The secular scientist in me tried to reject the notion of God, and the arguments of many religious people made it very easy. The closed-minded, eyes-wide-shut views many religious people take on science, especially on generally accepted scientific principles such as evolution and carbon dating, made it easy to dismiss their views entirely as ignorant of human achievement since the middle ages. But still, I had this sense that everything in my life had happened and was happening for a reason. I could not explain it; I did not like that I could not explain it, but it finally came into focus.
A year ago, I ran for political office. I was looking to be elected, not to find God. God and religion, I had put on a shelf to be addressed at some future point. At this point in my life, I had spent the previous three years preparing for that election. I had worked on others’ campaigns in roles from volunteer blogger to campaign manager, during which time I made a point to know all the right insiders and some of the tactics of the successful career politicians, at least on the local level. One such tactic is to go where the people are already.
Much easier than building your own coalition of people is to tap into the already existing networks in the neighborhood, such as churches. In my neighborhood, at the time of my campaign we had two Catholic churches, two Baptist churches, a Church of God (denomination) and a Lutheran church. The problem for me was that they all meet on the same day of course, but thankfully, the larger congregations had multiple service times. So, on any given Sunday during the campaign, I was able to attend 3-4 services of the various churches. This schedule ensured that at least twice a month over the 3 months that I was running for office, I was able to attend each church.
