It had been a long time since I’ve sat on a park bench, but today it was a welcome respite from all the stress of dealing with purchasing a home, remodeling, moving, working two jobs, and of course doing this all in the middle of a pandemic. The park was in Irvine (about an hour south of Los Angeles), which is a newer city that is very well planned out and feel like the ideal suburban area where everything is clean, orderly, and well thought out. On this large open space with gorgeous weather the world felt perfect for a moment. It’s moments like these that I thank God for.

On the topic of God, writing about the topic still makes me uneasy as I feel that it’s not socially acceptable to speak about it in our day. The fanatics drive me away, but I personally feel at peace and empowered when I think of God in my own way. I was raised a Roman Catholic and attended Catholic school all my life, so you may argue that this feeling of peace and empowerment is something that was engrained into me. However, it is not some blind faith because I’ve questions so many things about my religion and God for many years. I felt ashamed for thinking those thought until I came across something that said, “don’t trust those who say they’ve found God, instead trust those who tell you they’re still looking for him”. Ever since then I’ve been comfortable with questioning because the divine–regardless of what you believe that to be–is so large and complex that not even a lifetime is enough to fully comprehend. So faith should be a journey and not a destination. Imagine saying you understand this world when you know you’ll never be able to visit every single place on earth, speak every language, or experience every culture. If the divine is something that links everything in the universe together, none of us can even begin to understand what that scale is: light at over 300,000 kilometers per second takes billions of years to travel from one part of the universe to another; there are more stars in our universe than there are grains of sand on our planet; and on and on. We’re not even sure that our universe is the only one. What if a multiverse does indeed exist? It’s impossible for our humble minds to fully grasp a concept of the divine, but we should all strive to search for something bigger than us.

I did not begin this post with the intention of turning it in to a sermon of sorts, but just the most simple and seemingly insignificant of moments let me contemplate so much.