Losing My Religion and Finding My Faith

Do you know what convinced me there was a God? It was science and nature.

I remember when I was ten years old and we planted seeds in clear plastic cups near the edge so we could watch them sprout. I remember running into the classroom every day so I could see if my seed was sprouting. I remember watering it and caring for it and the first day I saw the little sprout begin to climb from inside the seed.

I remember the seed gradually opening and unfurling, pushing through the soil until it was no longer a seed, but the roots of the plant as the plant began to climb its way through the soil.

It was such a little thing, but magnified in significance. There, in perfect synchronicity, was order to nature and the universe. Every part of the seed was used to create this plant and every part of the plant had a purpose. From the roots that took in water and nutrients, to the leaves that performed photosynthesis to the plant turning and growing towards the sun or the leaves that would turn over at night to collect the dew on the underside of the leaves to the stamen and the pistol that were used to pollinate other plants and the fact that bugs and birds and the wind would carry the pollen between plants to create others.

It was a perfect design.

That’s when I realized that it WAS a design.

Now, as a ten year old, the magnitude of that thought was far larger than my mind could hold. It didn’t necessarily make me open my eyes and look at the entire world and the universe in that fashion, it just stayed with me, in the back of my mind playing their like a recording and sometimes hiding when other things, other less mind boggling thoughts and experiences, were taking over my life.

During this time, while I was growing up, we went to church on Sundays, had vacation bible school during the summer and I belonged to a children’s Christian group called Awanas. The vacation bible school and children’s group was basically designed to teach you scripture and focused on the promise of salvation through Jesus Christ. They never really focused on the world in general or how God created it. Mostly it focused on the soul and the need to prepare for after this world.

It did teach me things about the difference between good and evil. They never taught me to be intolerant, but the message was about love, that God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son and that Jesus was an instrument of love and compassion and that we should aspire to follow in his footsteps.

As guide posts for living in this world, they weren’t bad concepts.

Still, looking back, I realize that this was half teaching concepts of how to live and half about indoctrination into a belief system. When I was twelve, I accepted Jesus as my savior. I remember the ceremony vividly. We were at vacation bible school. I had passed through most of the levels of learning with my study group and I was convinced that Jesus loved me and wanted to take care of me and insure that I could walk in heaven with him and see the face of God, enjoy an eternal paradise with all those that came before me. I was filled with the Holy Spirit.

I sat on the front pew with three other children of the same age. The church was relatively empty with everyone down stairs enjoying crafts and other events as vacation bible school went on. The youth pastor came to each of us separately. He took each of the other two off to the side and spoke to them for several minutes. In the Christian church that I attended, it was believed that you had to make a free choice, free will, to make this transference or it wouldn’t count so they would ask many questions about what you believed and why before having a short prayer session.

Finally, it was my turn. I was the last in the church so the pastor came and sat beside me on the mahogany pew. I was half scared and half excited. To me, this wasn’t just a rite to passage into a great inner circle of people, but a rite of passage into adulthood. We spoke for several moments about what being “saved” meant and what I believed. Then the pastor told me to bow my head and pray, asking Jesus to come into my heart and wash away my sins.

I did and the whole time I was thinking about what my sins were. Generally, I considered myself a good kid. I got good grades, tried hard to listen to my parents, but I knew that sometimes my brothers and I would fight, we’d say mean things to each other and there were those few occasions when I lied through my teeth (or just didn’t admit to anything) to save myself from grounding, or worse, a butt whooping. All of these things were going through my mind while I prayed and I hoped that God would forgive me and Jesus would help me be a better person.

The pastor prayed silently, too. When we were done, I felt euphoric. This then must be what it was like to feel the spirit inside of you and to be complete. When we went home that night, my family was very happy for me, but after that, they didn’t really talk about what being saved meant or having crossed this threshold. It was just another thing that we did.

Naturally, as I got older and learned more about the world, I had more questions and they didn’t always seem to be answered by the pastor or the church. When I was fourteen and looking for the answers, I read the bible from front to back, looking for them. The bible seemed full of great stories, but it didn’t make me feel closer to God or make me understand anything greater. I was full of “buts”.

The church I attended was going through an upheaval. We had a different pastor every few weeks as the deacons tried to choose the one best able to guide the flock. By the time I was seventeen we’d had about ten guest pastors. I started wondering what was going on that it took so long to get a pastor. I finally started listening after church in the parking lot as the deacons and others would discuss the different pastors and the issues they had with each one. Some of it was about doctrine and some of it about politics in the church. I couldn’t exactly understand about the doctrine issues because I had always thought that God was God and Jesus was Jesus and the bible didn’t change every week, so what was the question?

As time went on, the church membership became less and less. I recall a time when the pews would be filled and you’d be lucky if you could sneak in a seat in the back, but, as the search for a pastor went on, the pews became more and more empty.

The last pastor I remember was a relatively young man. The last two services I attended at the church, right in the middle of my own crisis of faith, pretty much put the final nails in the coffin. The pastor was preaching about sin. He was just a little less verbose than other hell, fire and brimstone pastors I had had the privilege to hear, yet he was very forceful and occasionally did bang on the pulpit. To the dwindling congregation, he gave a sermon that focused on tithing. The church was in bad shape financially with the low turn out. He was excoriating the remaining congregation, spread out with large gaps, about tithing ten percent. I remember thinking how strange that was. Even today I realize that was just bad economics. Fifty or less people were not going to support a church and a pastoral residence with tithing. The church needed more people and the hem-hawing around of the deacons had left it in a sad shape.

The last service, the pastor was preaching on the sins of pornography. He admitted that he had looked at such pictures and had to ask God for forgiveness for such a sin. Then, two longstanding members of the congregation, a man and a woman, came up front and took the microphone. They admitted that they had a marital problem and that each of them had committed adultery. They asked the congregation for forgiveness and then God. There was much weeping and begging. Picture Jimmy Swaggert times two.

The pastor then asked if anyone else wanted to get up and make any statements or ask for forgiveness.

At this point, I was kind of shocked. Not that I thought everyone was perfect, but that we were now in the business of public confessions as if these things were not between the man and his wife and God and not for public consumption or requiring forgiveness from people who had no ability to intercede with God.

Was this what faith was about?

I remember after that that I would make excuses not to go to church.

At the very same time, my family was beginning to break up for the last time. My parents were on the brink of divorce and faith, which might have given me a place to rest in the bad times, but faith had started fading.

We learned in school about the dinosaurs and evolution. We learned about the universe and how stars were created. We learned about molecules and atoms and how they functioned together to form things. In all the learning of the technicalities of things, the idea that we, or these things, were created by something powerful when science seemed to say it was an accident of colliding atoms explained by mathematical equations, seemed strange. I couldn’t hold the two ideas in my head.

It wasn’t as if I woke up one day and had an epiphany that God didn’t exist. It was a slow and gradual eroding until the thought rarely entered my mind.

I went on, left home, did a lot of crazy things. I learned the world was crazy and a lot of random things seemed to happen and turn life from one direction to another. I rarely went to church except for weddings and funerals. My friends and I rarely spoke about religion or faith. It really had no place in my life.

Watching that plant grow in fourth grade and remembering the miracle was hidden away in my mind. Add to that all the insanity in the world and the cruel things that humans seemed bent on doing to each other and it seemed that a spark of divinity could hardly be present in such people, so how could I believe in a God who knew everything and controlled everything, who made us in his image, yet allowed such cruelty to exist?

I think that this is why there is a difference in “believing” something and understanding something. Belief is blind often and doesn’t look for answers, but simply accepts something as true. Some say that this is the basis of faith, the not knowing yet believing. It seems to me that, belief without a firm foundation of understanding is like sitting on a chair with only one leg. You’re bound to fall and break something.

So, did I wake up one day and have an epiphany that God existed? No. Did I suffer a crisis and look once again to my youthful faith for answers? No.

Like the erosion of faith I once experienced, the idea that there was God and an order to the universe, was equally slow in arriving. Unlike my youthful self, I am not easily convinced of ideas. However, I am an avid reader of just about anything that sparks my interest. I am also fond of watching the discovery channel and other informational programs.

I remember watching a program on the birth of stars and the theory on how earth was created from gas and molecules. How, eventually, falling into the gravitational pull of the Sun, these molecules began to spin, creating a sphere with its own gravity, the sun heating the elements and the spinning separating them into earth and atmosphere, the gravity causing the atmosphere to remain around the planet, until the core of gas began to cool and create solid masses surrounded by oceans created by other gasses. Then, how the solar system was created by other such planetary objects being pulled into the gravity of the sun, each being affected differently the further away from the sun they orbited.

Other programs talked about the evolution of animals and plants and the movements of tectonic plates; the slow erosion of oceans, seas and rivers forming canyons and mountains and rich plains.

I was, in a very real sense, re-learning the things I had been taught in school, but now they seemed to make more sense.

Somewhere in that learning, I realized that there was order to the universe. There was a design. Even the most seemingly random of activities came together in a precise function to create something. And, each thing that it created, worked together with another to create something else.

Even if you could drill down to the smallest molecule or atom, there was still something there that began from something else and you could drill down for eternity and never find the ending or the beginning.

Revelations Chapter 22:13

· "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
Of course, Revelations was written to talk about the end of time as we know it, but I took these words to mean something more than just the creator and possible final destroyer, or the end.

I am the Alpha and the Omega. To everything there is a beginning and to everything there is an end, but the end of everything is the beginning again.

It wasn’t the mystery of not knowing from whence the beginning came, but the fact that it was orderly and had a purpose, that convinced me there was something greater at work than random chaos.

There is a design. Where there is a design there is a purpose and where there is a purpose there is a logical Creator.

I call Him “God”.