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(OPINION) I’ve spent much of my life — some might say, way too much of it — in church. I have a background in the social sciences, and I’ve always been interested in hearing churchgoers’ stories about how they came to faith. I enjoy looking for patterns.

Get to know the most devoted churchgoers, and you’ll learn they’re rarely who you assume they would be.

Yes, I’ve met Christians who were raised in the fold, accepted the tenets from childhood on, never seriously doubted any of it and have lived pious lives from the cradle to wherever age they are now, in their 40s, 50s or 80s. But I’ve met only a handful of those folks.

Mainly, that’s not the story. Mainly, the people who’ve become devoted to their faith did so along a winding path. Some had been to jail. Some were atheists. Some grew up in church, rejected it in their youth, veered out into the wider world for years and then reluctantly found their way back. Some hated organized religion.

Even once they’ve made a commitment, or a recommitment, many continue to struggle with alcohol, drugs or other assorted problems they’ve picked up along the way. Sadly, some lose those battles — even while holding their faith dear. Belief is not a magic wand.

Here’s the commonality. Almost everybody I’ve ever talked to who displays a serious, heart-felt, lasting commitment to God has said there was a moment when the heavens opened up before them and they were transported into some new spiritual dimension they hadn’t known existed. Heaven came down, you might say. They were transformed on a dime.

I’ve heard this from Catholics, Episcopalians and Pentecostals alike.

When I was a young pastor, I had in my congregation a guy from the mountains. He’d led, by his telling, a fairly rip-roaring early life. He’d partied a lot. He’d moved to Mt. Sterling to work in a factory.

One night at work, the assembly line broke. While repairs were underway, production came to a halt. He decided to take advantage of the idle time by grabbing a nap. He broke down a couple of cardboard boxes, spread them on the floor under his work station and stretched out on this makeshift pallet.

He’d only been there lying there a few minutes, he said, when without warning, he was overcome by a shimmering, unexpected aura of otherworldly peace. He felt bathed in love and light. He saw into the heavens. He suddenly realized God was real, that God cared for him intimately, and that God was right there in that factory. He felt new as a baby.

The experience shifted the way he saw himself, God and the world. It replaced the trouble and worry that had nettled him with joy and trust. After that, he found his way to church.

I’ve heard some version of this same story over and over. Ordinary people, going along their merry — or not so merry — way, find themselves gobsmacked by a glorious God they didn’t previously believe in, or believed in only in some vague, intellectual sense. In one moment (sometimes it’s a series of moments), they are transformed and left awash in gratitude.

God stops being a theological proposition to accept or reject, and instead becomes a living presence.

I wrote about this phenomenon in my final column of 2024. There, I highlighted David Brooks’ New York Times essay about his journey from agnosticism to faith.

“When I was an agnostic,” Brooks wrote, “I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.”

Yet, that wasn’t at all how he finally encountered God.

“When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences,” he said. “These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. … In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.”

Let me clarify what I am and am not trying to say here.

I’m not saying everybody who’s a churchgoer has had a transcendent experience. Probably most churchgoers haven’t. A myriad of churchgoers seem unacquainted with the divine.

I’m not saying everybody who’s had one of these experiences finds their way to a church. I’m sure God visits people of all varieties, including some who’ve never darkened a church door.

I’m not saying the people who’ve had such visitations suddenly straighten up and live like, I don’t know, Mother Teresa, picking up the poor off Calcutta’s streets. Typically the recipients of these visions go right on being glaringly human.

However, what I am saying is that we’re sometimes confused about how people arrive at lasting, paradigm-busting faith, the type of faith that becomes the most comforting and inspiring force in their lives.

That kind of faith isn’t something you can reason yourself (or somebody else) into.

The deepest faith is experiential. It’s a mysterious, unexpected gift from above. Until God removes our blinders, we can’t see him. But once we’ve seen him, we can’t unsee, try as we might.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.