Like most of people in my generation, l grew up in an atheist society and knew little or nothing about Christianity before 1980s. After coming to the states, I saw there were a quite few churches around the campus. At the time, I only cared about my school – to get a degree.
Once I walked into a church with curiosity and saw the beautiful glass windows. For some reason, I did feel it was a sacred place and awed, then I walked out. That was my first experience with the church.
A couple of years later, I transferred to a university at the south. Apparently, southerners are more religious than Midwesterners. One of my classmates who shared office cubicles with me appeared to be a pious Christian. He always put an earphone on in the morning, which I thought he must have been listening to a pop music. To my surprise, he said that he was listening Christian music. From that point on, I often asked him about Christianity, which I had no clue. He showed his interest of helping me to get to know Christianity and talked about the Bible stories. To be honest, it was very hard for people who grew up in an atheist society to accept those stories such as how God created the world and how God saw the wickedness of man and was grieved by his creation, and then he flooded earth. For some reason, his stories turned me into a cynical man. I started to mock at his stories sometimes. In one of the occasions, I mocked why God made a virgin pregnant — that was equivalent to rape when he talked about the story of Holy mother Mary. He was definitely offended this time because of my stupidity, but I was completely innocent. I have to say some of my American classmates treated me like an evil since then and they hardly talked to me anymore.
I worked at a credit card bank in mid 90’s and my son started grade school. Though I came to the states many years by then, I had never paid any attention to the politics and the religion before I was out of the school. I began to pay more attention to the church stuff because I felt I had more time after I got my first job. I started to take my son to a church to attend Sunday school. That was when I started to read Bible. I have to say that the more I read, the more I was away from Christianity at that time because most of the stories were incomprehensible. Then I stopped to go to church, and so did my son. I even began to ridicule at the Christianity in front of my son with cynical tone since then.
In late 90’s, I worked at an IT department of a local insurance company with about 30 employees. There was a director, two programmers, a network administrator and PC support, and three data entry associates. I was hired as a programmer and network specialist since I had a MS degree in computer science and two engineering certificates (one from Microsoft and the other from Novell). The company was totally depended on the network guy before I joined in the IT department. Without him, the company was literally out of operation because no one knew the network and PC at that time (director was a non tech person). The network guy appeared as a devout Christian. He organized a prayer lunch every Friday and put Bible verse as his screen saver. He was treated as a guru and everyone was afraid of him, even the president of the company. My hiring was definitely a thread to him.
I have to say that he was a crook. He spent half of his time to create problems with network or PCs and then pretended to fix it. I was disgusted by him being a Christian as he presented himself in workplace. I became extremely biased toward Christian after working with him.
to be continued…