Amen. Amen.

I'm not going to get cute with this. I guess it could be fun to take the irreverent route, maybe pen this as a "Dear God" letter. I just don't feel like this topic and my mood lend themselves to that. And besides, XTC did it better.

I went looking for God this week.

I'd like to think I see Him in many places. I see Him in my family's health, our easy life, in the amazing sounds of the songbirds outside my daughter's bedroom, and in her eyes when she pauses to listen to them and smile.

I have felt Him twice. Both times occurred when I was a child. Of all the moments since, including the ones in church, I haven't seen, felt, heard, or otherwise sensed anything.

***

I went to our agency's monthly chapel service yesterday. I was in a contemplative mood, and found myself feeling out of sync with the Baptist-tinged, active worship service occurring there. We were treated to a good sermon, good music, and a good dance performance.

But I didn't encounter Him there. I was looking for Him in quiet, and there was none to be found then and there.

***

So I went to the chapel within our main office today. I closed the door behind me, had a seat in a pew, and took in my surroundings. I'd walked past it countless times, but never been in. It's small and quiet, decorated with wooden carvings of the stations of the cross. Candles burned, and a stained glass window depicting Jesus with carpentry tools was directly in front of me.

I stopped, closed my eyes, and opened everything else.

***

Prayer comes naturally to me. I don't know how or why. I wasn't given any particular model for faith as a child. I mean this as no slight on my parents. It is what it is. Still, around the age of 10 I found myself talking to God every day. Quietly. To myself. I developed idiosyncratic prayer habits that persist to this day, like saying "amen" twice.

So today I just let everything go. My reservations, my cynicism, my skepticism, my fear. If God had spoken to me in a voice that I knew was His at that moment, I was ready. If the voice had told me to renounce everything and join a snake handlers' church, I'd have done it.

I slipped between prayer and meditation. I did. I didn't worry about time or company or how I looked. I made myself available to be a vessel. I opened up.

I was ready to receive.

It didn't happen, and that leaves me at a loss.

***

I wasn't really looking for a voice per se. I don't need a burning bush.

An emotion, a flash of connection, a new sensation, a tingle... something that felt real to me, something that said this is IT is all I wanted.

I wasn't there to test anything. I wasn't there to put the fate of my faith on the balance beam, to be tipped one way or the other through the vanity of asking our creator to make Himself or Herself known to me on my schedule.

I presented myself there humbly in an effort to connect for the third time in my four decades on this planet.

It didn't happen.

I reach out to God, but He doesn't reach back.

***

The atheists (plural) among my friends might shake their heads and say, "Of course not! There is no God!"

The faithful (plural) among my friends might shake their heads and say, "Of course not! God doesn't work on demand!"

***

On my way back to the office, I realized that this amounts to a crisis of faith.

I have been a defender of God's. Hey, you all know me. I consider myself to be a man of faith, even if I variously wear Lutheran, agnostic, or Buddhist cloaks when doing so. Does He stay distant from me because I don't know if he looks like Willem Dafoe or Samo Hung?

I don't have difficulty reconciling my faith with our science. There are aspects of intelligent design theory that resonate with me. I stood in the lobby at a Catholic conference last year and took in a mural of a chambered nautilus, a terrific example of this theory. It's a functional, beautiful aesthetic that is not superfluous, and speaks to someone putting thought into its creation. It's God's thumbprint.

When people eschew faith, I wonder how they can with all the miracles around them. For example, we have the capacity to love each other. If you disregard the notion of a higher power, what exactly is love then? An evolutionary echo from the days when we needed to stick together in order to ensure our survival in a harsh world?

When people eschew science, I wonder how they can with all the evidence around them. Creationism is a romantic yet primitive idea when considered in a vacuum. Evolution is real; we have the fossil record. The evidence is really quite clear.

I think I can have it both ways.

***

Is God mad at me for thinking? He warned Adam and Eve in the garden not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Ignorance is bliss, right? I don't think we would have been given this capacity for rational thought if He hadn't intended for us to use it. Eating that apple didn't cause Him to turn his back on us for good. Or did He just stick it out for a while after that and then finally wash His hands of us?

Does God refuse the prayers of a sinner? If so, he's going to be one lonely deity.

Is God waiting for me to, again, see Him in a thousand little ways, and to connect the dots myself? It's part and parcel of my daily life. Call it pride, but I think it's not unreasonable to ask, after all this time, for a direct connection. I'm a guy; we don't do subtle very well.

Has he thrown up his hands and given up on me personally? If so then there's either no devil, no malevolent anti-God waiting to scoop up my withered soul, or ol' Pitch is too subtle as well.

Am I too soon? Too late? Am I one more epiphany away from really having my eyes opened?

***

I don't get it, but shoot, even Jesus on the cross asked, "Why have you forsaken me?" Right? In his hour of need, he felt alone, at least for a moment.

I'm not in some awful place. Do I have to hit rock bottom to feel that connection? If that's the case then the correlation between emotional problems and the strength of one's faith is deeply troubling.

And I wasn't at rock bottom the two times I did feel it.

I DID feel it.

Didn't I?

***

So before I shuffle off to bed, I request this:

If you do feel that connection to God, please thank Him for my family's health, for our comfortable life, for keeping us safe, and for giving my sister the courage and smarts to face her extraordinary parenting challenges. And please ask him to bless my parents with better health and to do something about war and genocide and famine and disease and hatred.

And if he responds to you, please ask what he can do about getting the Rangers to the World Series.

***

Good night.