1. "Are you Republican or Democrat?” “Liberal or conservative?” “Yankees or Red Sox?” “Star Wars or Star Trek?”
  2. He was providentially injecting streams of light into the darkness, that thereby he might lead them toward the true light of Christ.
  3. Show me. If I’m going to believe, I need to be convinced—on my terms.
  4. But one key theme that kept surfacing again and again was love: Jesus loved people, the Church showed me genuine love, and above all, God’s love in Christianity is unconditional.
  5. Years ago I picked up a used copy of Thomas Á Kempis’ Imitation of Christ at a second-hand bookstore.
  6. He has wandered away into the darkness of his doubting, got lost in his grief, confused by the pains he’s suffered. It happens. Shepherds sometimes become lost sheep as well.
  7. But on the mountain in Galilee, where we encounter a very different side of God, doubts overtake us. Why?
  8. That is the way of our Lord, the way of grace. He doesn’t abandon Thomas to drown in a sea of doubt.
  9. Our faith is not a mountain but a grain of sand, not pure gold but gilded plaster. And all it takes is a few nicks and scratches to reveal its shallowness.
  10. The biblical witness is clear: all the so-called gods and lords and idols who are the object of people’s devotion, to whom they offer their sacrifices, to whom they pray, whom they call God and Lord, are sadly nothing but a front for the father of lies.
  11. There is truly only one commandment and only one sin. That one commandment is “You shall have no other gods,” and that one sin is idolatry.
  12. Premeditated or not, you and only you invited this venom into your body, this evil percolating in your soul, and now you don’t know where to turn.