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Larenz Johnson
Professor Melissa Sipin
English 110C
3 September 2014
God Finds A Way
In many western cultures, religion and faith is pounded into you and you take it as law
without questioning it because the people you see as important or the people that love you tell
you this is what you believe. As a black male I hear constantly how, God finds a way, and that
faith will prevail and make every woe, trouble, and pain I have go away whenever I complain
about whatever troubles me that day to the older members of my family. Between the ages of
five and thirteen, this was what I believed. I would go to church with my favorite grandmother
every Sunday bright and early, with the only thing really getting me out of bed being the promise
of chicken nuggets afterwards and the privilege to hear the words of God shouted in unison
during prayer. Due to complications in my picture perfect family and my weakening as a person,
I discovered who I was only after losing myself.
This all changed around the age of thirteen. My sister had just went off to Old Dominion
University with hopes of becoming a lawyer, my father started a new job, and I was nearly done
with my middle school career. This is what I believed was a picture perfect life, living in a happy
household. One night though, I learned the truth about what really was happening: my parents
were contemplating divorce. My mother was cheating on my father, and no matter how hard my
father fought it, divorce was an inevitability. I knew it was over when I got the theatrical call to
my mothers room to have the dreaded mom or dad movement conversation. I wanted to die,
in a literal sense. Everything I ever knew was crumbling apart and I didnt want to be around to

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watch. My grandmother tried consoling me with the same words that plagued my existence as a
child, God Finds a Way, and again I perceived these four words as law.
It wasnt until I got into high school that I really questioned these beliefs. I was a fifteen
year old kid with a severe mental illness, a broken heart, a scorned mother, and a father who
reverted to his bachelor days. I was basically alone, and prayer did nothing for me. Prayer didnt
bring my parents back together, prayer didnt push me to even fathom a will to live, the only
thing prayer did was instill a false hope and security, the same false security one finds when
carrying a blanket as a child. You have the blanket, its covering you, but if the monster attacks
you how likely is it to really protect you from that attack? It also didnt help that my eccentric
world history teacher was an atheist and I was weak minded, so after having one-on-one
conversations with him about his views on religion, I was convince there was no God. He talked
about how these mythical creatures existed in the Bible and how nothing really made sense to
him, so he abandoned his faith, especially after his wife left him. I tried the wisdom of my
grandmother, God finds a way. Hed laugh every time those words left my mouth. By the
time God finds a way, Ill be dead, youll be dead, hell the planet may be a wasteland.
So for about 4 years I was atheist, and I dreaded it. I missed out on so many friendships
and relationships solely because of my lack of belief, with most of them ending with Youre
going to Hell. I didnt care about going to Hell, because I understood that if Christianity was the
true religion, that was my fate, it was just a really nerveracking thing to hear. This made me
reassess my thinking when it came to the topic of religion. I kept hearing people say that living
without some sort of belief or faith in something isnt living. So, I decided that if I was going to
do this whole religion thing, it would be my way. I wasnt going to convert to a religion I didnt
agree with. So, I started doing research on religions, ranging from Buddhism to Judaism. I never

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claimed a religion, and to this day I still havent, but during that time period of research I
realized who I was. I wasnt the cog in the machine I was as a child and I wasnt the rebel
without cause or faith I was as a high schooler. Instead, I became the free minded intellectual
with a universal understanding and respect for not only the worlds religions, but their
practitioners and followers. I threw out everything that was expected of me, I followed my own
path and made my own decisions, turning out a better person, but everyday I think about how I
might have turned out if I stuck to those four words: God finds a way.

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