Jeremy L. Berg

This is my version of the story after years of reflecting back upon that night in the dining center with my new Bible.  I have not tried to embellish it or exaggerate the claims. Though, truth be told, you might get a very different story if you asked someone who was close to me during this time what they saw different in me.

You see, outwardly I looked the same when I got back to my dorm room as when I left. Yet, an inward shift had taken place deep within me, and the long, slow, painful process of rearranging my new of the world and my place within it was only beginning.

But few, if any, could see the evidence of the wild interior journey I was now experiencing. To quote the words of C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy my “imaginative life began to be so important and so distinct from my outer life that I almost have to tell two separate stories…Where there are hungry wastes, starving for Joy, in the one, the other may be full of cheerful bustle and success; or again, where the outer life is miserable, the other may be brimming over with ecstasy.”

One obvious outward change in my life was my college major. I had become enraptured by the biblical text.  This was a rare case of the gym rat turned book worm overnight.  I developed a constant craving to plumb ever deeper into the depths of the Bible.  I became a reader.  I became an intellectual.  I became a student of the Bible with a voracious appetite for more understanding.

The following semester I dropped out of the Education Department and changed my major to Biblical & Theological Studies.  I had no clue what sort of employment this degree would lead to.  Frankly, I didn’t care.  Finding a good job was the concern of my old story, a story I had now thrown in the trash in exchange for a far greater Story with a much grander purpose than a steady paycheck.  In the words of my newfound spiritual hero, Paul:

“Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant—dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him” (Phil 3:7-8 The Message).

So, my love affair with the narrative world of Acts was first set in motion that night in the dining center. But it continued the following fall of my junior year as I began my new major. Two experiences that year added fuel to that fire.

First, I was able to take a class taught by Dr. Michael Holmes called The Life & Teachings of Paul which allowed me to study the life and journeys of Paul in great depth with a top New Testament scholar. Many of my classmates dreaded the workload that included reading and outlining all of Paul’s epistles verse-by-verse, putting to memory the basic topic of almost every chapter he penned, and reading through The Dictionary of Paul & His Letters.  I dug every bit of it.  This was drastic outward change not to be overlooked.

Second, I had signed up to go study in Israel in January 2001; but with a little twist of fate, the violence in the middle east escalated to the point of changing our destination to a bus tour across Turkey and Greece traveling In the Footsteps of Paul! For nearly a month I had a guided tour through the geographical landscape of Acts and stepped foot in all the places that had already left such deep footprints on my soul.

You can imagine the thrill of riding on a bumpy bus through the Taurus mountains toward Pisidian Antioch in the region of Galatia while reading John B. Polhill’s Paul & His Letters with my other hand gripping my now well-worn NIV Student Bible given to me by my two Spirit-led college buddies only a year prior.

These were magical moments in the honeymoon period of my renewed courtship with Christ.  I was madly in love with Christ, and anxious to see where my journey was going to lead.  I only hoped it would be half as exciting as the apostolic adventures recounted in the Book of Acts.