Ordinary People Learning Extraordinary Things

I thought this was a curious coincidence, but then I began to reflect on my own story, which, in many respects, has a similar flow to those of this sect of YouTubers. Since my conversion to the Faith in late 2015, I have become an avid reader and lover of philosophy and the social sciences. This is a characteristic that was not found in me until my conversion. Prior to my conversion, I never so much as pick up a book or listened to a lecture. I slept in all my high school and college classes, and maintained barely passing grades, never obtaining a degree. 

For nearly eight months after my first religious experience, I would listen to lectures and books for sometimes more than 10 hours a day, and I would take notes, lots of notes. I wasn’t forced into this pattern; in fact, at this point in my life, I had never been more independent. I had my own car and apartment, with a full-time job to pay for it all, I was self-sufficient. I also didn’t have any friends with those convictions. Sure all of my friends were quite smart people, but none of us read books or talked about complicated philosophical arguments, and none of us believed in God. We talked about games, movies, and comics, that was it. 

So, from where does this bonfire passion come? Why is it that these young men, myself included, have become so consumptive when it comes to the written word, particularly after conversion? Formally untrained laypeople picking up books and reading them not just for pleasure but so that they might understand the world, themselves, and the creator, just a bit more. 

Then after the learning, they share the information, not only with those who ask, but actively struggling to produce something to help others who may or may not yet have the same question. It’s one thing to develop a passion for learning and reading but an entirely different thing to then turn that process into a public project, a public project that is open to anonymous feedback, the worst form of feedback. 

I am not sure what causes this drive in the others who have developed this trait, but I can speak to my experience. In my case, I was absolutely lost in my preChristian life. I was aimless and disenfranchised. I have no line to walk and no direction worth walking. I was spinning my wheels with no talents or ambitions that existed outside of video games. 

Then in a singular moment, I had a flash, a unique moment in my life, an experience that I could not accept at face value. So, I began a search. I was and still am like a man in a deserted who, while dying of thirst, comes across a clear, clean cup of water — the most commonplace thing in the most unlikely of places. So, not being an utter fool, I drank the water. It gave me life in my bones and refreshed me. However, it left me asking one question, the most obvious of all questions. Where did this water come from? I have spent the past four years looking for the source of that glass. Turning over every stone and digging up every square foot of land. This became the line for me to walk and the direction that I might walk in.

That is the cause of the passion in my life. It is the outworking of that desire to find the source of water in a desert landscape.

I am curious if this is the same case for those previously mention and for others in general.