By Alex Brick –
He was wildly successful, a lawyer with a great career and “life was getting better every day,” so when a friend challenged his worldview with the Gospel, Mike Minot got offended.
“I was shocked that he would even make these kinds of challenges,” says Minot, who lives in Colorado Springs.
Nevertheless, he undertook the challenge, passed by the library and got some books on science and a Bible. The first challenge to his material worldview was the fine-tuning of the Solar System.
“I learned from elementary school that the planets orbit around the sun, but I never paid attention to how precise that system really is, and how each planet had the exact size, traveling at the exact speed, at the exact distance away from the sun so that they would perpetually orbit orbit around the sun as opposed to flying off into the galaxy or spinning into the sun.”
As he continued his studies, he felt afraid “because I felt like I was getting closer and closer to something that would radically change my world.” He would lose all his friends if he became a Christian.
Notwithstanding, the sheer magnitude of the evidence forced him to the logical conclusion: he was created.
He learned that each cell had DNA with 3B bits of information perfectly sequenced, multiplied throughout the body’s 35T cells. And all this came together by mere accident?
He learned that 100s of Messianic prophecies were all fulfilled in one man, Jesus, a probability-defying feat if fulfilled by only chance.
“What other explanation could there be other than God authenticating his words?” Minot asks.
As the scientific and mathematical evidence mounted up, it was joined by the emotionalness of Jesus.
Jesus wept in parts of the Gospels. He shared with his disciples.
“It led me to believe what a tremendous loving person Jesus was,” he says.
A personal relationship with Jesus – not a ritualistic or rules-based regimen – is the excellence of life, but it all culminates in Heaven. Death is not to be feared, he says.
“Death is the greatest day,” Minot says. “Like a lighthouse beckoning ships in from the seas, the reality of eternity calls us home.”
He summarized his life’s quest and learning in The Beckoning: Examining the Truths that Transformed an Atheist Attorney into a Believer in God.
Minot’s life has also tackled the problem plaguing philosophers, that of why is there pain in the world.
Minot and his wife lost a child, his son Connor.
“We’re never going to know the whys,” Minot says. “But I’ve determined that from all the things that he does give us that he is absolutely loving and knowledgeable about all the things that are taking place in our lives.”
He can’t explain why his son died, but he can see the maturity it brought to his own life.
The book of “James says that to consider it joy when we enter into pain because it matures and completes us,” he says. “Pain works in us in ways that are mysterious but also good.”
What’s more, Jesus suffered pain, and the end result was salvation.
“The excruciating deep pain that took place in one person’s life became the greatest day in humanity, which is the salvation of man, then I have to leave open the possibility that pain works wonders to us when we respond properly in our lives,” he says.
