Deep Undercover

by Jack Barsky

  A few days after my return, Penelope and I had an emotionally charged argument, and it became clear that even our unspoken roommate arrangement could not survive. A week later, I filed for divorce and subsequently moved into a two-bedroom apartment near my job. My only companion was Barney, an African grey parrot, who greeted me every time I came into view with, “You moron!”

  In a matter of weeks, I had gone from being on top of the world to the depths of despair, hitting rock bottom. Without a specific reason, I cried myself to sleep every night. After plodding through so many times of loneliness in my life, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t rise above it this time.

  As life continued in an empty new rhythm, a good friend who had unusual insight into my psyche suggested I start dating again.

  My response was curt and simple: “I’m done with that stuff.”

  “No, Jack, seriously,” she said. “I might know you better than you know yourself. First and foremost, you are a lover.”

  “That may well be true,” I said with a sigh, “but love is a two-way street, and I always seem to wind up on one-directional roads. Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

  I pushed the idea away and didn’t give it any more thought as, little by little, I managed to crawl out from the pit I was in. At work I was able to function, but there was little joy in my life. The only things that deadened the pain of loneliness were my nightly drinking and the game of golf.

  What I couldn’t guess was that the biggest change of my life was just around the corner.

  ONE EVENING, just a few days after Jessie’s eighteenth birthday, he and I met Chelsea at the Clinton House, our favorite restaurant. I had already told Chelsea that I was going to reveal my murky past to Jessie.

  “I can’t wait to see his face,” she said, remembering her own reaction when I had told her.

  As soon as the waitress had taken our orders, I cleared my throat and started my confession.

  “Jessie, I’ve got something to tell you. I might as well come out with it straightaway—I used to be an undercover agent for the Russians.”

  Jessie stared at me. Chelsea leaned forward with a slight grin on her face.

  “You’re joking, right? There’s no way,” Jessie said, looking at Chelsea to gauge the truth of my story. I told him about Berlin, Moscow, and coming to the United States, and he asked questions as he followed the tale. It took a while for it to fully sink in.

  “Dad, you’ve got to write a book—and if you don’t write it, I will,” he said. There was a sense of pride in his voice that I’d never heard before. I remembered overhearing him tell a friend one time, after a ‘bring your child to work day” event, “My dad doesn’t really do any work. He just sits in his office and talks to people all day.” Suddenly, the boring office worker had been elevated to some kind of action hero in my son’s mind.

  Before we went our separate ways that night, I reminded Jessie that I would always be there for him if he needed anything. The divorce had turned into a mess of lawyers and disagreements and further stress. I could only guess how life at home was for Jessie.

  Two weeks later, Jessie decided to come live with me at the apartment. He and a friend conspired to load up his belongings and leave the house at a time when Penelope wasn’t home. This wasn’t necessarily the best way to handle the situation, but it reflected the emotional climate at the time.

  Soon after Jessie moved in, he enrolled at Mercer County Community College to lay the foundation for a potential four-year degree. With my son now living with me, I wasn’t alone anymore. The time we had together also gave us the opportunity to bond with each other as adults.

  I still had no interest in dating, and I played as much golf as I could—on Saturdays with Joe Reilly and his gang, and on Sundays with colleagues from work. My nighttime sleep aid helped me evade the dire emotional reality of my life.

  Work, at least, was going well. Besides golf, it was the only bright star in my otherwise dark sky. In early fall, I decided I needed to hire an assistant. The human resources department screened some candidates and handed me the résumés of two finalists. After initial phone interviews, I invited both candidates to come in so I could meet them. My only concern with one of the applicants, a young woman named Shawna, was that she had volunteered during the phone interview that she was a Christian.

  I hope she’s not a Holy Roller, I thought to myself. But then I reminded myself that I had worked with some good employees who had been open about their Christian faith. They almost always turned out to be honest, hardworking people, the kind you never had to worry about.

  Shawna was sitting at the table with her back to the door when I entered the small conference room for the interview. When she turned around and we made eye contact, I was instantly in love. I know that sounds extreme, but it was as if I’d been slapped by the invisible hand of God. Nobody—and I mean nobody—had ever made that kind of impression on me.

  Impeccably dressed in a charcoal-gray business suit, with her head held straight and her shoulders square, she exuded elegance in every way. But what struck me the most, from the moment I first laid eyes on her, was the glow that seemed to emanate from her face. Her smile was neither seductive nor superficial; it was calm, even serene, reflecting a great amount of self-confidence. She was also twenty-four years my junior.

  It wasn’t the first time I had fallen in love, but each time before had always been a process. Even with Gerlinde, whose beauty had so captivated me on the dance floor, it wasn’t love at first sight. And over the years, I had seen many beautiful women, but their outward beauty never managed to touch my soul the way Shawna did the very moment I saw her.

  I managed to retain my poise and conduct the job interview; it was no surprise that Shawna aced it. Her impressive résumé included a stint with the United Nations as a bilingual secretary. She carried herself with class and dignity, and I later found out that she had attended a British-style finishing school in her native country of Jamaica. She answered all my questions, showed a well-developed ability to think on her feet, and even asked some good questions of her own. In the end, it was an easy decision to offer her the job.

  So I now had a new assistant, but I had to keep my attraction for her under wraps. I had no business falling in love with a much younger woman, especially one who reported to me. Besides, I was still in the middle of divorce proceedings with Penelope.

  I kept my feelings for Shawna hidden, but I also found ways to be helpful to her whenever possible. I soon learned that she was the head of a three-person household that included her mother, who had come to the US late in life, and a son who had just started high school.

  Our company encouraged bosses to take new employees out to lunch, so after her second week, I took Shawna to her favorite Mexican restaurant. This was a sacrifice for me because I really don’t like Mexican food. At one point, the conversation veered into the realm of faith when I asked her what gave her the inner peace that I and the others in the office had noticed and been drawn to.

  “As I told you during the interview,” she said, “I get my strength from Jesus.”

  I remembered that she had said that, but I still found it odd. How could she draw strength from someone she had never met, let alone someone who died two thousand years ago?

  I explained my philosophy to her in a straightforward fashion.

  “I used to be a radical atheist with extreme hostility toward the church and Christianity. However, I’ve since met too many good Christians to retain my hostility toward your faith. So now my motto is ‘live and let live.’ As long as you don’t proselytize me, I won’t criticize you.”

  She smiled, as if unfazed by my words.

  Encouraged by her silence, I continued to explain my belief system.

  “Atheism seems to be just as foolish as Christianity. One maintains that there is a God, and the other says there isn’t. But neither side can prove their hypotheses, which are ultimately statements of faith. I believe in reason,
but my ability to reason is not developed enough to understand the universe. I’ll stand with Socrates, who said, ‘I know that I know nothing.’ So, there may well be a God, but—”

  Without finishing the sentence, I shrugged my shoulders and boldly (today I’m more inclined to say cowardly) declared myself an agnostic.

  Back in the car on our way to the office I wanted to be sure that the line was clearly drawn.

  “You may believe whatever you like, but please don’t think for one minute that you’ll make a convert out of me.”

  In response, Shawna, who had already seen the care and kindness I extended to the team I supervised, made a bold statement: “You are already a Christian; you just don’t know it.”

  I had no comeback for that one.

  Throughout my career as a manager, I always tried to help others develop to their fullest potential, even if it meant losing them as they went on to explore other opportunities within—or even outside of—our company. So when Shawna told me that she had enrolled at Philadelphia Bible College in pursuit of a bachelor’s in biblical studies, I became curious about her writing skills, thinking that one day I could help her advance to higher positions in the company.

  When I asked her to share a sample of her writing, she handed me a recently completed essay on the biblical book of Ruth. I read the essay and found her writing to be fundamentally sound, but I didn’t know whether it did justice to the original source.

  “I guess I have to read the original to see if your paper makes sense.”

  Ever the alert evangelist, Shawna produced a Bible from her bag and handed it to me. I took it home, and as I sat down to read it, I realized this was the first time since my early attempt to read Genesis from Opa Alwin’s Bible that I had opened a Bible.

  As a man, I didn’t find the book of Ruth to be the most inspiring text I’d ever read, but it was enough to get me interested in finding out more. When I mentioned it to Shawna, she came back with a set of CD recordings of the entire Bible, proving once again that she was prepared for any eventuality.

  I can listen as I drive to work, I mused as I set the CDs next to my briefcase. That’s not a bad idea . . .

  I decided there was no reason to be closed-minded about the Bible. After all, it was the most-read book in the history of mankind. Besides, I’d had about enough of the shtick put out by the radio talk show crowd that I usually listened to during my hour-long commute. This was an opportunity to fill a gap in my knowledge of the world, and it would come at no additional cost in time or money.

  As I began to listen to the Old Testament, there were many sections I didn’t understand and many questions I would have asked if I’d had a teacher by my side. So I asked Shawna if she could help me grasp some of the material better. In an instant, the boss–employee relationship was turned on its head. Shawna became my teacher, and I was the beginner student. She gave me Bible passages to read at night, and we began to meet every weekday morning, a half hour before the official start of the workday, to discuss the various subjects she had picked. We commandeered a small conference room at the office, and the entries in both our calendars read: Logistics Planning.

  During these discussions, which I considered purely academic, Shawna always managed to sneak in a few remarks about a church service she had attended the previous weekend. What she described sounded significantly different from the Catholic mass I had experienced.

  Shawna spoke in such glowing terms about her church that I became curious, and when she invited me to accompany her one day, I accepted.

  We decided to meet on a Saturday at Zarephath Christian Church for their afternoon service. I arrived in the parking lot right on time, but Shawna was running a little bit late. I waited patiently in my car—there was no way I would enter the church by myself without knowing what to expect.

  Shawna arrived in time for us to catch the tail end of the worship set, and we took seats in one of the back rows. I was surprised at how professional and pleasing the music was—a delight for my discerning ears.

  When the pastor stepped up to the podium, he exuded the same glow that I had gotten used to seeing on Shawna’s face. Even today, my vocabulary is not rich enough to do justice to that look—it is angelic and otherworldly, yet completely present and engaged with real life. It projects a serenity that seems to say, “I have found inner peace and nobody and nothing can disturb it.”

  As he began the message, I found myself captivated in a way I could not have anticipated. The reverence in the pastor’s calm and quiet delivery was a welcome contrast to some of the fire-and-brimstone, in-your-face sermons I had caught glimpses of on TV. He spoke about God’s love for His people. I had never heard God described in such a way. His statements about God’s love transcended logic. They were absolute. You either accepted it or you didn’t; there was no middle ground. I had long felt a yearning for unconditional love, the type of love I had been surprised by when Chelsea was born; the type of love I still felt for her and for Jessie. Was it possible that someone could love me in the same way?

  At the end of the service, I did something unexpected and out of character. Feeling a strong need to speak to the pastor, I rose to my feet and I walked toward the altar.

  Of course, at six foot three, I was hard to overlook, and the pastor immediately stepped forward to greet me.

  “You have a phenomenal delivery,” I said, as if I were critiquing a TED Talk.

  The pastor thanked me and then asked me some questions about myself. We talked for about five minutes, and when he had gathered enough background on me, he called over an assistant pastor and asked if it would be okay if they prayed for me.

  I shrugged and said, “Why not?”

  As they prayed, they placed their hands on my back and shoulders. Surprisingly, my discomfort with that was minimal. It seemed that, in little more than an hour, I had overcome most of my emotional resistance to the church.

  Before I left, the pastor went to the back of the sanctuary and returned with two books, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, and a Bible bound in red. I read the Strobel book the next day and read through the Bible during the following year. I wasn’t entirely convinced by The Case for Christ, but it planted a seed. For the first time in my life, I was open to the possibility that Jesus Christ was not only a special human being but also God’s Son, who had been crucified and had risen from the dead. You might say the door to faith was ajar.

  When I shared my thoughts with Shawna, she pointed me to a weekly half-hour radio program called Let My People Think, featuring a speaker named Ravi Zacharias. I decided to investigate it the next time I had a chance during my drive to work. Ravi Zacharias turned out to be a highly intelligent, deeply philosophical thinker, who laid out his faith in a way that fully engaged my mind. And the message he conveyed simply blew me away.

  What I found especially appealing was his logical argument that there could be no morality without a power external to humanity. By now, I had learned enough about human nature—with myself as Exhibit A: always wanting to be good, and yet failing so often—that I agreed fully with his reasoning. As I listened to Ravi in the privacy of my car, I found myself responding out loud: “Yes, exactly!”

  These radio broadcasts also disabused me of a notion I had held since my youth—that religion, especially Christianity, was only for the intellectually weak and those who responded with their heart rather than their head.

  Ravi Zacharias watered the seeds planted by Lee Strobel, but ultimately it was C. S. Lewis who nudged me over the line to faith in God. In short order, I read both Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. The argument that impressed me the most came from Mere Christianity:

  I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral tea
cher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.[4]

  I was now an intellectual Christian—historical facts and Socratic dialogue had gotten me there. My soul had yet to follow, but I had opened myself up to Christian thought and culture. I attended church regularly, reviewed Shawna’s Bible college essays, and helped out with some of her research. All of these activities drew me inexorably toward an emotional, spiritual, and intellectual destination.

  Of course, one cannot become a Christian through only experience and logic. The cornerstone of Christianity is faith—which includes, but transcends, experience and logic. As it says in Hebrews 11:1, “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.” Accordingly, faith cannot be attained by study alone, and it cannot be forced.

  I was soon to learn, however, that when faith finally blossoms, it can happen quite suddenly. For me, it happened on the golf course, of all places.

  One weekend morning, as I waited for my playing partner to hit his shot, I was staring up at a massive white cloud formation that soared against the bright blue sky. Just then, I felt a sensation similar to what I had felt before my first kiss, only much stronger. All the nerves in my body came alive and were tingling as a profound and otherworldly awareness began to grow in me.