I was only 11 years old in 1974, but I followed the Watergate debacle. Thirty six years later, the wonderful story of how Chuck Colson came to Christ in the midst of it all still amazes me.
Slate recently interviewed Chuck Colson about how he came to Christ.
You have a fairly dramatic conversion story. What first prompted it?
I was the principle strategist behind the 1972 reelection campaign of Richard Nixon, and when it was all over I should have been absolutely on top of the world. I’d succeeded, we won, it was a historic landslide. But instead I found myself staring out of the office window thinking, "So what?" I was getting ready to go back to my law firm and was going to make a fortune—literally, a half a million dollars a year. And I felt dead. Really dead.
Then I met a man who’d been a client of mine before I’d went to the White House. I’d not seen him the whole time I was in the White House, and when I went back to be his general counsel again, he was totally different, completely changed. I asked him what had happened to him. And he said these words: "I’ve accepted Jesus Christ and committed my life to him."
Well, I’m not from the Bible Belt. I come from New England, and I’m not used to people talking like that. I was startled, and I just sort of stared at him uncomfortably.
Was that just social discomfort, or was it an inner discomfort—the first stirrings of your conversion?
It must have been the latter, because about four months later, I called him up one night and said, "I’d like to come see you." I drove over and spent an evening on his porch—this was August of 1973—and he read to me from a little book entitled Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. It was about pride, and it described me to a T.
Read the rest here.
