At the end of last semester, I set myself up for a daunting task: to explain the value of Christian faith in 500 words.
I will admit from the start that I'm no guru. I have no religious training beyond the handful of Bible studies and comparative religion classes I've attended.
But perhaps that is best. I know from experience that you cannot debate someone into faith, and the best case I can make for my belief system is to reflect my God's love.
So instead of constructing an elaborate defense, I will tell a story. The story is about a young man who grew up believing in a God who cared about him. As he grew older, he questioned everything - textbooks, cultural norms, even the faith he had been taught.
He learned about Darwin. He read Vonnegut, Camus and Rand. He heard from a hundred sources that God was a social construct and that belief in the empirically unknowable was a fallacy.
How, after all, could all those stories in the Bible be true? The works of Jesus alone defied more principles of physics and biology than he could count on his hands and toes.
But then he went to Mexico. He met people who had few things in this world besides their faith in Jesus, and he saw a simple beauty in their lives like he had never noticed before.
In those two weeks, he allowed himself to see God working in many ways, concrete and mystical. He saw a little boy's legs literally and visibly healed when the people around him prayed.
Since then, he has seen that same God's movement many times. He has experienced a love that trumps all things, including his own stubborn ambitions.
That young man, of course, is me. In recent years, dozens of people have told me of their conviction that all (or most) religions are paths leading to the same mountain peak. They tell me to follow the path that works best for me.
But Christianity does not offer another way up the mountain. Christ taught that we could never climb high enough on the mountain of our own merits to reach salvation.
But he also taught that we could never fall too far. In the economy of mercy, we all find ourselves bankrupt. At some point in our lives, we all feel it: that utter lack, the sense that we are wholly inadequate - as sons, mothers, students, spouses, much less arbiters of our own eternal fate.
The good news is that we're offered an unimaginable wealth of grace in the person of Christ. And when we allow the Lord to pardon our crimes against Him and adopt us into His family, the transformation of our hearts and minds can begin.
This faith does not offer happiness. Nor does it exist to make us better people. Those things may come in time, but all we're guaranteed is grace.
I am learning that grace is enough.