I am about as far from a mystic as anyone I’ve ever met.
I lack the sort of conversion story other
believers often point to; the type of testimony that includes phrases like “I
asked God …” and “I felt a strange sense of peace come over me”; the type of
experience that leads you to write a date in the front of your Bible and
remember it the rest of your life. All I have is a vague recollection of an
emotional moment as a child on a front porch somewhere and the dawning realization
that Jesus died for me, but memory is malleable and inaccurate more often than
not.
So, like I do with everything else, I check boxes: “If you
confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord” [check], and “believe in your heart
that God raised him from the dead” [check], “you will be saved” [check and double-check].
That’s the word of God, and it gives me more confidence than
the recollection of any experience or feeling.
Immanuel Can sums it up perfectly in this recent post: “So
how can we know? The Father
loves the Son. Surprisingly, this is the essential answer we have been looking
for.”
No experience can be more reassuring than that. So,
mysticism, yeah … not really my thing.