What does it mean to "know" and "experience" God?  This seemingly simple and fundamental question is at the core of my life-long spiritual quest. My convoluted and  erratic faith journey can be boiled down into this very basic question.  I've tried to answer it through immersing myself in scripture, testing the waters various faith traditions such as Buddhism, Islam, and even exploring some alternative, "new age" forms of spirituality. Throughout these spiritual travels, I've envisioned God to be nothing more than the essential nature of this world, the peace one discovers by complete submission to a set of practices or actions and by being fully present in the here and now.

These different traditions have opened my heart and mind to a God so much more beautifully complex and magnificent than I could have ever imagined.  They have brought me closer to God while giving me a greater sense of peace with myself and the messy world around me.

Yet, I've made my way back to Christianity because none of these other faith traditions could quite capture the power and beauty of the radical, counter-intuitive life of Jesus.  While other faiths reveal many wonderful dimensions of the almighty, Christianity alone reveals God as a living, breathing human being - just like us in body, and dramatically different from us in just about every other way.  In Jesus, we have the ultimate role model for how God expects us to live out this life.

Yet, for me, the power of Christ has always been in the radical choices and actions he made throughout his short life - the people he chose as his companions, the people he chose to help, and the ultimate sacrifice he made save humanity.

If you think about it, everything about Jesus' life is completely insane by the world's standards and runs completely counter to the impulses of society, both then and today. Just consider the choices he made.

Instead of being born to royalty or political aristocracy, God chose to come into this world as the son of and unwed teenage mother in a poor peasant family within a defeated community on the "wrong side of the tracks" so to speak. 

Instead of having him grow up to become a great and powerful leader of a mighty empire, Jesus spent his entire short life as a radical, traveling preacher leading a rag-tag group of mostly uneducated, working-class men and a corrupt government official.