Greg said he'd seen a pamphlet with four or five ideas on it, ideas such as man was a sinner, sin separated man from God, and Christ died to absolve the separation. He asked me if this was what I believed, and I told him, essentially, that it was. "Those would be the facts of the story," I said, "but that isn't the story."

"Those are the ideas, but it isn't the narrative," Greg stated rhetorically.

"Yes," I told him.

Earlier that same year, I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who's a student at a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet with me for coffee, and when we sat down, he put a Bible on the table, as well as a pamphlet offering the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar they were critical, that basically this was the Gospel of Jesus, the backbone of Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, "If these ideas are so important, why aren't they in this book?"

"But the Scripture references are right here," I said curiously, showing Omar that the verses were printed next to each idea.

"I see that," he said. "But in the Bible, they aren't concise like they are in this pamphlet. They're spread out all over the book."

"But this pamphlet is a summation of the ideas," I clarified.

"Right," Omar continued, "but it seems like, if these ideas are that critical, God would've taken the time to make bullet-points out of them. Instead, He put some of them here and some of them there. And half the time, when Jesus is talking, He is speaking entirely in parables. It's hard to believe that whatever it is He's talking about can be summed up this simply."