Is God Real?

I've spent a pretty significant portion of my life questioning a lot of things, from what I'd been taught about various subjects in school to the very essence of the Christian faith that drives most of what I do. As I dig into some of those questions, more seem to come up, but there's one in particular that has always fascinated me. Is God real?

There are many different perspectives on that question and several different lines of thinking that go along with each one, among people on both sides of the fence. It always has been and likely always will be a controversial question that has not only sparked quite a number of fairly heated debates between me and other people, but even a few debates inside my own head. It's a question about which just about everybody has some pretty strong opinions.

I think it would be pretty naive to say it's a question that can easily be answered unequivocally, but the events of my life have given me what I believe to be pretty strong evidence for the conclusion at which I've arrived. That conclusion, for anyone who's done much reading of my written works, is fairly clear. Yes, I feel as though I have some very strong evidence for the assertion that God is absolutely real.

Over the course of my life, too many things have worked out in just the right way to pull me out of too many tough spots for coincidence to be a satisfactory explanation. The most significant of those things is the simple fact that I'm alive to write this post.

When I was in high school and college, I would have laughed anyone who even hinted at the possibility that I might end up writing professionally out of the room. To this day, I can't really give a specific reason as to why that changed, but after I finished my second year of college, it did. I dropped out to take my first job as sportswriter at a newspaper and over the course of the next several years, I ended up winning a pair of APME awards and having enough success for my name to be known in at least half a dozen states.

As a result of that success, I ended up getting a job in a small town in Texas. I had sent my resumé to that newspaper on a whim months before I got the call that resulted in the offer and tried to turn the man who ultimately became my boss down twice, but he wasn't having it. Despite having never met me in person and not even so much as conducting a proper phone interview, he wouldn't take no for an answer,

While I was there, I ended up suffering a shunt malfunction. That was going to happen when it did no matter where I was, but because I was in a new area with a new team of doctors, the diagnostic process had to start from scratch, which ultimately led to an ultrasound being performed after the X-rays that should have shown the path of my shunt tube from my head down to my abdomen proved ineffective.

Though it was meant to simply find the tube and act as an aid for the surgeon who would be doing the upcoming shunt revision, it was standard procedure at that hospital to look at the kidneys whenever an abdominal ultrasound was performed, no matter the primary reason for the procedure. As the technician turned her attention to my left kidney, an unidentified mass was spotted.

That mass turned out to be renal cell carcinoma, which was ultimately treated with complete success. I have now been cancer-free for more than five years, but if that ultrasound hadn't been performed when it was, I would have been dead within a year and a half of when it happened.

The simple fact that I got the treatment I needed when I did was all due to the fact that I made one still inexplicable decision eight years before. Yes, there were many other things along the way that could have led to that discovery not being made if they'd gone differently, but that one decision to leave college and go to work for that first newspaper was the catalyst for all of those subsequent events.

My bout with cancer and the circumstances leading up to it, among many other things I've seen and made it through over the years, have led me to only one possible conclusion: God is real and has always had a hand in my life. Others may not believe it and that's fine, but I just don't see any other logical option. The evidence presented by my experiences just doesn't make sense to me without some sort of supernatural intervention.

Yes, it's possible I could be wrong, but I'd need some pretty strong evidence to convince me to seriously consider any other conclusion.

As I always have been, though, I'm still curious what others might say. Is God real? Whatever your answer, what led you to that conclusion? And most importantly, is there anything that could change your mind? Responses to these questions aren't required here, by any means, but as I do with many of life's questions, I strongly believe they're all worth some thought.