(RNS) Seven years ago, a rabbi friend of mine told me something I’ve thought about every day since: “We learn the most from the people we think are the least like us.”

Earlier this month, when my Uncle Dodi crossed through the veil into the eternal hereafter at age 74, the rabbi’s words returned to me with fresh power.

Dodi was my chosen uncle — a childhood friend of my father’s. Despite the lack of blood bonds, he had an epic and enduring influence on the spiritual life of my entire family.

Dodi was the person who introduced my parents, and then my brother and me, to Jesus. Not as an historical figure or as a spiritual idea, but as a personal savior — the giver of life eternal and of unending, staggering grace.

In the late `70s, after having studied intensively the New Testament in its original languages for himself, Dodi came to believe wholeheartedly in the message of the gospel. And he shared the good news he’d discovered with my mother and father.

Soon after, they became born-again Christians, left the Catholic Church and led our family into the brave new world of Protestant evangelicalism. It was, at the time, a thoroughly scandalous transformation.

My parents’ spiritual epiphany, for which Dodi’s own newfound faith was the catalyst, changed the course of our lives.

But Dodi was the most unlikely of evangelists. A consummate intellectual, Dodi came from stubborn Greek and Italian stock, was a proud Dartmouth grad and a member of Mensa. He was not, for most of his life, a believer of any sort. Nor was he any sort of gentle spirit.

Dodi was the quintessential New England curmudgeon, straight out of the J.D. Salinger handbook. When Dodi became a born-again Christian, his soul was reborn and remade, but his personality remained intact.

Irascible. Intensely private. Perpetually grumpy.

Still, he was a believer in the most authentic sense of the word. When I was a teenager, Dodi would engage me for hours in conversation about the Bible and faith, and never once condescending to my young heart or mind.

Dodi always spoke to me as an adult. He was unfailingly frank. I could (and did) ask him anything about God and he would give me the straight answer (as he saw it), but he would not abide intellectual dishonesty. I couldn’t get away with faking it. I had to know what I believed and why.

He was thoroughly convinced that we were living in the “end times” and that the Second Coming of Christ was nigh. Time’s a wastin’, Dodi insisted, no room for mucking about. It was time to get down to business.

Dodi was no blind apostle. He embraced the great Jewish tradition of arguing with God and did so endlessly. He had many unanswered questions about Christianity and Christ. Despite his lingering conundrums, Christianity, he told me time and again, “is the only game in town.”

Prayer is meant to be an ongoing conversation with God — we can say anything to God. God can take it, Dodi would say. And God talks to us as well, Dodi insisted.

“What does he say to you?” I asked him once.

“Mostly he tells me that I’m an a-hole,” Dodi answered. He wasn’t kidding.

When God “told” Dodi that, I wasn’t meant to understand it as a damnation. Rather, it meant that God knew exactly who and what Dodi was — and loved him anyway.

That kind of truth was liberating. It wasn’t Pollyannaish. It was real. And messy. And true.

As I got older, Dodi and I had less in common. His politics were somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun (at least from my perspective), while mine were adamantly liberal. It drove Dodi nuts.

While he never gave up trying to change my politics, Dodi never implied that because of them, my faith was any less genuine than his.

As I see it, God, with that holy sense of humor, used the most unlikely of men to lovingly and powerfully shape my spirit.

Dodi was my opposite just as certainly as he was my soul’s mate. I can’t help but smile picturing him now, sitting with Jesus in heaven, a long list of questions in his hand, crossing each one off as he gets the answers.

Still arguing his point.

Bless his soul.

(Cathleen Falsani is the author of “Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace” and the recent book, “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.”)