The Biggest Question of All: Part 2
Being less than two years out of college and a person who had usually found answers through books, the next Saturday I wandered into a local bookstore and began to poke around in the non-fiction area. There were lots of self-help titles but few titles that seemed to have anything to do with God. There were a few Bibles, but I knew those were hard to read and came with the assumption that God existed. Besides, I had a Bible at home that I was given when I joined the Methodist church in Chicago when I was eight years old. I never read it, but I had dragged it along when my husband and I had gotten married. Anyhow, the only title that seemed to be of some interest to me was a book by Norman Vincent Peale called The Power Of Positive Thinking. The book jacket assured me that Norman Vincent Peale was a minister, but his book didn’t scream faith. It seemed to be talking about the mind, and I was comfortable with an intellectual approach to my search for God. After all, it was my father’s intellectual approach to God that had convinced him that there was no God. I needed to start my search in a place that could be sensible and reasonable.
Reading Mr. Peale’s book was interesting. He seemed to assume that his readers had run into some unanswerable problems in their lives. I certainly could be lumped into that category. He also seemed to believe that God existed and that he would help those who asked him for help. In the book Mr. Peale challenged his readers to give God ninety days of praying and asking God to change their lives in some way. He seemed confident that God would answer these prayers. HMMMM! Since my search was about the existence of God, I decided I would give God ninety days to prove to me that he was real. But I also decided that I would up the ante by making a list of things I would do for those ninety days for the possible God, so that if I got no answer, I could know that I truly tried to be good on my side of the challenge. I made a list of ten things I would do while I waited for ninety days for God to move.
I would attend a church each Sunday.
I would read my Bible each day.
I would put on the cross I owned (a little gold cross necklace that I had been given some years ago.
I would move from the “best” lunch table, so that I wouldn’t gossip. (I knew that I would become the Super topic of gossip for doing this unforgivable thing.)
I would not eat too much.
I would not eat nothing if I did overeat.
I would not allow the fellow teacher to flirt with me.
I would try to look for good and for beauty in things.
I would pray to God to reveal himself if he existed each day.
I would be a good person for the ninety days.
Well! I did put on the cross. I found a church and started going on Sundays, which my husband found amusing. He wasn’t motivated to get up, since we had decided not to worry about church attendance before. I tried to read my Bible, but I found it impossible to understand. So many unfamiliar words and “thees” and “thous”, it reminded me of a Chemistry book. (I didn’t find Chemistry easy, either.)
I did move from the ‘best” lunch table, and immediately I became suspicious to the “best” teachers. No one moved away from that group! This action cost me some “cred” among the gossipers, but I think other teachers may have secretly given me a “thumbs up”. But I couldn’t get a grip on my eating. That messed up thing stayed messed up. I cycled back and forth between eating too much and eating too little.
The flirting teacher realized that something had changed, but we remained friends. I just didn’t listen to his stories or encourage him in any way to stop by my classroom door for a chat. I tried to pray, but I really had no clue what that meant. I had never been taught what prayer was, so I talked to God as best I could, asking him to let me know if he was somewhere listening. As to looking for good and being good, those rather subjective things stayed subjective. Looking for good was a distant thing from my childhood. Since heading to college, I had found it more interesting to approach life from a negative place of disbelief, and that was a hard habit to break. Also, as to being good, I figured I had started the process, but I was slipping up constantly.
All I could hope was that God was a forgiving character if he existed. If his showing up for me was dependent upon my actions, I was failing to meet my own standards of “good” in too many places to be able to count upon his approval. I was about two weeks into my ninety days, and I was nervous.