I gotta have my orange juice.

You asked if there was anything in my congregation that could not be naturally accounted for by an unbelieving skeptic. My answer would be emphatically yes, but you will think me cheating when I tell you what they are. My congregation is filled with people who have been washed in the blood of the lamb, who have had their sins forgiven, who have been justified, and sanctified. No naturalist can account for any of these things. They have come to participate in the salvation of God. You will accuse me of begging the question, and of assuming what I need to prove, but my point is that the naturalist begs the question himself. He pretends he is searching for evidence that his epistemological grid has already ahead of time dogmatically declared cannot exist. So even if a man were to rise from the dead there would be a natural explanation for it and could not mean what, say, the Apostle Paul says it means. . . .

I can sympathize with your account of spending (I assume) heart-breaking time trying to find a miracle, or a clarity and experience of God in your earlier years, and not finding it. I went through something very similar, and spent a number of years close to despair at the “brass heavens.” God was nowhere. For all of my desperation, I could not “find” him. Then I met some people who were able to help me. What they helped me to see was that if we are to find God, and to find a real and living experience of Christ, it will be in the midst of a moral war that I must wage with myself. The only way that Christ can ever be found is when I’m thrown on, most specifically, an utter need for a Savior who can save me from sin. That meant I had to begin to take sin seriously in a way that I never had before. Before (and I was raised in the church), I was caught up in seeking “experiences,” and happiness, and (in a youthful way) success (of which I had little of any adolescent sort). (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 115-116)