How I Found My Soul

I grew up in the deep South. My mother's side of the family recognized only two religions: Baptist and not-Baptist. I was forced to attend church a few times as a young boy and hated every second of it. This dislike grew into a dislike of religion in general. At one point in my teens a good friend of mine convinced me to attend a service at his church, and I agreed. I knew no one. At some point he and I began quietly giggling over something, I don't remember at this point, but it was something innocent and we were not being disrespectful in any way. A man behind us stood up, and as he glared at us shouted, "You disgust me!" and stormed out of the building. Everyone around us looked at us as if we had loudly announced our intention to begin eating small children. Humiliated, I left as soon as I could. never to return.. not just to that church, but to any church. I haven't gone near a formal place of worship of any kind since 1987.

That was nearly 25 years ago. During that time I have been on my own search for universal truth. I listened with a completely open mind and without judgement to all spiritual beliefs, myths, ethos, theories, ideas and speculation. I was willing to accept any belief system proposed provided it passed two tests: The belief has be be fully reconcilable with known scientific law, and there needed to be observable supporting proof available. Fairly simple rules one would think.. but in 25 years nothing I heard was able to satisfy those two logical requirements to my satisfaction.

However, like a true agnostic, I continued to keep an open mind, and applied this test not only to theistic beliefs but to atheistic beliefs as well. To this day I still consider atheism to be illogical, because to be atheist requires just as much of a leap of faith as a theist. There may not be emperical evidence that a god exists, but there is also none to the contrary.

For two and a half decades I had been on this spiritual quest, without finding what I was looking for. How surprised I was, then, when what I had been trying to find, proof... found me instead.

In future entries I will be recoding my personal accounting of this event, and the seven weeks surrounding it, in as much detail as I can remember. It is a story so unbelievable that even I sometimes have a hard time believing it all. But it's true, it's my story, and I'm willing to share it here.

Stay tuned.