A spiritual seeker, Kyle Eller, always sought the truth. But in one quiet, humble moment, Eller left behind his hodgepodge of religious ideas when God showed him that Jesus Christ is the Truth and the Way.

Words can be defining, words can be powerful. Words can shape our thoughts and even change our life’s direction.

I remember enjoying words a decade or so ago from Kyle Eller’s Duluth Budgeteer opinion column, rejoicing as I felt he began to articulate a Christian worldview and eloquently champion the pro-life cause through his powerful crafting of words.

Free from a tangled web of religious rabble and philosophies, Eller came to a place of truth, and now imparts that truth with his gifts of honest and intelligent communication from a heart and mind given over to the One that he serves.

Born in 1971 and living in the Moose Lake, Minn., area, Eller’s spiritual journey began when he was very young.

“I remember being a little child, maybe 5 years old, sitting underneath a tree or looking out the church window during a long sermon and wondering if what I was hearing at church was true,” Eller said. “Where was this God? I couldn’t see Him. Then I would look at the beauty of the clouds in that blue sky and think, ‘That’s not an accident.’”

Raised in a devout Lutheran environment, Eller read his Bible and had a genuine prayer life. But for a number of reasons he began to struggle spiritually.

“I had real and complicated questions about certain beliefs and divisions among Christians,” he said, “and I encountered what I perceived was widespread hypocrisy. There were less savory reasons for my struggles, too. Some Christian moral beliefs were unpopular and didn’t match the culture and the politics I identified with so strongly.

“The biggest thing,” Eller added, “was that I was a smart kid — and more importantly, I wanted to be seen as smart by others. Not feeling particularly good about myself, I invested practically my whole self-image in being (and being recognized as) the smartest guy in any room, which ended up involving a lot of self-deception and filled me with a really shocking pride.”

College brought Eller more reasons to disengage from Christianity: widespread hypocrisy, religion classes that refuted the validity of the Bible, wild divergences in doctrine and moral beliefs, multitudes of Biblical interpretations and the challenges of fitting in without appearing “judgmental” while retaining a moral ground. Eller was challenged by the philosophical and scientific arguments of nonbelievers, and his doubts grew stronger as did the challenges to his pride. After all, Eller said, “I wanted to be a smart guy, and that didn’t seem very compatible with Christian belief.

“Pride was always the gasoline on the fire. I prided myself on my intelligence and especially my intellectual honesty. And yet it’s notable that I did not do the intelligent and intellectually honest thing, which would have been to seek out how Christians for 2,000 years had answered those objections I had.”

Eller eventually traded in his “Christian” label because he didn’t want to be dishonest or hypocritical.

“I started studying Buddhism and Taoism, practicing Zen meditation, which seemed to allow me to hold on to part of the contemplative prayer life I had. … I studied other religions, as well as more New Age beliefs. I was a full-time ‘spiritual seeker’ and proud religious relativist.

“I was also a committed and professed moral relativist,” Eller added. “I didn’t notice until later that, like many moral relativists, I was paradoxically also a relentless moralizer, ready to lecture anyone and everyone about ‘tolerance’ and the world’s injustices, in complete contradiction to the philosophy I professed.”

Reflecting on that time in his life, Eller labeled himself “a mess.”

However, God continued to woo Eller by leaving him “lifelines,” which included opportunistic times of contemplative prayer and Scripture and his raw and honest intellectual pursuit of truth.     Combining

this with his pro-life stance, which did not fit in with his moral/ political views, Eller said, “The more I saw the arguments attempting to justify abortion, the more firm my pro-life convictions grew. It made me question my allegiance to some of those ideologies, some of the very ones keeping me from God. If the people I trusted could be so profoundly and doggedly wrong, and often dishonest, too, about something so important, wasn’t that a sign of something deeply wrong?

“None of this was sufficient to bring me to God. All of this was setting up a dramatic turn that happened with a very quiet miracle, invisible to the world outside my heart: a moment of candid humility, a quiet realization that what I was doing spiritually wasn’t working; that I would never be smart enough to figure it all out; that my hodgepodge of different religious ideas was never going to be right, was never going to save me or bring me peace.”

Eller grabbed a Catholic Catechism off his bookshelf and began reading a section that compressed about 20 arguments or reasons to believe in God’s existence into the space of a couple of paragraphs, building upon what he already knew: the wonder of creation and the wonder of the human person.

“All the little sophistries I’d built up for why I couldn’t believe shattered before my very eyes,” he said. “I was almost a blank slate, free to look at Christianity afresh, almost like a pagan who had never heard of Christ.

“So, to the pleasant surprise of my wife, who had prayed for me all those years, instead of picking up books on Buddhism at Barnes and Noble, I was suddenly picking up Bibles and books on Christianity by authors like Lee Strobel and Peter Kreeft and Ravi Zacharias and C.S. Lewis and then G.K. Chesterton and more. And I came to see what should have been an obvious fact: I wasn’t the first Christian in the world who ever asked a hard question about the faith.

“Christians with God-given intelligence and the guidance of divine revelation and the Holy Spirit have been answering those questions for 20 centuries. The humiliation of seeing how foolish some of my questions looked in the hands of a 1,600-year-old guy like St. Augustine was healing balm to my proud soul, a very sweet experience.”

As God continued to work in Eller’s life, clear and satisfying answers to hard questions became apparent.

“I prayed again, and I believed again,” he said. “I discovered that my worth as a human person is determined by God’s love for me and what He has made me, not in any of the gifts that He has given me.

“I recognized, too, that in God’s providence, He had put me in a unique position to be able to share the truth He had shown me. I was a journalist and wrote an opinion column that touched on spiritual matters and social issues, and so my behind-the-scenes conversion must have made entertaining and perhaps confusing reading as I went from relativist to passionate anti-relativist, agnostic to outspoken Christian. People who thought I was the greatest writer in the world suddenly thought I had lost my mind, and vice versa. But I was surprised to find how grateful Christian readers were to discover someone actually giving voice to their views and arguments in a place where those ideas sometimes don’t get a fair shake.”

Eller is still writing and is now employed by the Catholic Diocese of Duluth as the editor of The Northern Cross, a Northeastern Minnesota newspaper that he helped birth.

Fr. Richard Kunst, Eller’s supervisor and pastor of St. John the Evangelist said, “Kyle is as top-notch as they get. He is a man of great spiritual integrity. I look up to him — and he is younger than I am — I would like to be like him.”

Life has not been without trials since Eller embraced faith in Jesus Christ. Eller’s second daughter, Anna, was born with a terminal illness. But God had prepared him for this difficult season as Eller was able to retreat for several days prior to Anna’s workup at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

When Eller and his wife, Sandra, received Anna’s diagnosis, “We made a fundamental decision. We could trust God or not trust Him. We could live in gratitude or be bitter,” Eller said. “We chose to trust God and receive His grace, to recognize the gift we had been given. We didn’t have time to mope around; we had 14 months to be the kind of parents Anna deserved.

“God really walks with us in the darkness and in our pain and suffering. It was so strange and, in some way wonderful, to see Him working even in caring for my baby daughter as she died of that terminal illness, to see the beauty of her life, how marvelously she accomplished things without ever speaking a word that no words of mine, however eloquent, can ever do.”

Rick Lubbers, sports editor for the Duluth News Tribune, has known Eller for about 11 years from when they both worked at the Budgeteer.

Lubbers said that “Kyle and Sandy provided a powerful testimony to the love, peace and comfort that God sustained them with during that difficult time of losing their young child. Their faith was truly an inspiration to me. How could someone display such peace and courage in the midst of such a tragedy? That type of faith only comes from our Father above. Now he has a powerful testimony to share with others.”

“As we went through this,” Eller said, “I realized that God lost His Son for me, so, everything in life is now redefined in Christ.

Everything in life is redeemed in Christ. It’s always possible to fall into old ways of thinking about things and go on your merry way, but this is the ultimate ground of reality. Jesus’ incarnation, His death, His Resurrection are the ultimate ground of reality. Christ is not only the defining moment of history, He in some sense encompasses everything.

“And though I in no way deserved it, He’s given 100 percent of Himself for me, and He deserves nothing less than 100 percent of me.”