What happened for me was that some people came forward to offer me words about the gospel (Greek, "good news") of Jesus Christ. People proclaimed to me the availability of salvation and the fact that there was a way out of such slavery. People asked me to consider the words of Jesus. Words like:
One person, whose name I do not know, is especially memorable. I was a patient in a substance abuse program in a psychiatric hospital. Each Friday the program invited a representative of some religious order to speak with the patients about spiritual issues. On this particular day a young woman came from a local church. After the formal session, during which I had voiced much skepticism about "organized religion" because of my disgust at corruption among church leaders, which I knew about growing up in Chicago, she approached me for further discussion. She was gentle but persistent when asking about my plans for the future. She suggested that we read Psalm 23 together, which we did. Though I knew the psalm by heart, I had never considered its promises nor thought of them as having been made specifically to me. This minister suggested to me that though I was quite literally walking "through the valley of the shadow of death," I need "fear no evil," for I did not walk alone. I can only say that I was startled by the implication of these words.
I was due to leave the hospital the next day. She urged that I come to church that weekend, Easter of 1988. Despite the fact that I had not been inside a church more than a half dozen times in the preceding decade, I accepted the invitation. The service was beautiful, especially the music. I recalled the many Sunday services I had attended as a child in Chicago. My family was involved in an African Methodist Episcopal church, a two-hundred-year-old Christian denomination found mainly among black Americans in the United States. And so as a child I loved going to church services, but when I reached my teens, I fell away and stopped going; there was really nor much that I had retained from those church experiences.
The sermon was about redemption. I wept quietly for two hours, thinking of all that I had done for which I needed to be forgiven. At the time I did not acknowledge to anyone, not even myself, that I Was being touched by the Spirit of God. I did not go to the altar for prayer; I did not join the church or confess Christ as my personal Savior. I fled from that sanctuary as quickly as possible when the service had ended, not even thanking the young woman who had invited me.
But the truth is that something happened, deep inside my heart, on that Easter Sunday morning. Nothing was quite the same again after that. In the months that followed others asked me to come to church and to read the Bible. I followed some of this advice, though not especially enthusiastically. Nothing dramatic happened.
There was, however, a minister and friend I came to know through my work as an economist at Harvard who continued to visit me. He seemed to be genuinely and deeply concerned about me; he would politely but insistently ask me questions about my life. Ray Hammond eventually persuaded me to come to a Bible study. I began to go regularly. After that I began to go to church services regularly as well.