Plagued. All the time. Questions have always plagued my head ever since we started going to the place called “church”. All throughout elementary school and middle school the speaker always knew with such certainty who the creator of the world was and what that meant, namely God. “OK, God is here”, I thought, but how do you know? Why does this matter?

These questions were put for a rest for a while, until my fourth year in high school. I felt a great deal of loneliness and a sense of meaningless in my life. My past was centered around being the best student. Did any of my efforts really matter? Humanity sucks. We destroy things no matter what we do, and we’re aware of it. During this period, I resorted to porn, masturbation and casual sex to feel excited about anything. I loved having a guy’s attention, and feeling loved by someone, anyone. It still wasn’t enough to fill in the gap of loneliness and meaninglessness I felt. I finally realized that I had nothing to keep me going.

I had one ray of hope: the rumored all-mighty-good God that from those days in my childhood. So, in a desperate attempt to figure out meaning in my life, I went searching. I revisited church.

I met people and made friends, but most importantly I finally met God’s son, Jesus. The more I found out about Him, the more I understood the great being they always talked highly about, God. God loved me, and because he loved me, He sent his son to die for my sins and save me. I stopped questioning his love after that discovery. I slowly realized later that I never needed to hook-up with someone in order to feel special. I am already made special by God. I found a reason to live: for God, by following Christ. I found that my life had been given meaning. So much so that I wanted everyone to know Him.

I wanted to share, and I shared with everyone. Enrolling in college, this was my goal. It was a challenge, however. I met many who didn’t understand Him. I argued with people, thinking that I had everything figured out. I made the worst arguments; many people took them apart. I could argue forever, but not convince a soul. I realized that I wasn’t going to get anywhere. I should’ve known I was doing it wrong.

I bonded with people in these discussions though. We all became friends. I started seeing where people were coming from. However, I started experiencing what they were seeing, a world filled with things, you can call them good or bad, if you thought about it. You can explain the world however you wanted to. Maybe I’m just identifying things that weren’t there. Others disagreed with my sense of right and wrong. I thought, I might just have my own moral code because I grew up around Christians and wanted what they said to be true. I was just using motivational reasoning to make my arguments for God, because the idea of God comforted me and gave me a reason to keep going, and I wanted Him to be there. I had no way to prove how Christ was resurrected, I had no perfect way to argue for any of it. I had no way of knowing. I had no way of knowing whether God was there or not, nor whether any of what I believed in was truth. Is it true just because the Bible said it? Just because humans wrote it down? I realized I could’ve been wrong about an existence of a God. I thought, “I just wanted him to be real and needed meaning in my life,” that’s how I had believed in him. With that thought, I realized that I didn’t have any reason to believe in God. I stopped believing and started questioning. I entered agnosticism. I put God behind me.

I was in what seemed like a twilight zone. Nothing made sense. I had double vision, seeing things constantly from both perspectives. Contradictions were right near each other, constantly. Light and dark were both in the same room. I probably drove people nuts because I never added up as a person myself. I didn’t stand up for anything, despite wanting to be on the side of truth.
During this period, I needed to keep myself sane and needed answers from somewhere. I read through all sources and listened to every speaker. I sought the perfect argument. All of them failed, there was a loophole to every one of them. A more better description of my scenario was like this: I kept trying to cut an onion with a hammer.

I was in a persistent abstract reality. It went on and on..until I finally read An Apology for Raymond Sebond, by Micheal de Montaigne. The piece revealed to me an epiphany: God cannot be reasoned for. There was no way for a human to argue for God, because a human is not perfect. A human is not God. If a human tried to explain God to someone, he or she will always fall short, because humans can’t fully understand God. I concluded that I was trying to do the impossible.

Of course! If there was a God, I had no way of proving Him. I would never get a complete answer.

I didn’t know how to move forward with what I didn’t fully understand. How do I know anything with certainty? Do I even move forward?

I realized that, if I were to move forward, I needed to take a leap into the unknown. Faith. That’s all there was in this moment. I slowly felt an excitement, joyful emotion creep over me during this moment. After a long while, I felt God again. I never needed an explanation for him, I never needed to try to reasonably explain him to others. God just is, by faith. Faith was an entirely supernatural experience, and that made sense, because perfection by definition wouldn’t exist in our world. I realized that even though I may never get the perfect understanding, I would be in good hands. With this acknowledgement, I knew I couldn’t convert others. I could just share love with others. The rest was in God’s hands.

I know now that when I share God, I share love. I can’t logically argue for Him, or His love,  because I only have an intellectually-limited tool in order to explain the vast, dark unknown that humanity hasn’t even scratched. God is the light that we need in order to move forward past this dark void of questions we don’t have answers for. God is why I am here.

When I focus on God, I focus on the now, this current moment, every second. There is a Puerto Rican saying I grew up with that goes, “La luz de adelante es la que lumbra”. The saying, which is characteristic of many Puerto Rican sayings, refers to food and when we should eat food. It implies that when we are hungry and are given options of when, where or what we can eat, we should play it safe. When we are hungry, we should eat the food the moment it is provided to us.

I saw this saying recently and realized, you could apply it to God. It could be saying seize the day, or it could just be saying focus on the current moment. Focus on now. Forget about everything else, God is now. There is so much God wants him to know about you, now. He always had, since the moment I met Him, to the point I felt His perfect love, through my bouts of extreme doubt, and when I came back to Him with guilt. He was the light in the dark rooms.

When I think what my life means to other people, I say, “I’m not sure. My life is in God’s hands. We’ll see.” My life is now. Everything now is meaning. I know now to put my confidence in my own thoughts, but rather in my faith, rather in love, rather in wisdom, rather in God.