Open-mindedness. Tolerance. Acceptance. These are very important to me, and I’ve made a concerted effort in my life to exercise these concepts. Such assertions of late have caused doubts and questions to emerge that I haven’t considered about religion and church and God and spirituality. And my relationship to people who don’t believe the same things I was brought up to believe.

Life is a process. It’s learning and progressing and striving for happiness. And I’ve always taken this seriously.

I deeply appreciate and admire the great minds of our time and throughout history. I’ve lauded the reverence they seemed to have for higher powers or whatever they couldn’t understand. To me, they’ve always allowed room for God. Something. Something that encompasses infinity and eternity, speaking the language of numbers and natural laws, languages they’ve only taken the span of a lifetime to comprehend. Intrinsically, it has to take longer to grasp what infinity and eternity mean.

And then one of the great geniuses of our time up and says stuff in his upcoming book.

Now, he doesn’t deny God’s existence; he just says that the Creator didn’t create the universe.

And if anything should rub me the wrong way, it’s something like this.

Now, my mental capacity is nowhere near Dr. Hawking’s. I haven’t devoted my life to trying to calculate and compute and empiricize and theorize in order to understand.

But, I have prayed.

And God has told me.

So, I know.

Dr. Hawking’s claims were my tipping point. Spending the summer questioning and struggling and researching and trying to reason wasn’t making me happy.

Faith isn’t a rational device: There are no existing extrapolations for it.

I have to thank him, though, one of the greatest minds in history.

Instead of being an apologist for everyone else, he helped me turn into a defender of myself and my personal beliefs.

Things aren’t perfect yet, they’re not quite balanced, and it might take a while – even forever – but they’ll get there.