"Just seven years ago, if someone had told me that I'd be writing for Christianity Today magazine about how I came to believe in God, I would have laughed out loud," Powers begins in a revelatory article appearing in Christianity Today earlier this month.
But that all changed one night while on a trip to Taiwan when she woke up to find herself in a peculiar state between a dream and reality.
"Jesus came to me and said, 'Here I am.' It felt so real. I didn't know what to make of it."
Until that point, she believed that anyone who claimed to hear or experience God was either "delusional or lying," she wrote.
However, for a time before this encounter with Christ, she had begun to seek the truth while dating a man who was a firm believer. He was beginning to take their relationship seriously but because she claimed to be an atheist, didn't know if they should continue dating. When he asked if she could at least keep an open mind about it, she agreed.
Raised in the Episcopal Church in Alaska, she describes her belief in God to have been "superficial and flimsy" while growing up. By the time she got out of college, whatever little faith she had was completely gone.
"From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real."
She went to work in the Clinton administration, then moved to New Yor where she worked in Democratic politics where she described her world as "aggressively secular."
"Everyone I knew was politically left-leaning, and my group of friends was overwhelmingly atheist."
She was perfectly happy with life until she met a man who was "into Jesus." When he asked if she believed Jesus was her Lord and Savior, she told him the truth - no - but she agreed to keep an open mind about it.
One day, she went to church with him where she was introduced to a dynamic preacher named Tim Keller whose sermons quickly became the highlight of her week. Keller not only made the case for Christianity, but he also dismantled atheism and agnosticism by exposing the intellectual weaknesses of a purely secular worldview.
"I came to realize that even if Christianity wasn't the real thing, neither was atheism."
She began to read the Bible and came ever closer to realizing that the weight of evidence was more in favor of Christianity than against it.
Although she still had no personal connection to God " . . . (F)rankly, I was fine with that," she writes.
Then came the trip to Taiwan and the personal revelation of Jesus. When she called her boyfriend to tell him about it, he said he had been praying about their relationship and decided to break up with her.
"Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me," Powers says. "I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn't shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy."
A friend led her to a Bible study, which she thought "only wierdoes and zealots" attended, but said after her first class, "everything changed."
"I'll never forget standing outside that apartment on the Upper East Side and saying to myself, 'It's true. It's completely true.' The world looked entirely different, like a veil had been lifted off it. I had not an iota of doubt. I was filled with indescribable joy."
Even though she continued to try to "wrestle away" from God, it was pointless. "The Hound of Heaven had pursued me and caught me—whether I liked it or not."
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