Why I’ve chosen to walk with God
THERE are two things I have never done in life and that is to show emotion or question God. But all that changed when my youngest brother passed away two years ago. That night I was angry with God and I cried and begged him for an answer. I have still not received an answer but now believe he was instrumental in my closure. In life, I have always subscribed to the theories of Unitarianism and pantheism but bordering on agnostic.
Like your correspondent Alleyn Disel ( POST August 2-6, “Alter your God question”) I often meddled with the allegories of great men like Popper, Wiesel and Jung. I was an ardent follower of the teachings of Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin. I always questioned the fact that if God was so loving, then how could he unleash such calamitous atrocities of such apocalyptic proportions on the world? This is my story of how I found God. I once lived a hedonistic lifestyle, redolent of “been there, done that”. I was a high-flier, the epitome of the brand: wine, women and song. I wallowed deep in moral delinquency and once thought the world was an ocean and I the oyster. I only prayed when I had a problem. I was one of those people who forgot about God. I was infected and intoxicated by a Napoleon complex.
To me, in times of need, God always seemed distant, unhearing and unseeing. I was often lost in my own reflections, my own contemplation of sin.
And when my life came crashing down through a series of calculated events, I was forced to look inside myself – the best in me and the beast in me. When my life reached its lowest ebb, I turned to God as I understood him. Obstinate as I was, on a dark and painful night, I had a conversation with God asking for blessings and guidance. I was unsparingly honest. I never bargained with him that if he saw me through, I would change. Change comes automatically. And God responded beyond my wildest dreams.
Recently, someone asked me whether I believed in God after overcoming my plethora of personal challenges. I replied as follows: “I find it easier to believe in God than to not believe, as if I believed in nothing then all my losses were pointless. I live in the hope that my losses were part of a pattern (some call it God’s plan) that I do not fully understand yet. God, whom I believed in, sometimes looked away; he was a detractable God, a God overwhelmed by our demands. I believe in God as I had seen all that he was not and therefore I could no more deny his existence.”
Through God, a rescue of hope was found in the recesses of my own destructive fatalism. From rock star to rock-bottom, hero to zero, I was slowly resurrected with love and care. Through my murky despondency that sucked the colour out of everything, I have now accepted life on life’s terms.
Don’t get me wrong though – I am no bible-thumping bucolic saint. I am still feverish about life, there are still many songs sung half-way and incomplete books. On my final journey to reunite with my brother, I choose to walk with God. KEVIN GOVENDER
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