A friend, noticing my relatively recent and rapid enlightenment in Christ, asked if I had experienced a near death encounter. A grin came to my face, and I chuckled slightly, because I had. At the age of 33 I died. I died and was born again, through Christ.
To this day, I hold firm in my belief that God used politics to bring me closer to Him. I lost the election, which I see now not only as a blessing but also as God’s will, not only because that’s the way it happened, but because it caused other events to happen in my life which were meant to be. The first causality is that I learned a great lesson in humility. Further, running for office caused me to go to church. Finally, if I had won, then I would have likely never felt called to
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My logical self does not hold much stock in signs or premonitions, but as the campaign went on, I knew something larger was afoot. I had a tugging feeling in my heart that I was supposed to do something, but I didn’t know what. I now know that I was being tested. Whenever God spoke to any of the patriarchs in the Bible, to whom he was going to give a task, He always started the conversation by calling their name, sometimes several times, until they said something tantamount to, ‘Yes, I’m listening.’ He called Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses in this
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My mother raised me with no particular notion of God. That is to say that while we celebrated Christian holidays, they were secular versions of themselves. On Christmas, we gathered around the Christmas tree and opened presents, and any particular year we may or may not have attended church. Jesus was the baby in the manger scene, but there was no explanation of who he was or why I received presents on this day from a man in a red suit with a long, white beard.
On Easter, I woke to a large basket of candies and toys and then hunted Easter eggs. Again, we may or may not have attended church on any particular Easter. And, again, no explanation of why I received candies and toys on this day from a giant rabbit.
When we did attend church, it was a Catholic church. In raising me, my mother gave me all the love and resources she had available to her. And the resource my ethnically Jewish mother had available to her in the area of religion was a Catholic tradition. In conversations with my mother, I get the sense that she too was raised without any specific religious
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Typically, those that either come to, or return to, religion later in life, rather than as a child or young adult, have a dramatic, life-changing story as to why. I, on the other hand, do not. While having had no firm beliefs on or in God, I have always believed that there was a great, undefinable something out there. And, proclaiming no knowledge or understanding of what it was, I was free and open to accept the possibility that it could be anything. It could be a monotheistic God as the Christians believe. It could be a pantheon of gods as the Hindus believe. It could be a hugely complex mathematical equation that held the rules for all existence. It could be little green men that seeded the Earth with all forms of life. I was open to all ideas.
Having no particular sense of God also freed me from the dogma and traditions of any particular religion and allowed me to more easily accept scientific facts, such as disease through virii and bacteria, genetics, evolution and the big bang theory. In fact, I come from a scientific background, although not physical science such as biology or chemistry. So, I am trained to think logically, rationally, critically. I am trained to mentally break apart a concept to its component parts, analyze each and understand the whole. And, this is how I approach all things, including religion.
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
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