"I know it's hard to believe right now, but if you have faith, everything will turn out exactly as it should" - Six, Battlestar Galactica. 

 

May 23rd 2005 just another day, or so I thought. I just happened to meet someone who changed my life in more ways than I ever thought possible, or more ways than she's even aware of. 

 

Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, but boy wasn’t sure if girl liked him, despite the less than subtle flirting.

 

Sure enough we got together, she made me stupidly happy, the kind of happy when people think you're a bit backwards coz you can't help smiling for no apparent reason. That chance meeting with Julie, in the Cellar Bar of all places, had a larger impact on my life, other than making me feel more alive than I’ve ever felt. The effects of which are still not known, the ripples are passing through me as they would on the surface of a pond.

You see up until late last year I was a heathen, a heretic, if you will. I didn’t believe in a Christian God, and thought all people who were religious were deluded fools, who had to be told what to think and to say. Julie bore the brunt of my sarcastic questioning, my pig-headedness and my sheer unwillingness to listen to what she was saying, God only knows how she put up with me!

Nothing really happened on the religious front until March 23rd 2006, when I went to watch ‘V for Vendetta’. This is the film that started it all, OK, so the title of this piece is a bit of a misnomer so far, but hey, it’s my article, so ner. Anyway, this was the film that started me thinking. One of the themes was that the events in your life just don’t happen randomly, everything -everything- has a reason.

I phased out of the film, I thought about Julie, the girl I was in love with, the one who was sat next to me, I remember clinging onto her hand, not wanting to let go. I started thinking about the day we met, and about the number of different things had to happen for us to even just meet on that day.

Any other time of my life I would’ve said it was just a freakish occurrence, but the line of “I, like God, do not play with dice and do not believe in coincidence” cut through all the bullshit and opened my eyes.

 

OK, so maybe it was a highly romanticised thought for me to have, how very Dawson’s Creek of me. Thinking that we were destined to be together is a hugely clichéd thought.

This had wider repercussions though, it got me thinking about the possibility of a higher power. I didn’t deny the existence of God beforehand, I just refused to believe in, and worship Him. Long story but I lost belief in Him when I was 13, a story only a select few actually know about.

 

I got thinking whether or not me & Ju were brought together by some higher power, not saying God, but you know, something.

Over the next few months my curiosity got the better of me, I watched BBC4 for the ‘Did Jesus Die?’ program, which gave me answers to questions that I didn't even know I had. I also went on a Happening taster day. I had questions, I needed to find answers. Slowly I got them but it left me with even more questions. To be honest, a lot of them were due to ignorance on my part, I didn’t take that leap of faith I needed to. I stayed firmly in the realm of my own ideas and misinformed thoughts.

Over the past 9 months I’ve had religious signs every day, I still get them, and not random signs, specific ones to me. Like one of them was “all your past sins will catch up with you. Repent now” Which for the select few of you out there, it was a rather apt thing for me to see.

I went to a Church in lower Darwen with Julie and her other religious cohorts, it was fun, I had a good time, the service that they put on meant something to me, and to Julie. The theme was how you don't have to be alone in life, that even though we've all got different destinations, we can share our journey with someone, OK, I skipped the religious overtones on that one, and just thought/kept looking at her. We got back together on July 23rd, there’s that date again. The 23rd. It just seems like important stuff happens on the 23rd regarding my faith and with her.

One of my questions was rather naive, it was about Him being 'all powerful'. “if God’s all powerful, you know, He’s the dude who created the universe. Why can’t he send me a sign, you know, like a post-it note with “I exist, love God x” written on it? It can’t be that hard, surely!”

 

And thank you to Julie for not writing those post-it notes yourself, and leaving them around my room, I think that really would've fucked me up.

So I randomly sat down to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica, The Hand of God, to be specific. The premise was the same, a religiously sceptical Gaius Baltar said “it’ll be a lot simply if He came down and told me”, he was told “you must remember to surrender your ego, remain humble” and a bit later, “He [God] doesn’t always speak in words”. I found that hugely weird, once again my religious questions were seemingly being answered through the media.

I know it could be coincidence, but the universe is a wonderfully complicated entity, there are repeated patterns throughout it, and to deny the existence of a God, or something equally omnipotent, would be foolish. It could be me keeping an eye out for them more, but stuff like seeing a laminated cross practically outside my house for like two weeks, I find rather disturbing.

I’ve had too many weird things happen to me over the past 18 months for me to rule them out lightly, the end result is me actually believing in God now. Not so much being Christian, one step at a time, but I definitely feel this is a journey I’m being led on. It even got to the point where both me and Julie, so not just me being crazy, actually said “maybe God brought us together?” just so I could regain my lost faith. I'll admit, I still need her in my life, I feel like I'm just starting to walk again and I need the support

I’ve always been a sceptical man, I’ve had my doubts, tried to explain away the mystical with science but this is where all my logical answers point to the divine, and I’ve finally taken that leap of faith. All this because of one person, it’s frightening how much your life can be changed.

 

So I'm guessing it wasn't so much Battlestar that changed my life...

"You've changed so much. I guess that's what happens. I wish you knew how much you changed me. I wonder if I changed you, if your life is different because of me. Because mine is different." a quote I found, August 7th 2002.