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All over the world, Muslims are having dreams and visions of Jesus. These men and women often find him appearing to them in a shining white robe. The encounters are often so powerful that they produce a newfound interest in Jesus. As these Muslims dig deeper and learn what the Bible has to say about him, they are discovering his power to transform their lives and receive forgiveness for their sins. One of these encounters is described by Tom Doyle in an interview with Lee Strobel. “We met another guy in Jericho named Osama who was part of the Palestinian Authority. He started having dreams about Jesus. He went to his imam, who told him to read the Qur’an more. But the more he read the Qur’an, the more he had Jesus dreams. The imam told him to get more involved in the mosque, so he did—still, more Jesus dreams. The imam said to make the Hajj to Mecca.” In my mind I could picture this person among the throngs at Mecca, walking around the Kaaba, often called “the house of Allah,” a black building in the center of the most sacred mosque in Islam. One of the five pillars of Islam says if a Muslim is able, he should make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca once in his lifetime and walk seven times around the Kaaba. More than a million people walk counterclockwise around the Kaaba during this five-day period. “What happened to him?” I asked. “You’re supposed to look at the Kaaba and say your prayers. Instead, he looked over—and on top of the Kaaba, he saw the Jesus from his dreams.” “That must have startled him!” “It did!” Doyle replied. “Jesus was looking at him and saying, ‘Osama, leave this place. You’re going in the wrong direction. Leave and go home.’ So he did. Later a … friend shared the gospel with him… Today, this man has such love for Jesus that you can literally see it on his face.” Learn More Short Blog: Muslim Looks for Allah but Finds Jesus - Nabeel Qureshi External Website: https://www.unchangingword.com/ Reference Lee Strobel, The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural, Reprint ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2018), 146.

David Bennett grew up in a non-religious home in Sydney, Australia. After discovering he was attracted to men, he found himself the victim of prejudice and hatred. This stirred in him a desire to become a gay activist, and to oppose Christianity since it seemed to bring so much suffering upon his friends in the LBGTQ community. Then, one day, the unexpected happened. After inadvertently getting into a discussion about God with a friend, he agreed to let her pray for him. “As she prayed, what I felt was a beautiful presence pouring over my head like oil. Jesus had shown up and this was the love I had been searching for all my life,” he explained. “I could not find the intimacy I had been looking for in the world. It was only in God I found that ultimate transcendence I craved.” That experience transformed David’s life. He went from rejecting everything Christian to hungering after God’s will for his life. The hardest part of all this was squaring his new love for God with the Bible’s teaching concerning sexuality. He knew that God’s design for sex was based on the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman. So where did that leave him as a gay man? “In watching the example of other friends who were celibate and had given their lives to following Jesus and discipling others, I was also witnessing a joy and flourishing in their lives I admired. If they were living this life as heterosexual people, then I could do that as a homosexual person.” David found that following Jesus isn’t always easy but he has also found a new joy that he longs to share with others in the LGBTQ community. He also works to help the Christian church understand why his gay friends have such a hard time with what they hear from Christians. “When the church says that homosexuality is a sin, the way gay people often hear that is that they are being shut off from the greatest form of transcendence—relationship with God— and secondarily that they cannot have the secondary transcendence of romantic love with a partner,” Bennett explains. “So we have been removed [from] the two greatest forms of transcendence that give us meaning as humans. Of course, there are feelings of anger and rejection!” Learn More Short Blog: "Leftist Lesbian Professor" Found Jesus - Rosaria Butterfield External Book: A War of Loves: The Unexpected Story of a Gay Activist Discovering Jesus External Video (below): My Story | David Bennett Reference Will Maule, “‘I Don’t Need to Have Sex’: Radical Gay Activist’s Dramatic Turn Towards Christ,” Faithwire, January 4, 2019, https://www.faithwire.com/2019/01/04/the-extraordinary-story-of-a-radical-gay-activist-turned-christian-apologist/.

Guillaume Bignon grew up in France and was a convinced atheist. In his mid-20s he went on a trip to the Caribbean where he met a beautiful girl from New York. They began a relationship that continued on after their vacation was over. Unfortunately for Bignon, she was a Christian and in order to help her escape from the clutches of that “nonsense,” he began reading the Bible. But what he discovered from reading intrigued him, especially the figure of Jesus. I was impressed by the authority of that man’s teaching… I didn’t have much room in my worldview for his talks of God and supernatural activity, but I was rather impressed by the way he maneuvered in conversation and the wisdom of some of his retorts. This encounter with Jesus made Bignon slightly more open to Christianity – just enough that he decided to visit an evangelical church in Paris. He describes that experience like “go[ing] to the zoo” in order “to see some weird exotic animals.” While in the church he was deathly afraid that someone he knew would spot him there and he would die from shame. Still, he was impressed that these Christians actually seemed to believe what they were talking about. At the end of the service, he met the pastor and began a conversation about Christianity. This lasted for several hours and led to more conversations in the coming weeks. Bignon describes the impact this pastor had on him. Here was an obviously educated man, who believed these incredible things about God and Jesus, and I progressively started to consider that all of this could possibly be true. As Bignon pondered the contents of the Bible, one question kept coming up: “why did Jesus have to die?” Around the same time, he became acutely aware of a great wrong he had done and the lies he told to cover it up. The sense of guilt was so powerful that he was “physically crippled with pain in [his] chest and disgusted at the thought [of what he had done].” Suddenly Jesus’ death made sense. Jesus died because of what he had done wrong – because of his sin. Jesus died so that he could live. Once this key piece of the puzzle clicked into place, he “placed [his] trust in Jesus, and asked Him to forgive [him] in the way the New Testament promised He would.” Learn More Short Blog: From Atheist to Christian While at Harvard University - Jordan Monge Reference Guillaume Bignon, “How God Turns a French Atheist into a Christian Theologian - My Conversion Story,” TheoloGUI (blog), September 18, 2014, https://theologui.blogspot.com/2014/09/conversion-guillaume-bignon-french-atheist-to-christian-theologian.html.

One of the ground rules of science, espoused by agencies such as the National Academy of Sciences, is that scientists cannot appeal to any supernatural causes in their scientific work. This is often presented as one of the key distinguishing factors between science and pseudoscience – a rule known as “methodological naturalism.” While this principle may (or may not) be valid, it means that scientists are not allowed to follow the evidence wherever it leads. That is, if the evidence pointed to a supernatural cause (such as God), scientists would not be allowed to acknowledge that. This is an important fact to keep in mind when atheists point to science as proof of their worldview. What these atheists fail to realize is that if science is not allowed to consider God, it is illegitimate to use it to prove that which has been assumed from the outset. To do so is to engage in circular reasoning. Some atheists recognize this problem and are lobbying for change. For example, the atheist-physicist, Dr. Sean Carroll, wants to see the scientific community reject methodological naturalism. In his opinion, science should be a search for truth that is free of constraints. Science should be interested in determining the truth, whatever the truth may be—natural, supernatural, or otherwise. This stance known as methodological naturalism, while deployed with the best of intentions by supporters of science, amounts to assuming part of the answer ahead of time. If finding truth is our goal, that is just about the biggest mistake we can make. Learn More Short Blog: Conflict View of Science and Christianity is Myth Reference Sean M. Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Reprint ed. (New York: Dutton, 2017), 133.