by Rebecca Carroll

Created on: March 14, 2008

Sometimes things happen in our lives that completely change the way we think. Usually these are ground shaking events: the death of a family member, a serious illness, a natural disaster, the birth of a child. But sometimes they are the smallest, seemingly insignificant, events imaginable. My belief in God stems from one of these moments. A sliver in time, forever frozen in my memory. It was a pivotal experience that changed the way I had come to understand the universe.

Having come from an Italian background, my ancestry was deeply rooted in religious tradition. I'm sure I would have followed suite except for the fact that my mother had some negative experiences with the Church shortly after my brother was born. It wasn't long before she'd drifted away from the faith of her family. Despite having been raised as Lutheran, my dad had become an agnostic after the death of his father. The only time we went to church was for the occasional wedding or funeral.

By the time I was thirteen, I was convinced that there was no God. I loved science and embraced evolutionary theory. To me, Christianity was an ignorant belief system. My brother and I bolstered each other's atheism with long discussions about the "natural" universe and our brave convictions that we would someday return to the elements we had evolved from.

When I met my husband, he was a Bible-thumping Christian. On our first date, we went to a revival meeting at his church. Once inside the unassuming, white-steepled building, I found myself thrust into a strange and foreign environment. People were crying and yelling "Amen!" I had a hard time not laughing aloud at how ridiculous it all was. I sat quietly, hands in my lap, trying to analyze the madness that was going on around me.

For all my husband's attempts to convert me, in the end, I converted him. We began our married life as a pair of atheists on a mission. We would evangelize our "godly" friends until the early morning hours. Our enthusiasm for spreading the religion of atheism rivaled that of neighborhood missionaries in their crisp white shirts and neatly pressed slacks.

But then came that pivotal moment. The one that would carve a gentle footpath far from the concrete road I'd been on all my life. We were driving down from a trip to the mountains, when I found myself admiring the beautiful scenery. I can still see it in my mind's eye. The sky was clear and crystal blue against the ragged, copper mountaintops. Autumn had just brushed against the aspen

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