A journey in faith

Until fairly recently, the last time in my life that I felt close to God was when I was a teenager at church camp. After that, all encounters with organized religion were, shall we say, futile, as well as frustrating. I was sure that no legitimate higher power would want to have anything to do with churches as I encountered them. Oh, occasionally, I would feel a longing to connect and pick out a church and actually go, but going back was not an option.

I began to seek the spiritual in the secular, sure that it was there if I just looked hard enough, more certain that I could find the answers to life in a book or conversation. That, too, was futile. Dad even accused me of declaring that "God was dead," though I swear that I never thought nor said such a thing. I just didn't know where to find any connection, any proof, any way to reach a higher power.

Next, I turned to nature, and I have had a long love affair with anything not touched or ruined by man. When I lived on Cape Cod, I found God in the marshes, the long stretches of isolated beaches, the ripples of sand when the tide went out. Now I walk along the C&O Canal and Potomac River every day, watching for signs that a loving Creator is at work in our messed up world.

A little over six years ago, in despair over my son's illness and unable to keep going, I uttered a prayer of sorts when I wept and said aloud to nobody in particular, "I can't do this alone any more. I need help." My prayer was heard and answered when a few weeks later, I found and went to an old Methodist church in Shepherdstown. I felt that my feet were being directed there, and I couldn't explain to anyone why I needed to go. But it saved my life. I found refuge, acceptance, love and answers I'd been yearning for since childhood. There were no burning bushes, but there may as well have been. My own suffering became part of the larger human condition, and I came to believe that rather than, "Why me?" I should ask, "Why not me?"

"By the grace of God" were words I'd never fully understood until then, but grace is what saves us, what connects us to God. And so I belatedly started my journey of faith, stumbling onward and trusting that I am not alone or forsaken. It hasn't solved my problems, but it has lightened my burdens, lifted my spirit, given my life direction and purpose it didn't have before. And all it took, it seems, was my cry for help, my admission that there are things I can't do alone. For me, this is what it means to be "saved." I fell, and God was there to catch me. It's that simple and that complicated -- and that wonderful.