https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qg1H50DvftI
I want to ask you why you became a Christian. Like, what terrified me into religious submission was studying the Holocaust. It just seemed like this thing to do at the time. Yeah. Okay, well you went to Yale and you were in the English department. That was before you had a conversion. What happened in the conversion and why did you switch your tune? That’s the funniest way of putting it that I’ve ever heard. Thank you for that. Why did I switch my tune? I was, you know, I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. And I had a vague faith at Yale, which is extraordinarily was then, and of course is now dramatically more secular, hostile to genuine biblical faith, hostile to the ideas, the American ideas of freedom and so on and so forth. I, you know, foolishly drank that Kool-Aid and drifted into genuine agnosticism and I was dramatically lost. I was really, you know, I wasn’t some proud atheistic sinner. I was just lost. And ultimately, we could talk about this later, but ultimately I found myself horror of horrors moving back in with my parents, my European immigrant parents who had worked menial jobs to put me through Yale University. And they’re kind of looking at me like, so why are you back here again? What are you doing here? But I was totally lost. And in that season of my life, I was 24, I got this horrible menial job as a proofreader at Union Carbide in Danbury, Connecticut. The Hebrew word is Gehenna. It was awful. And in that misery, I met someone who began to share his faith with me. And I was initially hostile or at least not wanting to hear it for many, many months. And long story short, around my 25th birthday, I had a dramatic miraculous dream in which in a nutshell, God spoke to me so unequivocally that there was no going back. It was game over. I say it’s like going to sleep single and waking up married. Can you tell me, would you tell me the dream? Now? Sure. It’s actually hard to do justice to it. No doubt. It encompasses three parts of my life. Part of the reason it was so staggering to me as I was having this dream, because I don’t dream very much and I had never ever had a dream anything like this. This was another category of dream. It was like having a vision in the context of a dream. I was unconscious, of course, I was sleeping. But I have to say a couple of things for background. So you get the vocabulary. Number one, grew up as the son of immigrants. My father from Greece, you know, very, like most Greeks, inordinately proud of being Greek and wanting to raise his kids in that tradition. And so that was a very important part of my growing up, that I am Greek, that this is my identity. Once my father, we were at a light. I mean, I still drive there today. And at this light, we saw the car in front of us on the bumper that had one of those chrome fish. This is in the 70s. And my father says, do you know what that is? And he explains to me that that’s the Greek word for, the Greek word for fish is ichthis. And it’s spelled, you know, it’s an acronym. Well, the word is ichthis. But the early Christians adopted that symbol of the fish as a symbol of the Christian faith, because the word fish is an acronym for Jesus Christos Theos Imon Sotir, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior. So they use the symbol of the fish because to them, the symbol of the fish meant ichthis, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior. So it’s the secret symbol of the Christians. And my father was, you know, thrilled to tell me that’s a Greek word and that’s where that comes from. And so I always associated that fish with Christ after I saw that. So again, this is by way of background. Fishing was very important to me growing up also. I should say that, you know, if I had a hobby other than like watching sitcoms, it was fishing, that was very important to me. 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When I went to Yale, suddenly I cared about the meaning of life and I really was an English major. I realized even somewhat at the time, because I’m trying to figure out the nature of reality. By reading these great novels in the Western canon, I’m putting together these pieces to figure out what is the nature of reality? What is the meaning of life? And I was actually doing that without doing it particularly intentionally. It was just instinctively the life of the mind. And I came up, and I have to say this, so then the dream will make sense. I came up with, you know, as only a pretentious undergraduate could do. I think I’ve got it figured out that it’s kind of like a literary trope. It’s an image of a frozen lake and what all religions, world religions mean to do is, so this is where it becomes Freudian and Jungian and you must forgive me, but the idea of a frozen lake, I thought this is a perfect image for what religion tries to do. You have this ice on the top of the lake, which is like the conscious mind. The ice is the conscious mind. And our goal is to drill through the ice to touch the water, which is the collective unconscious. We wanna touch the divinity, the Godhead. Again, Jung’s idea, not the Bible’s idea, but this idea that that’s what God is, the collective unconscious. So I had this image that I developed, you know, as an undergraduate, like, okay, so that’s what all religions are trying to do. They’re trying to drill through the conscious mind to touch the other side, to touch the collective unconscious, which is the kind of new age idea of the divinity, the Godhead, whatever that is. So I bring all of this, you know, into my 24th year and around my 25th birthday have this dream. In the dream, I’m standing on a frozen lake, Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Connecticut. I’m ice fishing with friends. And I look at the hole in the ice and I see what you never see if you’re ice fishing. I see a fish pointing its snout out of the hole. And I look at it and I reach down and I lift it up by the gill because it was a pickerel or a pike. They have very sharp teeth and you’d never lipland a fish like that. So I pick it up and in the dream, I lift it up and it’s a large pickerel or pike. And anybody who knows that fish knows that it has a kind of bronze coloring. But on that glorious winter day, the sun was shining brightly, the sky couldn’t be bluer, the ice and the snow couldn’t have been whiter. And I hold up this fish in the dream and I see that because of the sun, it looks golden. And suddenly in the dream, I realize, no, it doesn’t just look golden. It is golden. It is a golden fish made of gold, like in a fairy tale, but it is alive, a living golden fish. And in that moment in the dream, God effectively drops this into my head, like in paragraphs. I knew this is God saying to me in this dream, you wanted to drill through the ice, to touch inert water, to touch the collective unconscious, the divinity, the Godhead. I have something else for you. I have the golden fish, Icthus, Jesus Christos, Theos, Imon, Sotir, my son, your savior, Jesus Christ. Why did you make the association between the fish specifically at that point and Christ? Or did that happen in the dream? No, that’s what I’m saying. It happened in the dream. Yeah, I know, but the realization took place in the dream too. The realization took place within the dream. Within the dream, I knew within the dream that this is Jesus Christ, the son of God, our savior. I had been searching for this thing, to touch inert water, and God says, I’d like to one-up you with your own symbol system. I’d like to give you what you’re really looking for, my son, your savior, Jesus Christ, a living being. And when you think about it, theologically, a fish coming out of water, what happens when a fish comes out of the water? It dies. The idea that God came from his medium to our medium to die. All of this came clear in the dream. And when I was in the dream holding this fish, I was flooded with joy because what I had believed you could not know, that the Bible is true, that Jesus is God. In the dream, I realized, no, I know. And as I was holding the fish, I realized, I have what I’m looking for, what I was looking for, which I didn’t believe could be found. This is God, he’s given himself to me. And in the dream, I was flooded with joy. Within the dream, this is before I woke up, I knew this is true, and I just had this joy. So the next day I went and I told the friend of mine at work the story, I said, I had this dream, and he says, well, what do you think it means? And I said, and I never would have said these words, these words would have made me cringe at any previous day. I said, it means I’ve accepted Jesus. I never would have said these words. I never would have said that. I was made uncomfortable by people who said that. But I knew that I had jumped over the broomstick, that I was in another world, that I had accepted Jesus, and that happened right around my 25th birthday.