Stardust
There was a time when I would step into the kitchen after drinking a 6-pack while driving home from work, wobble over and kiss my wife, and then watch the sweet expression on her face melt into one of pure disappointment and sadness. She could always smell alcohol when I drank just one beer. So, with six, it was a foregone conclusion that I wasn’t going to fool her. I would quickly apologize and beg her to forgive me and then proclaim to her and my kids that I was going to go to an AA meeting right then. I’d grab my keys and off I went...straight to the 7-Eleven near our home and then to a nearby meeting where I would sit in my car, listen to sports and drink another six-pack of beer. When I saw people walking out of the building heading for their cars, I would start mine and drive home. I remember actually beaming the entire way home. I was a genius! She had already smelled the 6-pack on me, but there was no way she could tell the difference between that and a 12-pack. Genius!
This was only one of many modes of deception I used to make it possible for me to continue drinking and using, all the while confident I was fooling everyone around me and that I wasn’t addicted to anything. “I don’t need to go to a meeting and have people tell me what to do,” I’d think. “It’s just a couple of beers.”
A couple of beers. Really?
Reading that now makes me cringe, literally, but it made perfect sense back then. After all, I was strong enough and smart enough to take care of myself. Right? I didn’t need any help. Right? What I didn’t know was that there was no way I would ever be able to control anything regarding my future, let alone how much I drank or how many pain pills I swallowed. Nothing. I couldn’t control my addictions, my stress, or the PTSD that was at the root of everything. Opening my eyes to the truth would take abject fear and desperation at levels capable of suppressing my ego. One morning, I woke up in an empty house, still drunk and with a massive hangover brewing on the horizon. It took 26 years, but my moment had finally arrived.
By the time I was forgiven and allowed to come back home, I had finally reached a point where I was more desperate and scared than I was proud. This meant that I allowed myself to be vulnerable enough to be open to doing whatever it took to save my future with my wife and three children. I was ready to read anything, watch anything, listen to anything, talk to anyone, find a competent therapist, and, yes, actually attend a 12-step meeting. But I soon found that being vulnerable wasn’t enough.
This is where it gets sticky.
I am a Christian, and I will completely understand if this post upsets some people out there, but it describes my personal opinion. I am in no way trying to convince anyone of anything. But, as I’ve said before, my goal with this blog is to get you to look at the world differently. I’m trying to get people who have had very few, if any, positive experiences with religions, religious people, or legalistic practices and doctrines to consider there might be something real out there that has nothing to do with religion. You would be amazed and saddened by the number of people I have worked with one-on-one and in intensive outpatient groups that have stated with no reservation that they either don’t believe in a God or describe themselves as atheists or agnostic. Sadly, almost every one of them had their opinion shaped at an early age by awful church experiences where they were scorned, shamed, and made to feel completely unworthy and unwanted. It was for these people that I decided to provide a sampling of my experiences during my journey to find if there was or was not a God. I hope after reading this that you will be able to look at the subject matter with a new set of eyes and then go and find your own answer. If you do, I’m confident you will find it...and Him.
Although Einstein’s comment was meant mostly as a criticism of quantum physics, after reading “God does not play dice with the universe,” I was compelled to close the book I was reading and contemplate why I had been so affected by it. I couldn’t find the answer, so the next morning, I began my journey to definitively answer whether or not there was a God or everything was just a continual series of games of chance.
I had been going to AA meetings for a little more than a month and had still not connected with the 12-step concept. This was because I wasn’t sure if I did believe in God or a higher power. Up until that time, my faith was based in fear, fear of the possibility that there was a hell, and fear of spending an eternity there. It wasn’t based on love and forgiveness and hope. This was because of how I was raised and the doctrine I was taught every Sunday morning at church.
On one hand, during Sunday school, I would be told stories of Jesus and his miracles and how kind and loving he was. He helped people and forgave them for the bad things they had done. Then, afterward, I’d sit and listen to seemingly countless guilt-based sermons structured around punishment, hell, and consequences of my sins. At the end of each sermon, large brass plates would be passed down each row. As they moved down the aisles, in front and to the side of me, I would watch people quickly check to see how much the person sitting next to them had given to God. After years and years of this, I knew about the idea of Jesus but was scared to death of the retribution of God and of being a “bad” Christian.
When someone is trying to stay sober, one of the most necessary and powerful coping skills is the ability to let go of fears and doubts and know that something real is out there that you can trust to help you. I was not going to be able to do this if I feared God. So, I decided to do what my father had always encouraged me to do...
“I don’t care who you marry, how you vote, what you look like or believe. Don’t believe what someone tells you. Do your homework. Make up your own mind.”
So, I did, and here’s what I found.
Stardust
I loved chemistry in high school and college. It fascinated me that everything around me, on me, or in me was made up of all the elements listed on the periodic table of elements. We were all taught in our high school chemistry class that the earth was made up of all of those elements. Well, what if I told you they all came from an exploding star billions of years ago? It’s true, and it’s where my search began.
A star provides the heat and energy we need to live, but eventually, it will use up all available hydrogen and begin to die. But instead of cooling off, the star actually becomes much hotter and grows to many hundreds of times its original size. Deep in the core of the sun, it is fighting a losing battle against its own gravity. As it fights, its temperature and pressure become so high that new elements are created. It begins at 100 million degrees when helium atoms are fused together to create carbon and oxygen. The process continues until the core is a solid ball of all of the elements that exist here on earth. The star then collapses and rebounds with a massive explosion, blasting all of the elements into space.
Then, millions and millions of years ago, particles like these began to stick together and, in time, the basic shape and size of the earth was formed. One day, another large blob of elements slammed into the earth and then was propelled back into space. We now call that blob our moon. This collision resulted in the earth being tilted 23.5 degrees off of its axis. Without this tilt, there would be a complete absence of distinct seasons like Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. The collision also caused Earth’s outer core of liquid iron and nickel to be in perpetual motion, which created an electromagnetic field that repels deadly solar rays and keeps our earth from becoming as uninhabitable as every other planet in our galaxy. Finally, about 2.8 billion years ago, the Earth cooled to a point where water vapor condensed into rain, and the oceans, rivers, and lakes were formed...and the Earth finally became a place where life could begin.
After learning all of this (and much more), my first reaction was to ask, “What were the odds?” Seriously, a star explodes, things stuck together, there was a wreck, a core started spinning, water vapor turned into rain, and then on April 20, 1962, I was born into an amazing, beautiful world full of life and promise. What are the odds? I’ll tell you...they are so minute that they’re almost incalculable!
Please understand that I started this journey with an open mind but also with more desperation than I have experienced before or since. I NEEDED to find the truth. Yet, all I was finding was one impossibility after another. It didn’t make sense—none of it. And then I watched S2E6 of “Through the Wormhole,” and everything fell into place. I watched the show for two reasons: 1) the show always had really cool experiments and 2) Morgan Freeman was the host, and any movie he makes and every series he provides narration for MUST be watched (I’m pretty sure it’s an actual law). Throughout the episode, various experiments were shown, which were intended to cause me to raise an eyebrow and, possibly, get me to expand my points of view. Then came the segment titled “Double-Slit Experiment” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT-_uCLwKhQ). I was lying in bed eating crunchy Cheetos, and 2:45 later, my body was covered in goosebumps, and tears were sliding down my cheeks.
It’s not an accident.
It was like someone punched me simultaneously in the chest and head. “Oh my God, that’s not an accident!” Initially, I just lay there as my mind reeled with everything I had learned over the past year. The extreme coincidences kept popping in and out of my head while my stomach churned. I felt a wave of nausea begin to build, but I also felt this strange sense of joy beginning to swell inside of me. How could just looking at an experiment change its outcome? It couldn’t be possible, or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. But I had watched it happen. So, I quickly ran to my laptop and began scouring the internet for either corroboration or evidence to debunk what I had just watched. All I found were more videos and research validating what I had just seen. It had happened. It shouldn’t have, but it did. I concluded that it hadn’t been a trick, that it could not have been an accident. So, a few minutes before midnight, I went for a walk. “Who cares?” I thought. It was a really cool experiment, and I loved the mind-bending nature of quantum physics. It was good TV. So, why wouldn’t the goosebumps go away?
“It wasn’t an accident. It was NOT an accident. It was not an ACCIDENT.”
Then it occurred to me that if what I saw wasn’t an accident, then something or someone I could not see or interact with had stepped in and altered the experiment. Something or someone did not want me or anyone else seeing something. If there was someone or something out there that was capable of altering the laws of physics, then I had my answer. There is a God, and this meant that nothing was an accident. Best of all, it meant I wasn’t an accident either.
Think about it. All of the “coincidences” that brought the elements together are a part of everything on this planet. Trees, their leaves, water, air, dogs, lizards, flies, carpet, asphalt, picture frames, skin, teeth, muscle, neurons, telephone poles, paint, puzzles, Christmas ornaments, babies, baby blankets, whales, coral, swimsuits, airplanes, tacos, EVERYTHING! Everything and everyone is made of stardust, and everything we are, everything we have or want, everything we need to live, the moon that hit and tilted us on our axis, the molten core that spins and provides the magnetic field that protects us, it all began in an exploding star billions of years ago. None of it was or is an accident.
But, if everything on earth is made of stardust, how come I’m not a tree or a rock, or a cornstalk? Why am I a human? Why am I Steve? It’s simple. I’m Steve because I’m supposed to be Steve. I was born precisely when I was supposed to be. I grew up where I was supposed to be and have the family and friends I’m supposed to have. I experienced the ups and downs, joys and tragedies that I was supposed to. I experience joy because I am supposed to be happy. I feel pain and desperation because I am supposed to learn and grow from my mistakes. I feel sorrow because I am supposed to long for and feel gratitude for those people I loved and who played roles in my becoming the man I am now. Nothing was or is an accident.
So, the truth is that if I am not an accident, then the things I have done that have hurt myself and others were as necessary to the role I am to play as were the times I have helped myself and others. The bad was as important as the good. This is not an excuse for my mistakes, but it is a reason for them. It is up to me to either let these mistakes destroy me and my loved ones or to be accountable for them and, in doing so, grow closer and closer to the man I was born to be. If I can do that, then I can stop hating myself and, eventually, forgive myself. I can be stronger and happier, and I can play a small role in helping others forgive themselves and be happy because I am not an accident, and they are not an accident.
You are not Chicken Little, and the sky is not going to fall. It never does. Every morning doesn’t have to be the continuation of a waking nightmare. It could be a day where you take a step toward your future and away from your pain. It’s a choice we all have. I’m not saying it is easy or short-lived. I’m saying we are gifted with free will, and sometimes that results in our making horrible, narcissistic choices. We have to be accountable for those choices, but we do not have to be defined by them. Improvement is a part of life, but there is a process that can’t be avoided. We screw up – we get in trouble – we make amends – we learn – we change – we move forward. But here’s the thing, we aren’t alone. I know that now and for the rest of my life, I can rest in the knowledge that nothing is an accident and that I can let go and trust that someone is going to catch me. So can you because we all came from stardust, which means we were built from and for miracles.
