At this point, I began reading my Bible more than ever. I had been doing some serious pondering and thinking after my father’s death. I had a lot of questions that I wanted to find answers to, and I began spending a little more time in my room contemplating on life and wondering what was our purpose for being here if we were just going to die in the end.

What happens after we die? That was one of the things that I wanted to know most of all. Where do we go? Is there really a heaven and hell? If we’re really children of God then why are we here instead of with Him? Why did He leave us on our own, and why does He let all of these bad things happen … the crimes, the killing, innocent people starving and suffering? Why can’t we ever see Him or carry on a two-way conversation? Why doesn’t He talk to us anymore like He talked to those in biblical times? And why don’t we have prophets anymore? It just didn’t seem fair that He would talk to people back then and not today. Where were all the miracles that seemed so abundant in ancient times … why don’t they occur today with the same magnitude? I was beginning to think that God was being extremely unfair!

My mind was a like a whirlwind of questions, and I made it a personal quest to seek out and find the answers. I wanted to know about life and death. I wanted to know where my dad was right now. His body was buried, but where was his spirit? Was he in hell because he never went to church? I didn’t even know if he was baptized or not. My dad was a good man despite the fact that he never attended church, and I couldn’t believe that he was in hell.

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What about all of those people who never had the chance to know about Jesus before they died … did they go to hell too? That hardly seemed merciful, just, and fair to me. And why in the world would babies need to be baptized? They don’t know right from wrong so why would they go to hell if they died as infants without baptism? It wasn’t their fault. The more I thought about these things, the more troubling it was to me that God didn’t seem to care about us the way He cared for people anciently. If He did, surely those miracles would be happening today as well, and He would still be speaking to us!

I just really had a hard time believing some of the things that others were telling me. They just didn’t seem to make any sense at all. I eventually started talking to God when I was alone in my room. I spoke to Him out loud as if He was right there in the room with me—just as I would talk to anyone else. I didn’t know how answers were received, but I was honestly expecting some sort of answer. But it was always just a one-way conversation.

During the next three or four years, I started listening to every word that was said whenever I had the opportunity to go to church with a friend. The opportunities didn’t come often, but when they did, my ears were sharper than they had ever been before.

I continued to check out books at the library that dealt with religion and philosophy. In high school, I had taken a Bible Literature class. I found that there were literally hundreds, if not thousands of different churches all over the world! This was going to be harder than I thought. Which one was the right one? How could there be so many different denominations? And if they all claimed to be God’s church, then why did they all believe differently and why did they teach different things? The more I read about some of the different denominations, the more I began to regret having done so. It seemed the more I read, the more convinced I was that something just wasn’t quite right. We were supposed to get to know God and Jesus Christ … but it seems the more I learned, the more confusing things became. How can we get to know God when everyone is saying something different? How was I supposed to know WHAT to believe?

It seemed logical to me that if God had a church, and Jesus taught everything we needed to know, that there should only be one church necessary, not all of these different denominations that each had their own beliefs and doctrines.There seemed to be an awful lot of contradictions and discrepancies. Who gave these people permission to start a church? Did God agree with all of them? If He did, He sure was confusing the heck out of me!