How Do You Know?

How do you know that God is real?

It’s a question that I've asked of myself for the last 20 something years. I don’t remember the first time I asked it, but I know there was a point when I became aware that there were other options to believing in the Christian God. Being raised in a Christian home meant I knew many bible stories and scriptures to apply to every situation. I knew the doctrine of our church well. I knew about creation stories and end time prophecies, but what I couldn’t wrap my head around was the validity of it all. 

Sure the Bible tells me Jesus loves me, but how do I know the Bible is telling me the truth? I spent time in my teenage years trying to “prove” the Bible through external historical sciences. I just needed something tangibly real to believe in. 

In college, my mind was opened to the world of philosophy. I took a handful of classes on the subject and learned how to start thinking differently. For years I had struggled with the guilt of my doubt. If I couldn’t believe this was real and it was, would I be cursed to eternal damnation? If it wasn’t real and I chose to stubbornly believe it would I be wasting my life?

Then one day, at a bible study, a leader did something that surprised me. He gave me permission to question. He gave me permission to doubt. He told me that if I never doubted then I would never need faith. So for the first time in my life I began to freely and openly question. Not just the core truths that are central to our beliefs, but also to question the validity of religious practices that made no sense to me.

In my early twenties I began having experiences with the Holy Spirit. Finally, the tangible evidence I had been seeking. But the further I dove into life with the Spirit, the more fraudulent experiences I also witnessed. For every person having a legitimate word or experience with God I seemed to encounter two who were doing it for a profit. It was hard to reconcile in my mind and even harder to share the Gospel with others when I myself only believed in part. 

A year ago, a situation with a friend made the doubts that had been suppressed rise back to the surface. This friend, after himself having a life changing experience with Jesus, changed his mind. Taking Jesus back into the world proved too difficult for him. It was one thing to profess Jesus in the safe environment of our church, but once he told his friends about it and they mocked him he backpedaled fast. He denied the experience, he said that he had just wanted to believe in something so bad he tricked his own mind into the experience. 

Not only was his faith shaken, but mine was as well. Have I just been creating these feelings for myself because I am desperate for it to be real? In the church I am considered prophetic, but is it really just my own ability to make educated and rational guesses based on the situation? Am I just so desperate for an encounter that my subconscious was creating these experiences for me?

How do I know God is real?

I’ve spent the last year seriously questioning this again. There were times that I felt that I knew without a shadow of a doubt there was no way He wasn’t, but the next day I would slip right back into the lake of doubt that my mind was adrift in. 

All until this week. I’ve been praying for an entire year: “God, I want to know you without a shadow of a doubt. Show me”.

This week he showed me, through a testimony and a memory. 

My father-in-law gave me a book called ”Inked for Eternity”. It is an autobiographical testimony of a woman named Roxanne Wermuth who had a near death experience and a vision of heaven. Having lost her hair due to chronic illness, she later chose to tattoo the flowers she saw in heaven on her head. To her, tattooing her head was a big deal. To me, not so much. I’ve been there, done that. 

What was a big deal to me was her description of her entrance into heaven. We were listening to her audio book on the way home from New York this week. When she started recounting her experience leaving her body I had to stop the book. I started crying. I was trying to process it. My husband asked “What? Have you been there?”. I told him I had, but I wasn’t ready to deal with that in the moment so I unpaused the book and kept listening. It took me a whole two days to process what my Spirit, soul and mind had jointly come to terms with: I had been there, too. 

It was over half my lifetime ago. I struggled with depression throughout my teenage years. When I was 14, I made an attempt at my life. I was mad at someone, who I don’t remember, but I had come to the conclusion that the best option to get back at them was to end my life. I went into the bathroom and took the remaining contents of a bottle of acetaminophen. I don’t remember exactly how many there were, but if not enough to kill me it was at least enough to send me into acute liver failure. I went to my room, curled up in bed and waited to die. 

As I lay there, I became aware of my thoughts, but I couldn’t move my body. I felt warm and comfortable. I wasn’t frightened. I can’t remember how the shift happened, but I transitioned out of my bed in my room into a tunnel. This tunnel was very dark, but there was a light far, far ahead of me. I felt no rush to go through the tunnel, but inside of it I felt the most complete feeling of peace and love that I have ever felt. It was indescribable. Nothing else mattered, I thought of nothing else, only how wonderful it was. No one spoke to me, there was no one else there, but I remember thinking how OK I was with this place. It was peace. 

I woke up several hours later. Nothing was wrong with me, its as if the events of the previous night had never happened. I was fine.

I never again attempted to take my life, but I did struggle through several more years of mental health issues. I had all but forgotten about that experience until I listened to Roxanne’s book and realized her own description of her experience entering into heaven was exactly what I had experienced. It wasn’t something my mind made up. Years apart, hundreds of miles apart, a woman from a completely different walk of life had the same experience I had. 

I don’t know what exactly has shifted, or what changed, but I now have this awareness of how real this is. It wasn’t a physical experience that I can show or prove to anyone else, but I feel that the proof my soul has been searching for was finally delivered. 

Now all that is left for me to do is take the rest of my life to answer this question. The question my husband asked me last night. “So why are you still here?”