What this world needs... (video)

...is for men to wash one another's feet.

Art Katz, the cynical Jewish atheist, deeply intellectual, vehement anti-religionist and anti-Christian was radically apprehended by a God whom he was not seeking.

In the video below, Art explains how it all went down -- his US army assignment to Germany, the place and people he despised for the Holocaust, his visiting the concentration camps, the people he met along the way that led him out of hatred and finally how God radically changed him. It's really an amazing story, please watch it or at least give it a listen. The video is low volume and poor quality; don't let that turn you off -- please give it a listen, I promise it will be worth your while.

"There's no way to describe what I was as a Jewish atheist and radical. I was not just mildly contemptuous of religion, I was an avid and vehement opponent of religion. And of all faiths, Christianity was the most abhorrent, because I equated Christianity with the Holocaust; it came out of and was issued from a Christian nation. So, any attempt to communicate [religion] with me was met with vehement refusal.

It took a crisis of my life being broken at its foundations to make me be void of my own clutter, my own vocabulary, my own convictions, my own categories, my own petty cause. It put me in a place to hear, for the first time, this still, small voice.

The first thing I did at the earliest Yom Kippur of my time in Germany was not to go to a synagogue -- an atheist does not attend a synagogue -- I went to Dachau. It took the enormity of the concentration camp -- the barbed wire, the barracks that yet remained and have since been removed, the place of annihilation, the place of cremation, the ovens -- to break something in me. I can remember leaning my hand on this smoke stack, and something broke. The magnitude of what I was touching was greater than my categories.

The cremation ovens at the Dachau Nazi concentration camp, which Art describes in the video above. Jews were hung from the rafters and burned in the ovens. God used this experience to break Art at his foundations, the first in a series of steps God used to bring Art, an adamant atheist, back to Him.

Please listen to this man's story; whether you're an atheist, Jew, or Christian, it's a moving story, and I think you'll be changed for the better.

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