I didn’t meet God sitting in a church pew, staring at stained glass while someone told me where to find Him.
I didn’t find Him in the pages of a Bible, even as I pored over them, scouring verses for some ancient wisdom that might map a path of my troubles. I didn’t find Him in the honeyed words of my pastor, or in the prayers of friends who placed their hands on my back, murmuring their hopes for my journey.
I left it all behind on a flight from Sydney to Ho Chi Minh City. A borrowed Bible sat pristine and unopened in my bag as I stepped off the plane into the noise and heat of a city alive with chaos. I didn’t know what I was looking for, only that I wanted to go far.
I walked out into the night, lanterns swaying overhead, trusting something unnamed to guide me. Trusting, maybe, that the world itself would show me the way.
For so long now, I’ve struggled to name what I believe. Faith always felt like a knot in my chest, tightening when someone asked me to choose a side; “believers” and “non-believers” — as if the world could be split so cleanly. I believe in a lot of things. I believe in the pull of the earth, in the beauty of imperfection, in the way the universe speaks when you’re quiet enough to listen.
I didn’t find God in a church, but I felt Him – or it, or everything – in the mountains of Laos, where the hills roll like waves frozen mid-crash, where the air smells of all things green and growing. I prayed with every aching step I took to climb higher, even when my legs trembled and my lungs burned.
I felt Him in the waterfalls, in the kind of cold that makes you gasp when you dive in. I wondered at the design of a body so perfectly built to keep itself warm, to keep itself alive.
I saw Him in the murky brown eyes of an old Vietnamese man as he strapped a helmet to my head and sent me off down the winding roads of Ha Giang. For four days, I rode through mountains that seemed older than time, slept in homes where strangers fed me from pots blackened by generations of cooking. I tasted kindness scraped from the bottom of the bowl and thought, this is enough to believe in.
At night, I’d gnash my teeth in frustration, crying out to the idea of a “God” who dared to call these people “non-believers.” If faith is the pull toward something greater, aren’t we all believers? Don’t we all worship in our own way?
God – if that’s what I’ll call it – became my guide, not a fixed star but the light shifting constantly around me; lanterns swinging in a Bangkok market, fireflies blinking in the dark, the first rays of sun spilling over the limestone cliffs of Thailand.
For now, I’ll call it God. For now, I’ll thank God. Not for answers or rules or certainty, but for the questions, the doubt, and the unshakable feeling that something in this world, whatever it is, is worth worshipping simply because it exists.
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