One cold winter night my car wouldn’t start. I was only about an hour from the warmth and security of my own bed. While the temperature plunged, I waited for a tow-truck after being told it was a busy night on the roadways and it would be “at least” a couple of hours. I propped the hood up to signal my location to the truck driver, and climbed back into the unheated car.

   I used several strategies to stay warm, played guitar until my fingers got too cold, sang most of the songs I knew, recited passages I’d memorized, until I ran out of ideas with which to entertain myself. A full moon rose over the dark hills. Under its bleak light, all my day to day reality constructs seemed to fall away, and I ended up having a heart to heart talk with myself, reviewing my spiritual life and future. Circumstances had apparently forced me to cast a cold eye on reality. What did I really think of having my next life on a morontia planet? Was it too far-fetched? Was I in truth actually haunted by doubt about the ideas of the afterlife I’d learned in The Urantia Book (The UB)?

   “Your Adjuster memory remains fully intact as you ascend the morontia life. Those mental associations that were purely animalistic and wholly material naturally perished with the physical brain, but everything in your mental life which was worth while, and which had survival value, was counterparted by the Adjuster and is retained as a part of personal memory all the way through the ascendant career. You will be conscious of all your worth-while experiences as you advance from one mansion world to another and from one section of the universe to another—even to Paradise.” (The UB, 47:4.5)

   In the humble beginnings of my Urantia life, shaped by secular ideas held by my family, I became a scientific thinker who depended on rational explanations of life experiences. After several of those, experiences of loss, disappointment, heartache, then revelations and transformations where I watched my tower of reason collapse, something new emerged. I experienced the reality of the spirit and set out on the path of the truth seeker, looking for more information about the new goals I envisioned. Of course I found The Urantia Book during this period.

   Maybe I’ve reached the age where one begins to wonder about one’s death. Will my faith still be strong at that point? Will I be full of fear, or go joyfully into my morontia transit?

   “There is but one struggle for those who enter the kingdom, and that is to fight the good fight of faith. The believer has only one battle, and that is against doubt—unbelief.” (The UB, 159:3.8)

   In the cold darkness of my broken down automobile, stuck in the boredom of waiting for rescue by tow truck, I was not about to be rescued from this close self-examination, this heart to heart confrontation. I discovered I’d actually accepted the information about the morontia worlds long ago, at least intellectually. It made sense to me, even fit my old criteria of a rational explanation (that’s a separate blog!) But the real situation, as I now saw it, was the half-heartedness of my belief. I was “altogether too vacillating and indefinite … guilty of too much chronic yearning,” about seizing the kingdom, (as Jesus said in 155:1.3). I was begrudging in my acceptance of the challenge to grow and progress, even reluctant and resentful, perhaps even crabby about all the spiritual work that lay ahead.

   I know what you might be thinking so I’ll hasten to confess that my reaction to the information about our ascendant career was a result of my spiritual immaturity. It also had to do with cowardice. It was no wonder that lately I often found myself repeating the passage (one I’d memorized) about “courage [as] … the very heart of [Jesus’] teachings.” (140:8.2) I think my spirit guide was nudging me out of a self-satisfied rut.

   “The theme of Jesus' instructions during the sojourn at Sidon was spiritual progression. He told them they could not stand still; they must go forward in righteousness or retrogress into evil and sin. He admonished them to "forget those things which are in the past while you push forward to embrace the greater realities of the kingdom." He besought them not to be content with their childhood in the gospel but to strive for the attainment of the full stature of divine sonship in the communion of the spirit and in the fellowship of believers.” (156:2.6)

   “But honest doubts and sincere questionings are not sin; such attitudes merely spell delay in the progressive journey toward perfection attainment. Childlike trust secures man's entrance into the kingdom of heavenly ascent, but progress is wholly dependent on the vigorous exercise of the robust and confident faith of the full-grown man.” (102:1.1)

   “There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.” (The Interpretation of Religion, by John Baillie)

   Not long after my “dark night of the soul,” stranded in the car for those long cold hours, I found I’d had a change of heart. I heard myself saying to study group one night, “It’s fun to do God’s will. You are becoming more real, more truly yourself and that’s more rewarding,” certainly more so than the life I’d chosen to live in the past.