When I Started to Believe in God (and so much I can’t explain but I’ll try)
I was a spiritual person for as long as I can remember.
One thing I love about being half Native (mother) and half Korean (father) is that both sides of my family are equally spiritual.
In my Korean household, I grew up doing 차례 and 제사 on the holidays, where we host a bowing ceremony for our ancestors in my father’s lineage.
On my mom’s side, my Navajo aunts taught me: “Everything has a spirit– the kitchen table having some from the wood of a tree has a spirit, the cups, the art on the walls, everything.” Knowing this, I felt this deep sense of care and appreciation towards the inanimate things around me. Also in the culture, when we eat dinner we place a piece of food from our dinner plate into the Spirit Bowl which sits at the center of the table and is an offering to the spirits.
Growing up, my mom always told me to pray to God when she heard how bad my father was.
So I prayed all the time.
As a child, I thought God lived in the sky and he controlled everything up there. It was Him and an angel that controlled all the traffic lights turning them from red to green and changed the weather, too.
I don’t know if I knew God but I felt certain He existed and I blamed Him for my childhood. “I could have been born into any other household but You put me in this one. I could have been the daughter of my friends’ parents but I’m the daughter of my father and I hate it here.”
I don’t know why I never questioned God’s existence. I should have. If you looked at my broken family and my abusive childhood, I had all the reasons to believe He didn’t exist.
I think I believed, on faith, that God was real because I was desperate for saving and praying felt a lot like keeping hope in a better future.
As a kid, I crawled into my bed at night and I prayed for 2 things:
To die in my sleep because if tomorrow was going to anything like that day, which they often were, I would not be able to do it again
But if I open my eyes and wake up, then God please give me the strength for another day to face my father
This was my most common prayer.
At 17, life at home got very dark after my sister submitted herself to a Battered Womens’ Shelter. The Department of Family Services and local police got involved with my family and everything at home intensified.
At the time, it was my high school friends, boyfriend, extracurriculars, track club, and prom that served as all this light flooding into my dark cave of a life at home.
One day, when I was 18, that cave went completely dark and everything felt shut out.
I couldn’t see anything worth staying around for any more.
I felt sure I was going to go. I was as certain about it as the sky was blue. I had a plan and it got clearer in my mind the more my heart felt heavy.
I was scared of myself.
Now, I don’t know HOW this thought came over me but it did. I remembered there was a pastor’s kid in my high school, her name was Jin. I called her. I think I was already crying so I wanted to keep the conversation short– when she answered, the first thing I asked was for a church. By the time that question rolled off my tongue, I was crying so hard, I couldn’t get words out. Her voice was gentle and I remember her sounding so non judgemental. We hung up and she texted me a couple of churches around my house.
So I grabbed my stuff and went to a church building she suggested and I was surprised to see people there because it wasn’t Sunday.
The pews were wooden with a red thin cushion. Behind the empty altar there was a detailed sculpture of Jesus nailed to a giant wooden cross on the wall, with his feet together and a thorn crown on his head.
I sat in the middle left section and brought this special journal with me. It’s a little notebook that I’ve had since I was a teenager. I wrote in it every time my father laid his hands on me or said something that cut or did something that infuriated me– to write it down and cry it out was my release. I could reread old pages and process what I had gone through. The notebook solidified what I experienced.
Although what I wanted was to lock it all into a tight box and forget any of it ever happened to me.
So on that day, I bought this little book before God and I prayed. Wailed, really. “LOOK AT THIS that I’m going through God, I can’t take anymore from my father so can you PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO SOMETHING.” I begged Him.
Other people came in dressed in work clothes, took a seat in the pews and prayed. Cried. Everyone was asking God for something. I could hear the brokenness and desperation in their voices.
Was God supposed to answer all of us?
I had cried so much I could have fallen asleep right there in the church. I grabbed my notebook and walked out of the church. When I stepped onto Broad Avenue, the sunlight hit my face and it felt like the light was peeking back into my cave again.
There was still darkness in my soul and I felt it prominently but I was certain there was always going to be a light.
I believed that was God. He was always going to be there and I hung onto that belief ever since.
Now after this my life did not drastically get better but I kept hope in a better future coming knowing that God wanted me to stick around longer.