The questions came early.
They first surfaced in Mr. Timmer’s Sunday School class at Olivet Reformed Church in Grandville. I didn’t intend to embarrass him by asking what he could not answer, but at that age, there was no one else to ask. I was already searching.
In those early years, I imagined that becoming a minister might lead me to the answers I was looking for—that somewhere in a seminary, truth would finally reveal itself. But history intervened. By the time I graduated from high school, the war in Vietnam had taken center stage, and I knew I had to go.
Four years in the military taught me more about life than I could ever have learned in a Christian college. When I later tried to become a lay missionary, I was undone by what I found instead: hypocrisy, bigotry, and corruption. Slowly, almost reluctantly, I turned away from organized religion altogether.
It was much later—while working in an AIDS hospice in Cambodia—that understanding finally arrived. There, stripped of doctrine and belief, I came to see that the Energy of Life is the one thing that truly unites us all. It does not ask to be worshiped.
It asks only to be lived.
