How often do you think about God, and the shortness of life, and eternity? I was listening to The Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux today, and I heard her say this happened, when she was eleven years old:

The mistress at the Abbey asked me once what I did on holidays when I stayed at home. I answered timidly, “I often hide myself in a corner of my room where I can shut myself in with the bed curtains and then I think.”

“But what do you think about?” said the good nun laughing.

“I think about the good God, about the shortness of life, and about eternity.”

Later St. Thérèse would say she eventually realized she was “really praying, while my divine Master gently instructed me.”

It seems to me these things St. Thérèse is thinking about are the very most important things. For more than thirty years I served in a fire department where every day at work involved risk management. Before we run inside a burning building, we’re trained to run the scenario through this filter:

Risk a lot to save a life.

Risk a little to save property.

Don’t risk anything trying to save unsavable lives or unsavable property.

This kind of thinking is what allowed me and my mates to fight fire for three decades without dying. Which we always thought was pretty important because, as they say:

Once you’re dead, you’re dead forever.

Because of my career, I suppose that way of thinking is ingrained in me. Maybe that’s why, for me, Blaise Pascal’s wager resonates so hard (HT to my son Gabriel—thank you for giving me his book Pensées).

Life is short. Eternity is forever. And the eternal stakes truly are incomprehensibly high.

Now, if you’re not familiar with Pascal’s wager, I’ll ty to explain it briefly: When we’re discussing the question of God’s existence, there are only two answers: He does or He doesn’t. And we have two ways that we can respond: either we live with Him or we live against Him. When the end of our life comes, we’re going to find out one way or the other. If it’s true that God exists and we live our lives as if this is true, then we have heaven waiting for us for all eternity. If God doesn’t exist but we live our lives as though He does anyway, then we’ve lost nothing and lived a good life. If God doesn’t exist and we live our lives that way, though, odds are we’ll make ourselves miserable and then nothing happens, so at worst it’s kind of a wasted life. But if God does exist and we live our lives as though He doesn’t, then we’re really in for it.

Despite the oceans of ink spilled on the topic over the millennia, we’re not really able to definitively prove God’s existence, and we probably won’t be able to. We’re God’s creatures, made by Him. He’s too far above us to be able to definitively subjugate and prove beyond a doubt, which is why He reveals Himself to us. He wants us to choose Him, not force us to be with Him. And for this reason, Pascal says we ought to bet on God, because if we do, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain, and vice versa if we don’t.

The wager resonated especially hard after I learned of all that the agnostic-atheist Bart Ehrman believes is probably true from the Gospels (the list is in the Notes section). I mean, that’s somewhat of a minimal evidence approach. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic-atheist Bible scholar and historian, believes these things. Christian Bible scholars and historians believe even more. Check out Ehrman’s list in the Notes section for yourself. It’s surprising. One thing that struck me was that Ehrman believes it’s probably true that after Jesus was crucified, groups of people including his disciples believed they saw him alive. When I learned he believed that, I was blown away.

Former atheist turned Christian Jennifer Fulwiler put it this way:

“I started to think something explosive, something world changing happened in first-century Palestine.”

For her it was Aquinas and Augustine and other brilliant Christian thinkers that influenced her to come to Christ. While that’s true for me too, my journey to Jesus has been different. I was already a believer when I started reading the brilliant Christian thinkers. And I was already a believer when I learned what Ehrman believed to be probably true. And, I’m sure it wasn’t his intention, but what Ehrman believes strengthened my faith. And it strengthened my appreciation for Pascal’s Wager.

One hundred trillion years from now, even a lifetime of suffering will seem as a moment, perhaps comparable to a lifetime weighed against the time it takes for a doctor’s needle to pierce my arm to administer a vaccine.

It seems to me there’s way too much at stake, and there’s too much that points to God and Christ to ignore:

• The evidence for the life of Christ.
• The change I’ve experienced in my own life personally and the joy I’ve experienced that comes from following Jesus.
• The love I’ve experienced from other Jesus followers.
• The beauty that surrounds us. (It’s impossible for me to look at something beautiful and believe there is no God.)
• The evidence for miracles.
• The explanatory power of the Creator, the Unmoved Mover.

With all of that in mind, and with such monumental stakes, it seems like the best response I could have is the response that St. Thérèse had.

To hide myself and think. To hide myself and think of the good God, about the shortness of life, and about eternity. To allow my divine Master to gently instruct me in prayer.

I need to do that more often.

Notes:

Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul, narrated by Benjamin Crow, Audible, December 27, 2023

Gary Habermas, The Resurrection Argument That Changed a Generation of Scholars, The Veritas Forum, 2013 (Right around the 50 minute mark things become especially interesting.)

Pascal’s Wager, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, First published May 2, 1998; substantive revision September 11, 2022

Trent Horn, How Almost Everybody Gets this Christian Argument Wrong, The Counsel of Trent, 2025

Lifelong Atheist Jennifer Fulwiler Tells of her Life of Scientific Materialism, and Christianity, Science and Belief Explore God, 2013 via GodRunning.com

Matt Fradd interview with Joe Schmid, Popular YouTube Skeptic Becomes Catholic, August, 2026

A list of what Bart Ehrman believes is probably true in the Gospels (From a debate with Jimmy Akin):

1. Jesus existed
2. Jesus was a Jew
3. Jesus lived in the first century
4. Jesus lived in Palestine
5. Jesus was known for his teachings
6. Jesus taught on moral subjects
7. Jesus taught on prophetic subjects
8. Jesus gathered disciples
9. Jesus had an inner circle of 12 disciples
10. Jesus was crucified
11. Pontius Pilate ordered the crucifixion of Jesus
12. Jesus was an adult in the A.D. 20s
13. Jesus came from Nazareth
14. Jesus was connected with John the Baptist
15. Jesus was baptized at the beginning of his public ministry
16. John the Baptist was the man who baptized Jesus
17. John the Baptist preached a message of coming destruction and salvation
18. Jesus agreed with John the Baptist’s message
19. Jesus often communicated in parables
20. Jesus preached about “the kingdom of God”
21. Jesus believed he was the coming king of the Jews (the Messiah)
22. Jesus taught a coming reversal of fortunes, with the exalted to be humbled and the humble exalted
23. Jesus didn’t think you needed to scrupulously observe the Mosaic Law
24. Jesus believed that the heart of the Mosaic Law was love of God and love of neighbor
25. Jesus believed the way to attain the kingdom was love of God and neighbor
26. Jesus had regular conflict with other Jewish teachers
27. Jesus spent much of his preaching ministry in Galilee
28. At the end of his ministry, Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover
29. Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple
30. Jesus was betrayed to the Jewish authorities
31. Jesus had a follower named Judas
32. Judas was the man who betrayed Jesus to the Jewish authorities
33. The Jewish authorities handed Jesus over to Pilate
34. Pilate crucified Jesus for Jesus calling himself “the king of the Jews”
35. Jesus did not interpret the Sabbath command the way others did
36. Jesus did not understand the Temple rituals and sacrifices the way others did
37. Jesus did not think people should isolate themselves to maintain ritual purity
38. Jesus said the kingdom would be brought about by a cosmic judge called “the Son of Man”
39. Jesus said the kingdom of God has already begun
40. Jesus spoke of leaving one’s family for the sake of the kingdom
41. Jesus privately taught the 12 he was the Messiah, the king of the coming kingdom
42. Jesus did not openly proclaim that he was king of the Jews
43. Jesus did not understand his kingship as a worldly, political kingdom
44. The Gospels preserve Jesus’ saying in the parable of the sheep and the goats
45. Jesus was the one who chose the 12 disciples
46. Jesus told the 12 they would sit on 12 thrones and judge the 12 tribes of Israel
47. Jesus associated with tax collectors and sinners
48. Religious leaders mocked Jesus for associating with sinners
49. Jesus had conflict with members of his own family
50. Some members of Jesus’ family didn’t believe him during his public ministry
51. Around A.D. 30, Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover
52. Jesus came to Jerusalem a week before Passover
53. Jesus also proclaimed his message in Jerusalem at the end
54. Jesus objected to the money changing and selling of animals in the Temple
55. Jesus reacted violently to the money changers and those selling animals and overturned their tables
56. After the incident at the Temple, Jesus suspected his time was up
57. The Jewish authorities didn’t simply try Jesus by their own law
58. Pilate was in Jerusalem at the time of Passover
59. Pilate gave Jesus a short trial
60. When Jesus was asked if he was the king of the Jews, he either answered ambiguously or in the affirmative
61. Judas died an untimely death
62. Judas’ death was connected to a field in Jerusalem
63. After Jesus was crucified, groups of people including his disciples believed they saw him alive (Btw, this is uncontroversial among historians both Christian and non-Christian alike.)