CarlZunker.com

Maybe you should listen to me. Maybe you shouldn’t. That’s up to you. You can read my “About” page to see if I meet your criteria for being an expert (or even acceptable) witness, but I would ask that you not judge only on what I have been. Try to consider what is being made of us all, a new self. “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires, to be made new in the attitude of your minds, and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22-24 NIV).

We are continually being molded. Some people offer perspective as they are being shaped by the world; others while being shaped by the Word. Consider this essay a snapshot of me on my journey in being shaped by the Word while I do my best to submit to Jesus Christ. I only hope to share things here that might also help shape your journey.

I’m not here to sell you anything, I am just hoping to discuss the things that I have found. I have not created any kind of curriculum or program, but I have spent a lot of time reading the Bible and books by other people who have spent their lives reading the Bible.
I’m here to tell you what I’ve discerned for myself. I’m prayerful that it will help you to discern on your own as well.

We live in a world full of authority without truth. People sell systems and push solutions that don’t work outside of controlled conditions. There are external voices telling us who we are, what we should want, and what is right and wrong. We get told what morality is from people building on the sand, without any real foundation for morality.

We’ve built frameworks that try to produce something out of nothing.

To fairly evaluate my voice, you have to understand that I don’t think that logic works. I believe that objective morality exists and it only comes from one place. For me, the Bible is the grounding point. I read it, wrestle with it, and try to understand it with the help of those who have come before us. Theologians, thinkers, people who took it seriously enough to dedicate their lives to it.

I have also read quite a bit about the opposing viewpoints. I have not read deeply from every thinker who speaks against Christianity, but I am not required to. If I want to spot a counterfeit I need to spend time looking at the genuine article, not a forgery. But I have read from Nietzsche, Dawkins, Hitchens, Nagel, and others. Understanding their perspective helps me understand my own more deeply.

And yes, I bring my own background into this process of discernment. Years of academic study, degrees, leadership experience, time in the military, time in management, and being part of a family.

But none of that is why you should listen to me. Credentials can show that someone has thought deeply. They do not prove that someone is right. They do not make someone trustworthy with your life and with your eternity.

If anything, my time inside those systems showed me how easy it is to sound certain and still be wrong. During the height of my self-deceit, I told myself that I believed in Christ, but that I had to make small concessions because that’s how the world works. I would hide my belief when it was inconvenient to share, but that’s just what everybody does. I was only able to do that because, as Anselm of Canterbury suggested in about 1094 AD, I had not considered the weight of my sin. I was living life as a Christian in name only even though I was trying to be a good person. I was aligned in appearance, not transformed in substance.

And then life did what it does when we don’t put God first. It tried to crush me. Loss, pain, physical limitations, disappointment, sorrow, depression, shame. Problems that we feel like no other human endures and don’t project into self-help frameworks.

That’s where everything I thought I understood stopped working and faith became real. Not because I worked towards understanding, but because God showed grace and gave me mercy. He called me close to Him. Each of us has a personal relationship with God. His love does not change, but our willingness and ability to accept it does. God doesn’t make those problems go away, but he shows us how to bear them.

I look at my life as one story told in a lot of parts. But the biggest break in my story puts it in just two sections. Before I found Christ, and after he rescued me. The part that separates those two sections is complicated, but it involves my mother dying from pancreatic cancer, my brother’s suicide, and my own disability from degenerative disk issues in my back. Any one of those alone could be reason enough to push me far away from God, but he used all of them to humble me and call me close.

I fully realized that God is not an idea. He is not a structure. This relationship was something I had to either reject or fully submit to. I could no longer be “kind of” Christian if I ever wanted to have peace and joy again.

What I found is that nothing in this world produces the kind of peace and joy that God promises. No idol can replace it; not money, respect, sex, fame, or anything else we try to chase. Maybe you can approximate it, many people claim to have the same peace and joy without God. I don’t believe that, because I had a lot of the things I am told should complete us. Maybe I am uniquely broken, but none of it filled me up. You can certainly find ways to distract yourself, but you simply cannot create and sustain what your relationship with God gives you. Once you experience it, you cannot imagine life without it.

That only comes from turning fully toward Him. Once you are submitted to the creator of the universe, your life changes and people start to notice. We call that the fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), and it is evidence of a life aligned with the Spirit. The Bible gives an analogy of a person being in alignment with God being like a healthy tree, with healthy trees bearing good fruit and unhealthy trees bearing bad fruit. In Matthew 7:20 Jesus tells us, “thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” The good trees producing good fruit are the people who we want to surround ourselves with. They are the ones we should listen to.

When it comes to my own fruit, I wish it was something I could just show you here, but that’s not how it works. I’m not going to try to prove anything, not online or in person, because that type of endeavor is a trap. In Matthew 19:16-22 there is the parable of the rich young ruler. This young ruler thought he had checked every box in being obedient to God, and he tried to show his own fruit to Jesus, but Jesus knew the truth, and showed the young man his shortcomings. You can’t tell people about your walk; you simply have to walk it and let the fruit bear itself. This story illustrates how much the rich young ruler did not understand. I know enough to know I don’t know enough.

You can only witness fruit in relationship with people, and you cannot witness it in one blog post. All I can say is that I am not who I was. I can now see the direction I’m walking, and I pray that I am sharing fruit with others as I walk.

We’re all moving one way or the other. Toward Christ or away from Him. There is no third destination. As Eugene Peterson named his book, and Nietzsche decried about Christianity, it’s a long obedience in the same direction. I have spent enough time stumbling the wrong way to recognize the difference now. Not perfectly or consistently, the only thing I do with perfection is fall short, but I have now considered the weight of my sin. That makes me see things in this world a little more clearly.

Scripture is honest about the journey. The path to salvation is narrow. It’s not crowded. If you’re trying to walk that path, you need people alongside you. I pray that’s my purpose here for you.

Not to give you a system or hand out answers. Not to position myself as someone you should follow, but to be someone to walk with you. To help you ask good questions and to help you think deeply and clearly. To wrestle honestly, and to help practice the art of discernment.

And to point back to Christ, not to myself.

If there’s anything in my background that matters, it’s not the degrees or the titles. It’s that I had many of the things the world says we should want, and still found it wasn’t enough.

So, I stepped away. You can interpret that however you want. I’ve either lost my footing completely, or I have found something worth reorienting my life around. I believe it’s the latter.

That might be something worth listening to.