by Dr. Darryl E. Maxwell , Retired Baptist Patsor

I’ve just finished reading Philip Yancey’s thought provoking book, “I was just wondering.” The book was loaned to me by a friend. Yancey is my favorite contemporary Christian author.
In a short piece entitled “A Converted Imagination”, he says of Scottish preacher and fantasy-writer George MacDonald.
“Although he lived in a time of great conflict between science and religion, George MacDonald saw no split between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ worlds.
He confessed that in his youth ‘One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God had made.’ Instead, he discovered that ‘God is the God of the Beautiful – Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful – Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian….’”
I’ve thought for some time now that my Christian faith brings an intensity to life. It is gratifying to discover that someone the stature of George MacDonald found the same thing to be true.
And it’s not just the love of nature that’s more intense. Inter-personal relationships are more intense, as is life in general.
In the Gospel of John,  Jesus says  “I have come in order that you might have life – life in all its fullness” (John 10:10, Good News Bible).
In JB Phillip’s New Testament In Modern English ,  it is rendered in this way, “…I came to bring…life, and far more life than before.”
Whether you prefer one or both of those or the traditional “I am come that they might have  life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (King James Version), the essence is the same.
The Christian experience, made possible by faith in Jesus, brings a fullness, a depth, a richness, an intensity to life. At least that’s been my experience and that is what I take out of what He said. What is your experience, and how do you read Him?