Looking for God

I wasn't raised religiously.  We didn't celebrate any holidays with anything other than a special dinner with another family (we took turns going to one another's houses).  We didn't participate in the gift-giving holidays, we didn't attend religious ceremonies, we didn't contribute to religious houses.  And yet I had a feeling that there was God watching over me.  I always felt protected by this unnamed spiritual force.  I remember one night when I was 19 and had inadvertently partaken of an illegal drug (and I do mean inadvertently -- I did not know the drug had been added), I was certain I was going to die by morning.  I lay there in my summer job cabin on a summer job cot, alone, staring into the dark night, convinced I would not wake in the morning.  Suddenly I felt this overwhelming sensation, this awareness that I was being held and comforted.  It was a life-changing feeling.  And of course, I awoke the next morning.


Then college educated the spirituality right out of me.  Was it the classes I took, or the people I hung out with, or the cynicism of the time?  I don't know, but by my mid-twenties, that feeling of protection was gone.  And it wasn't until I came into program in 2002 that I began to experience it again.


But I haven't lost the cynicism.  I still need proof.  And I struggle with envy at the obvious proof experienced by others  -- "I was down to my last $5 and I needed to pay my rent, and I prayed about it and the next day I got a check in mail for cahoozes dollars."  "I couldn't find a job after a year of looking, and I prayed about it, and that day someone called me and offered me a job I hadn't even applied for!"  "I was despondent over my divorce and I prayed about it and within a week I had met a new guy and we're getting married next month!"  None of this kind of stuff ever happens to me.


And, in fairness, I have to add, I don't often "pray about it."


In my heart, I feel the comfort of having a spiritual guide -- call it an angel, or my deceased father, or God himself -- that helps me when the pain is overwhelming.  But my head argues with my heart and looks for the proof, and it's this that defines my struggle to find God..  I would love to give myself completely to the care of a God of my understanding.  I'd just like to have a little chat with him first.