An imagined conversation with a non believing friend.

So what do you go to church for? Do you really believe in Jesus?

Certainly I believe in him. There's a good deal of evidence he existed, even outside the bible, but the bible is a near contemporary source and he just leaps off the page.

How do you mean?

Well he was a truly amazing character. He had this pull over people. Think of the disciples, they were ordinary men, doing ordinary jobs but one word from him and they dropped everything and followed him. He must have had something to have had that effect on people.

He attracted people like a magnet; modern day celebrities have got nothing on him. Multitudes swarmed after him wherever he went. He'd have to go up into the hills, or push out in a boat so people could see him from the shore and yet; amidst all those crowds, he would somehow pick out people who really needed him, who had faith and believed. One time he was pressing through a crowd and a woman touched his hem, no more than that, and yet he sensed her need, stopped and healed her.

That's something else I find hard to take all the miracles and healing stuff.

I've struggled with that myself sometimes and been tempted to gloss over it; miracles can be hard to believe in our sceptical times, but healing is an essential part of Jesus' ministry. At times it's almost as if he feels embarrassed by it himself, or by the attention it draws to him. He wants people to be convinced by words rather than signs and wonders. He often tells someone he has healed to go straight home or to show the priests but not tell anyone else but it's almost as if he cant help healing people, can't help casting out demons. The very act of letting him into their lives makes people whole. How often does he tell them they have been healed by their faith, even those like the Centurion who make unlikely followers. Do you ever feel there's something missing from your life, that there must be more to it?

I'm sure he was really something but I still don't see why it should matter to me?

He has this way of cutting through all the irrelevancies and seeing right to the core of people. There was the woman he met at the well. He astonished her by what he knew about her, he read her like a book and just turned her life around. That was the effect he had on people.

A rich young man asked Jesus what he would have to do to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. He'd kept all the rules and performed all the right rituals but Jesus picked on the one thing he would struggle with; he told him he'd have to sell all his goods and give them to the poor. Jesus saw right through people, knew what their stumbling blocks were.

And the point is we can still have that relationship with him. He knows us better than we know ourselves. We can go to him in prayer and discover things about ourselves we never knew. Letting Jesus into your life is a way of becoming the person you were meant to be.

( The conversation continues in the next section).