Mad-Man

I am a mad-man. I am posting my true thoughts.

I didn't believe in God. I used to label myself, in my Leftist pre- and-college days, at best an Agnostic. Many days an out-and-out Atheist. I couldn't believe that any true greater being would allow wars and death and utter annihilations of entire civilizations. A flood. The existence of Hell.

I can remember penning a short story in the early 70s for a university writing class where the ruling religious government, oppressive of course, walled people off in clustered high-rises, squashing them together, and forcing them to attend religious functions. The protagonist found a way out of the city and discovered miles and miles and miles of endless beautiful forests and mountains and valleys that only the ruling members of the religion ever experienced. I don't suppose you'd be surprised if I told you I received an A for my grade. In retrospect the premise sounds more Left than Right and applicable, these days specifically, to the Religious Left. How odd.

Twenty years passed. Thirty years passed. And more.

I didn't give God much thought. Truly if at all. Until people started dying around me. My grandparents died. Reagan died. A friend died, shot at an ATM in a robbery. Warren Zevon died. My mother died. And finally my father died.

Bad things happened, more than I care to regale here. They clumped up. In 2009 following my father's death, my behavior became this: I would drive around in the middle of the night, for hours. I couldn't sit or lay still. One late night, last year, I was driving and started talking to God as if He weren't listening. I rambled on. I just kept talking and talking. I had made major mistakes in my Life and laid it all out. I was, for a change, more honest than I'd been in forty years. Or more. I ended up, oblivious, more than two hundred miles from my house in the darkness.

God replied to me in a sentence: "I'm glad to hear you."

It was in my brain. I hadn't expected any kind of response. I remember those five words. I was more than shocked. I was fully awake.

Since then, the Lord speaks to me at night, mostly, when I am alone and distraught and in dire straights and in need.

So clearly, I am a raving nutter.

I can, in the middle of my darkest nights, strike up a conversation with Him and He replies?

Am I insane?

Or is He really there?

He has already shown me my Grandmother, and then my Mother, in dreams.

He has answered some convoluted questions -- but many more exist.

He tells me the things I don't want to hear, but I know I must. I am either addled or blessed. I speak to Him at night at the drop of a hat. How is this even remotely possible?

No matter what way, I am starting to settle and realize my blessings. Perhaps this is the foundation of Faith. This either happens or it doesn't. I either believe it or I don't.

My soul, I think, has quieted a bit. And yet I find this, at once, both comforting and disturbing. But I either believe it or I don't.

I choose to believe.

BZ