The Mystery of God – Ken Boa’s Story

Former skeptic Ken Boa put aside his childhood faith and became a secular humanist who tested his philosophy through psychedelic drugs. After an agonizing search for meaning, he came to believe in the reality of God.

Ken’s Resources:

• www.kenboa.org

Resources recommended by Mark:

• Escape from Reason, Francis Schaeffer
• The God who is There, Francis Schaeffer
• Works of C.S. Lewis

For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. 

It’s often the case that what someone believes or is taught as a child begins to fade as they encounter other ideas or other people that seem more sophisticated, more adult, more true. It becomes easy to leave childhood ideas behind, to be put on the shelf as a remnants of an outgrown time. But what happens when someone begins to find holes in their new way of thinking? When it, too, doesn’t seem to answer the big questions of life as well as they might think? What happens then? Returning to childhood beliefs seems off the table. Yet living in the tension of intellectual dissonance and existential dissatisfaction is not an option either. Perhaps indifference or distraction is the answer, confronting the tension by avoiding it. 

In today’s story, philosopher, theologian, and former skeptic Dr. Ken Boa once rejected his childhood Christian beliefs for more adult-seeming secular humanism and experimentation with Eastern mysticism and even occultism. He continued to be unsettled by the inability, though, to explain things like the ineffable quality of beauty or his deep need for meaning. But these conundrums were not enough for him to search for the God of his youth. What happened, then, to compel him to a profound belief in the God that he had left behind? I hope you’ll join in to find out. 

Hi, Ken. Welcome to Side B Stories. It’s so great to have you with me today! 

Thank you.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Yeah. I often describe myself as a writer, speaker, and teacher, and a mentor. In a broader way, though, I’m a bit of an odd duck, insofar as I love to process things with people. I use beauty, and I use goodness, and I use truth, and I seek to winsomely draw people through narrative and through story. I want people to learn how to love well, learn well, and live well.

Can you give me an idea, also for the listener to understand, your academic background?

Yeah. Well, as an undergraduate I went to Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. And another thing about me, I’m a philosopher of science.

I was drawn to astronomy and math and physics and so forth. But then I started at graduate school at Berkeley in California. But then the oddest crazy thing, many things happened that led me instead to go to Dallas Theological Seminary. This was a long time ago, and I got a Masters of Theology there. And then working with different organizations. But I eventually started teaching at the King’s College in Briarcliff Manor, New York, when it used to be up there. And I was going to NYU to work on the philosophy of religion, so I completed my PhD from that. And then, some years later, about ten years after that, I wanted to go to England and just take a sabbatical. So what ended up as a sabbatical turned out to be actually going to Oriel College at Oxford, and ultimately I got my DPhil in philosophy and theology.

Okay. So, Ken, you obviously have studied at the highest levels, at Oxford, areas of philosophy and theology, but you didn’t start there. And so I’d like to go back to the beginning of your story and see how those atheistic views developed. Why don’t you start us back into your childhood, your family of origin. Give us a sense of the home in which you were raised, whether or not God or religion was part of your family life, part of your culture life. Why don’t you start us there? 

Yeah. As I’ve looked back, I recently realized—I didn’t know this until recent inquiries that I was actually baptized in the Episcopal Church when I was four years old. My father was a bus driver in New Jersey, and he was a very, very witty and clever man, and people loved him, and he apparently had one of his passengers. He must have gotten close to him and had an impact on him. And so my father started going to that Episcopal Church. And so my godfather was this man, this other fellow. But when he died of a brain tumor not long after that, my father lost his best friend, and his whole role then with regard to God was one of bitterness. How could God allow that to happen? And so that was his narrative. The net effect was that I still remember vaguely going to that Episcopal Church. I was about four or five. I remember what it looked like. It was a strange experience. And then I also remember my parents sending my older sister and me to church. It was a Baptist church that we had to walk by ourselves. This is in the ‘50s, and so these things were done then, but we walked by ourselves almost 2 miles to this Baptist church, and we had to go to a Sunday school class, and then we’d come back together. But my parents never went to church at all at that time.

But it was a strange thing, hearing those—I still remember the lessons, the flannel board teachings. I still remember the songs we sang. So it obviously had a big mark on me in some ways. And then also my grandmother had a huge impact, and she was definitely a strong believer. So there were those influences there. And one of my uncles as well. So it was there, but it was not something that was fed in my home.

So as a child, would you say you had some kind of childhood belief in God? That God was real, that God was there?

Yeah, I did. And we talked about these things. But my sister and I were in a world of fantasy and imagination a lot, and we got this set of book trails that was an eight-volume collection of stories, and I used to read them out loud to her. And it was a magical thing. So we were very much in the mind of the imagination. But in that understanding, we were believers, in that God existed and so forth. That’s an interesting thought. Though I didn’t carry it to its logical conclusions. Though I remember having some experiment with prayer when I was about seven, I think, when I asked God if He could send me a million dollars, and I had heard that, if you believe, if you have enough faith to believe it. So imagine my disappointment the next morning. So that kind of changed when the obvious would have occurred. But I knew I believed in God. Although I had strange dreams. I still remember at the age of six having a dream about infinity. The number one got oppressively large and larger and larger until I woke up in terror.

So this idea of the ineffable, of the mysterious, this has been a motif in my journey, from that inception. I can remember. I was drawn and terrified, both in that dream and also in my experience with the mysteries of nature. That seems to be a motif in my life. So I believed in God in  that sense.

But your father, in some sense, had rejected, and both of your parents, neither one of them went to church. And so you and your sister walked to church, and you were developing a childhood belief but also an appreciation for the grandeur and mystery of the transcendent. 

And so how long did that continue until you started becoming skeptical of what you were seeing or thinking? 

Well, what happened, we went from Dumont, New Jersey, and later on we went… as a period, we went to Louisiana. My mother is from there. So I lived in two worlds, the Monroe, Louisiana, which was actually going back like thirty years in the past. And we would go to a church there. My grandmother would take us to a church, and so forth.

But when we came back to New Jersey, my parents again sent my sister and I to church, so we went to this Emerson Union Church. But later a new pastor came, and it was Emerson Bible Church. And the pastor was a graduate from Dallas Theological Seminary. I was fascinated by him, and he had a good mind.

And what happened was I had two sets of friends by the time I went to high school. I went to Hackensack High, a big school. And my friends there were not believers, my closest friends, but my friends at Emerson Bible Church were. And I was involved in even Christian Service Brigade, which was this Christian version of scouting, boy scouting. And my friends, they’d have stories. We’d have a story and games and so forth. And sometimes then they were going into this back room, and they’d come out and say they received Jesus. And so I was the last one left. I figured I’d better do it, too. So I went in there, and I heard a guy say a prayer. I listened to the prayer and said, “Yes,” but it was his prayer. It was not really my own invitation, but more an intellectual reception, rather than a personal embrace. And that was a real problem for me, because I thought I had the real thing, but it wasn’t real. And a real profound inner tension that produced.

It wasn’t real because obviously it was another person’s prayer. You accepted it intellectually, but not personally. 

That’s correct.

So for those who don’t really understand the difference there, they might think just you’re a Christian just because you believe certain tenets. 

Yeah. It’s a matter of not believing about, but trusting in. And this whole idea of a transfer of trust, a choice, a will, rather than just an intellectual acknowledgment of a thing, became a very, very different thing indeed. It’s more a matter of a choice that you’re making, not just an intellectual acknowledgment. There’s a big difference.

Right. And so you never made that personal faith decision, trust in, what you believed. 

Yes. Although I wrote in a Bible the next year, when I was I think 14, “I received Jesus as my personal Savior.” So I knew the words, but I didn’t have the reality. But I could not in my heart of hearts acknowledge that, because then I’d say, “Man, none of this is true then.” So the interior tension terrified me, and sometimes his sermons would terrify me, because then I’d have to work up with some experience, emotional experience, to believe I was still there. It was a strange experience for me to be in that. So I was two different people.

So with your more secularized friends, you were thinking more maybe scientifically, more in a way towards the natural world as ultimate reality? 

Well, in part. Yeah. They were more into music and also into history. they were secularized. They loved great music and art and so forth. And it was a different kind of music, a different kind of an art, a different kind of an ethos than I saw at Emerson Bible Church, which was very thin. And so I was drawn more to the life of the mind and of the aesthetic dimension of beauty, again. So I became two different kinds of people. I was terrified, though, that two of them would ever meet each other. I wouldn’t know how to respond. I’d be two different people.

So there was this dichotomy for a while, a cognitive dissonance for a while, and so did one end up kind of winning over the other in terms of- 

Well, here’s what happened. Yeah. You can’t live that way.

Right. 

So I’m an old guy. It was in the fall of ‘63, then, that I went to Case Institute of Technology. And I remember being in the dorm, and I would still read my Bible as a kind of perfunctory thing before I’d go to sleep, and I decided I was going to go to a church. It was an embarrassing experience for me. It was some kind of fundamentalist kind of experience, and I was burned by that. And so I formally took my Bible, and I remember this moment. It was an amazing thing that I took it and put it on the shelf. I can see myself doing it. It’s an iconic moment. Sometimes time is frozen on a particular image, and visually, you take a photo. I put it in the shelf. And it was symbolic of the fact that I won’t deal with this anymore. I’m going to move on, and I’m going to bracket God’s existence or nonexistence, neither accepting nor rejecting, because I didn’t want to deal with that internal tension that was too great. So I just decided.

So it was more of a—scientific humanist was my modality.

Okay. So you put God on the shelf, literally and spiritually and figuratively, and all of it. 

In all respects, yeah. And that’s why I say I bracketed God, by which I mean I didn’t want to deal with the questions of: Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going? The fundamental issues of life. Because I knew in my heart of hearts I didn’t have answers. And I still remember, and I was at Pi Kappa Alpha in the fraternity, and my weekend blew apart when I was 19, a sophomore. All my plans went apart, and I was the only one in the house. And for the first time all these issues of questions about life imposed themselves, and it was a terrifying thing. I still remember that awful experience. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know where I came from and where I’m going. And so I said I’m never going to do that again. So, like, as Pascal predicted, indifference and distraction became my modality after that, and I made sure I would never let that happen. I didn’t want to think about it.

Yes. Now, you had mentioned that you were drawn to the life of the mind, and that evidently wasn’t in the world of Christianity that you had experienced. So I’m imagining that there weren’t any more intellectual Christians in your world to whom you could go and discuss God or Christianity or these larger questions with a Christian for whom you respected or could find, I guess, intellectual fodder at the level at which you were processing ideas. Is that right? 

Yeah. I’d say that would be true. The life of the mind, I found it to be somewhat anemic in those contexts of the church experiences I had, though there were men—and I will say this—godly men and women, especially these men who took me under their wing and became like mentors to me. I still remember them, and they were part of my journey. So it was a very real sense, because of my scouting and also in my Sunday school classes. These were men that I did admire. They had a quality in them, but they were ordinary men. They were not extraordinary in their way of thinking or apprehension. So it didn’t satisfy the level of understanding or beauty, because I was drawn to beauty, and to beautiful things. I became a lover of great, beautiful books, for example, and aesthetic things of that nature. So that’s where I found—my two best friends were both people who loved beauty and weren’t as concerned about truth. They were more concerned about beauty and goodness in a certain way. It’s an interesting thing, but there was a sort of mystery that was there.

Right. And so as you were moving into this more aesthetic, ethereal world that was secularized, I’m curious. Because they weren’t as concerned about truth, but there has to also be a grounding of goodness and beauty. Was that anything that caused any kind of cognitive tension in terms of the grounding? Or when you’re looking at something like you were looking at the sky earlier, and you feel the power of what you’re seeing, that it has to come from somewhere or be grounded in something? Or was it just it just was? 

That is why I didn’t want to think about it, because I knew it was pointing beyond me, beyond to something that was ineffable. And I was terrified of ineffability because I didn’t want to think about those categories because they reminded me of the internal turmoil underneath, where I knew I was an impostor. I was pretending to be what I was not, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. So that was a very real dilemma for me.

But you said, in Pascalian terms, you became distracted, right? With things. 

Indifference and distraction.

Indifferent and distracted, yes. 

And so my way then would be to make sure I didn’t think hard about those questions anymore.But the point is, I cannot help but think about meaning. I’m haunted by it. So that’s what’s going on. And so I think it is the Hound of Heaven and God Who stoops to conquer, and in my case, He stoops to conquer.

And so he used, of all things, then, the psychotropic drugs to make me to become aware of a realm that I had been trying to occlude so successfully for a good period of time. And it was in my junior year at Case Institute of Technology that I began to get involved with hashish and with grass, and then later with LSD, and so that opened up an entirely different world. That was a whole new realm.

And so, through psychedelics, was that pursuit of meaning beyond the imminent world? Or was it just distraction? 

No. It was not that. It was the pursuit of a new kind of another-

Level of consciousness? 

Yeah. As well as the synesthesia. And I have to say it was a pleasurable experience, the synesthesia, where you hear color and you see sound, and your senses are moved together, and everything comes together. There are reasons why that occurs, but in those conditions, I found it to be very compelling, very drawing, and so it forced me in, and so we were doing experiments with time even. And I experienced a very different experience with even time. It dilated. We would actually be able to go into a dark room and take a cigarette and write a word, a short word, and it would linger. You could see the thing. It was a very intriguing experience indeed.

Yes. 

So we were doing experiments with that and with different aspects of consciousness. After all, we were scientists, so we tried to control the variables and so forth. And we believed in Timothy Leary’s idea. So it was experimentation, and that’s what it was. In consciousness.

So sometimes in those experimentations, or in psychedelics, people will get a sense of the other, like more than the natural world, that there is definitely something more than just what our senses… that there’s something more. Did it make you question again the possibility of God, based upon your experiences? 

Not so much that. It made me aware of the mysteries that surrounded me, but I still didn’t connect them to transcendence. But here’s what happened on one particular occasion: For the very first time, I went away from other people on a trip. It was a duplex, but the second floor, and I remember going away from the other guys, and it was a journey. It took me a world to get up to the top of those steps, as my hand is going into the wall and yet it’s not and so forth. And I finally see myself in the mirror, and it was an incredible flash of complex geometries and so forth.

But then I found myself for some reason meandering to the end of the hall, which I never would do. I went to my friend Ray Musselman’s bedroom, and I found myself on lying on his bed, and suddenly it happened. I was aware of the presence of the holy, and I was terrified and absolutely drawn to Him. It was both the mysterium tremen—it happened again, but more now fully. It was so intense. I don’t know how long it must have been. It must have been about maybe 15 minutes it lasted, because it was long enough for Ray to come upstairs after a while and wonder where I was.

Right. 

But I was pinned on that bed in ineffable terror and longing. And I realized that there was a separation from that which… but I wanted it more than anything else, this being. And so my friend Ray comes to me and says, “Where have you been?” “I’m talking with God, Man.” That was my answer.

So that, and every time subsequent, every time I dropped acid after that, whether I was with people or not, the most important part was to deal with the ineffable, the mysterium tremendum.

Now, I’m just thinking of the listeners here, that they would say, “Well, you just were hallucinating. You were on acid.” 

So it would seem.

One would imagine. Yeah. How can you differentiate between that which was a hallucination and that was the real? 

What happened is I had to go back to Cleveland to do one thing. It was right after graduation. So I went back to Cleveland and saw my friends, and there were about eight of us who dropped acid together in that same place. And one of them I didn’t like. I was just going to avoid him. Of course, you can guess what happened. As we get further and further, I get drawn to him, and I realized why I didn’t like him. Because he was a mirror image of myself. Because, at the age of 13, he too had the same experience. We had a profession of faith in Jesus, but he realized it wasn’t real, and it forced me, after eight years, to have to admit that I didn’t either.

So for the first time we both became aware, through each other, why we didn’t like each other, because we were reminiscent of the same process and the same problem. We both found ourselves suddenly on the road less traveled. We were heading toward the road. We were on a road, and we could see that road.

We couldn’t put on the brakes. We couldn’t stop. A forced choice was made. We both took the road less traveled the same moment in time. And we were then instantly as straight as we are now in this room. All the hallucinations were gone, and it was replaced by the power of the Spirit, who brought to mind the scriptures we’d learned as kids, because we’d learned the same texts of scripture. I’d share a verse, and he now, as a new believer, having found Christ, would understand its meaning for the first time. And he was blown away. Then he’d share one with me. And it was back and forth, back and forth, until the joy became so intense we literally couldn’t stand it. We had to back off.

And when we backed off, the trip came back. And then we’d get back into the scriptures, and then it would be all focused on that again. All night long. And I went to church for the first time the next morning. That was a Saturday night. And I remember going there late for the service, it turned out. I don’t even know how I got there. I was in the balcony, and I just remembered the sermon started, and it was on the prodigal son. So it was a lovely theme for me.

But that night, on that experience, I knew I was going to go to Dallas Seminary, not because of an inference, but because of an assurance. This book is God’s blueprint for living. That was a metaphor. “This is His proof, and I’ve got to learn what it says.” Not to be prepared for ministry, just to get my head screwed on right. So I came back, and I made an application, though I had applied to Berkeley and Columbia and had been admitted both places. I also put in my application to Dallas Seminary. But it was a profound experience, with a witness who had the same experience as well. And I’ve talked with him recently about that. I never heard anything like it.

Right. No. So it’s almost as if you had had some kind of intellectual assent younger, earlier in your life, but there was no palpable reality of God, whether it be personal or otherwise. 

Precisely.

And then later you have this extraordinary experience of God, where you could not deny the palpable reality of God, so it was where truth and reality came together for you, and I presume all of the dissonance you had felt prior somehow coalesced into a wholeness of all of those big questions of life that you were talking about, identity and meaning and all of those things. Were they met with some kind of almost a sudden satisfaction through the person of God? You knew who you were. You knew where you were going. You completely immediately changed your path. 

Yes. I was a new creation. But it launched a journey, an agonizing journey, of conscious worldview transition that lasted about a year.

I’m sorry to say this. I’m not recommending this. You need to understand this. It is not a recommendation. It is just a realization. That’s why I almost never tell this story, because people get the wrong idea. I’m saying God stooped to conquer. And that is an important word for people to hear. I’m reporting what happened. It was radical.

So it was a year I was there, and it was in the fall of that year, the next year, so I’d been there a year, it all came together. I had an epiphanic experience that was not just in the mind, but shivered my being, my body, my mind, everything. Everything in this epiphany of sudden recognition. After about a year of being there, it all came together. Suddenly I had a worldview that was coherent, consistent, clear, and comprehensive. It all fit together. I had been reading Schaeffer’s…. His first book came out, Escape from Reason, in ‘68. And I found out about this guy I’d never heard about, C.S. Lewis, so I was reading Lewis and Schaeffer and so forth, The God Who Is There and so forth. But it took that long. It was an agonizing process until it all came together in a coherent whole. And it was the most satisfying. It was visceral, not just cognitive, and I was immersed in the beauty, the splendor of mystery, and it was ethereal. It was luminous. I was in this thin place between heaven and earth, where it was a numinous encounter with the living God. So it was grace to have other experiences of this nature that have been very powerful for me.

So when everything coalesced for you in terms of the Christian or the God-centered worldview, and everything made sense, and it was comprehensive and cohesive, and it corresponded with reality, all these other things, the mysticism in terms of Eastern mysticism, your occultism, your use of psychedelics, those…. I would presume as your Christian worldview got stronger, you were able to see that those were not based in truth or you were willing to give those up as your understanding of the true reality solidified, that those kind of went away as not part of the true truth. 

It sounds like God was taken off the shelf for you in a very, very powerful way and has informed all that you’ve done since, both you and your wife, in your life. 

Yes. So that’s why I love the life of the mind and the heart. I love the interior of the beauty and the goodness and the truth. And I love the heart, the head, and the hands. Being, knowing and doing. Loving well, learning well, living well. And so all truth connects together, so as a synthesizer, I see them all together, and I love to connect things with things in disparate ways, because whether it’s music or literature or film or poetry or architecture or whatever it is, beauty always points to the ineffable One, Who made it all. So everything connects, everything relates in that way. It’s a lovely way of being.

Yes. And I would imagine, too, as compared to the lack of finding those in the community of Christianity who did not have a fostered life of the mind, it seems as if you’ve been a leader in that field now and have probably found strong community with those who call themselves Christians but have a very strong life of the mind.

Now, all that I’d ever learned about music and art and literature all converged in this one. And so I see myself, then, as one where all these fields kind of point in integrated ways, and I love to connect disparate things and put them together. So I say that the heart cannot rejoice in what the mind rejects.

Now there are, I would imagine, some curious skeptics listening today who really respect who you are, in terms of your ability to see and to experience things in very deep and  grand ways. And I wonder if they’re curious, that you have obviously found a worldview that makes sense of who you are and what you see and what you experience in reality in the world. And it makes sense for you. How could you advise or encourage someone who is curious but yet skeptical, as you once were, to continue to seek to find as you did? 

Yes. Because I think that is the issue. You just said. Those who seek will find. Those who ask, it will be given to them. Those who knock, it will be opened to them. There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who seek to know God and those who seek to avoid Him. And both will succeed in the end. So this whole idea then is what do I seek? Is my aspiration big enough? Because I’ve claimed that no earthbound felicity can sustain the awful, awful freight of human aspiration because we are bearers of the imago dei, and therefore, to avoid God is to actually deny ourselves. And so to pursue Him is actually to discover ourselves, by losing ourselves and finding Him. And frankly, everyone admits that personhood is better than the impersonal, in their practice. Everybody admits that. They just don’t want it to be true of the universe. And the reason for that is because personhood is daunting. The creator of beauty displays the ugly, the source of goodness reveals evil, and the author of truth exposes error.

for those who are seeking, as you kind of experienced or spoke of, you used the word terrifying a few times. It does seem a little bit frightening, a little bit terrifying to pursue the One Who is all and is in all and above all and through all and overall. But it’s worth it! 

Well, it is worth it.

And for the Christians who are listening who want to help lead or foster skeptics towards looking and seeking towards God, how would you best advise Christians to engage with those who are skeptical? 

I think asking these fundamental questions. And there’s three of Jesus’ questions. These three questions, if you don’t mind, I’ll show them to you. What do you seek? Who do you say I am? And you love Me more than these? So, “What do you seek?” is for me the most fundamental question that determines what you find. What are you looking for, you see? And is it big enough to sustain you? So I think a prayer, even the desire to be pleasing to Him is pleasing to Him. And so I think an offering would be to say, “Lord, I don’t know if I believe in You, but I want to discover if You are Who You claim to be, and just give me the grace of knowing You as I pursue this.” So as you study scripture or expose yourself to something that you’re just inviting the grace of holy desire.

Yeah. Who do you say that I am? 

Yeah. Here’s the thing about this: This isn’t an optional thing. Everybody, if Jesus is right, and this is the Pascalian wager, of course, that the one who doesn’t believe in God gets nothing of gain, but the one who does gets everything. But if he’s right, Jesus is going to be the judge, as well as the lover of our soul. So He comes in his first advent in humility, but ultimately we will all have to give an answer to, “Who do you say that I am?” And every tongue will acknowledge. It would be mighty smart to be willing to acknowledge Him now and bow the knee now, because ultimately we will.

You can’t be on a road without making a decision. You need to make an informed—and this is my word. I appeal to people’s pride. And I mean by that that you owe it to yourself, if this Person has shaped the world in so many profound ways as He has, ancient, medieval, and modern, you owe it to yourself to at least hear what He had to say of Himself before you decide to accept or reject. But you will either accept or reject. You don’t have an option. You will. So wouldn’t it be wise for you to choose whether to have an informed opinion as to whether to accept Him or reject Him? That’s why we created this little thing, Jesus in His Own Words, which is that’s exactly what it does, is it gives them the way of actually having to understand that.

Yes. What you’re saying, too, just reminds me a little bit in your story, where you were talking about that there has to be a choice at some point in the road. Right. 

That’s right. It was the two roads diverge, and I can say it now. How long has that been? Fifty five years, is it? I mean, it’s scary to think because how brief the earthbound sojourn is. But if we should always be amazed at the brevity. We’re in our last days. Never presume a year. So wouldn’t we be wise then to see there were defining moments in the journey of our lives? But if you can’t avoid a choice of Jesus permanently. You can only say no so many times. I don’t know, for example, when we were in that experience. And what if we hadn’t chosen the road less traveled? Would that have been our last opportunity? I don’t know that. But there is a last. There’s one step too far, and a person can say no only, and then their heart will be hardened. So this is not just a game we’re playing. This is a reality that you have to engage in, and at least if you make an informed decision about whether Jesus is Who He claimed to be or not, but you will have to accept it or reject it.

And your story, Ken, has given us so much to think about today, so many big issues of ineffability and beauty and goodness and truth and just experiencing the reality of God and what we are seeking, Who we are seeking, and who are we. I think everyone who will be listening to your story will be asking themselves the same questions that you were asking yourself. And I appreciate you bringing these big and grandiose, yet very, very personal issues to bear to all of us. 

So I really appreciate your story, Ken. I know that it’s going to touch some lives out there of those who are, God willing, seeking and that they will find. So thank you so much for coming on with me today. 

Thank you.

Wonderful. 

It’s a pleasure to be with you. Appreciate it.

Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Dr. Ken Boa’s story. You can find out more about Ken, his podcast, the prolific number of books he’s written, as well as his ministry, Reflections, at his website, www.kenboa.org, which I’ll also include in the episode notes. 

For questions and feedback about this episode, you can leave a message on the Facebook page, as well as contacting me through our website at www.sidebstories.com. Also, if you are a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.