation. This is the narrative of With God Again, in which a man shares the pain and joy of finding God inside and outside the Church. With God Again is a deeply personal story of an individual's lifelong wrestling match with the Creator. Even as a teenager, controversy was in the DNA of the author's relationship with God and the world. It was in these adolescent years that false sexual assault allegations destroyed the author's conception of God - and his life at the time - but soon lead him directly to the person of God. It is in this continual process of tragedy, loss, learning, and growth that the author is able to share a testimony of God's grace and love for all people. The early trials are part of a God-ordained plan: Moving from the suburbs into one of the poorest neighborhoods in Portland, entering a new community, joining a new racial, cultural, and ethnic family, and subsequently finding Jesus anew in it all. With God Again explains in story that there is a transcendent, perfect God who is always greater than we can conceive, and at the same time, God is so powerfully knowable and accessible, even to the messiest and worst of us. This book is aimed at anyone who belongs to or works with this new generation, tackling a myriad of controversial topics with a post-modern audience in mind - the growing number of those who assert that experience, subjective as it is, is as authoritative as knowledge and tradition. From the introduction of With God Again, "One's conception of God is always lower than God Himself, and as the aim in this book is not to point readers to a perfect understanding of God but to a relationship with God." Mixed into the stew of frustrations among Christians, those seeing their tradition and ideals moved to the periphery of culture, as well as a social justice movement driven largely by secular leaders, is the foremost question of God Himself. How do we, as Christians, reconcile our knowledge with our experience? How do we hold to a spiritual view of life while believing in science? It seems that those who claim to hear from God are either insane or selling something - how am I supposed to hear from God? All of this is at the heart of With God Again, the story of faith for a man very much immersed in this generation's struggle to find God.
