Surveys show that that the number of people who do not believe there is a God is increasing every day. Pew Research Center says that today, only 81% of us believe there is a God. And while that may sound not too bad, you need to understand that five years ago, that number was 87% and in the 1950″s and 60’s that number was 98%.

And belief in God  is much worse than that in our younger generations. A new survey from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that while 57 percent of Millennials (ages 40-22) consider themselves Christians, the other 43 percent “don’t know, care or believe that God exists.”

There is a pretty good chance you know someone who fits this description, maybe a neighbor, maybe a friend, maybe someone in your own family, or maybe someone you will encounter tomorrow. 

What would you say if one of them asked you why you believed God is really real?

Would you have anything to say? And if you did say something, do you think it would mean anything to them, would it give them reason to think? It could happen. It could happen at any time—when you least expect it. And what you say could change someone’s life, maybe even their eternal life. 

Below are the responses from two people just like you. They took the time to sit down and think about what they would say if they had the opportunity, and then they sent what they had to say to me (billeckert49@gmail.com), to share with you in the hopes that what they had to say might help someone, maybe even you. 

As I am writing this, it is the week before Christmas. Could there be a better time than now for you to do the same as these two? I encourage you to sit down and turn off, just for a little while, all the noise and activity and any other distraction in your life and spend some time thinking about what you would say—why you are convinced that God is really Real. It could be one of the most important things you ever do for yourself and maybe for someone else as well.

Response #1

When I was in a Bible Study taught by Dick Phillips years back we studied issues like is God real.  I also attended CEW retreats and eventually gave some talks there.   Those experiences listening to others witness what God had done in their lives will answer the question is God real.   One Bible verse that fits my life perfectly is Jeremiah 29:11 and it says this:  “For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not for woe!  Plans to give you a future full of hope,” While I have not always been the best Christian example here on earth I have always believed these words.  In summing up what this has meant to me in life I chose these words:  ” I don’t know what my future is, I don’t need to know, God will provide I just have to accept it”.  This has never been easy for me though, many times I have been drug kicking and screaming to my answer.  What is my purpose in life I have often wondered?  Another thing I came to believe due to many near disasters in life is I have a tremendous Guardian Angel. Too many improbable things have happened not to know something is going on. The Bible says we each have a Guardian Angel to guide us if we listen.  This I have also believed and done.   So yes God is real and everything in the world has a reason and purpose.  A good secular book I read on this is Mitch Albom’s book “The Five People You Meet In Heaven”.  The man in the book discovered the purpose of people in his life after he got to Heaven.  One interesting thing was his wife’s idea of Heaven there was to attend a different wedding around the world everyday.  Whatever floats your boat I guess.

Response #2

This is my story on how I know God is real, and not some idea, philosophy or well-intentioned propaganda created to make people feel good. Believing God is real isn’t always easy and there are times, remaining firm in this knowledge of God being real, it hurts a little when the world doesn’t see things in the same light. 

I don’t often share my early life, when I didn’t know if God was real or not. My life experience when I as a child, then as a teenager and early adulthood didn’t help me see anything in a positive light. However, if you will bear with this story, I can promise you, I bear witness to how I came to know God is indeed real; very real, and as alive and well today as before time, as we know it, began. 

My family was very divided on the God issue. I had been told: “Jesus is my Lord and Savior” but no one really told me, or witnessed to me, what that meant. As I grew in age and curiosity, I would often ask my parents what that phrase meant. I was told it meant that Jesus died for me and took away all my sins. At that time in history, sins were very well known in this world, very frowned upon and would cause a family to be shamed, if their sins were made public. There were no underwear commercials on TV, there was no internet for us to have access to all types of information at our fingertips, and we certainly didn’t talk about what people did in their personal lives behind closed doors. Some things were meant to be kept private! 

Our family moved around a lot as I was growing up. My parents seems to always choose the people who made bad choices, those that went against a moral society, as their friends. This made it difficult for me, who was always the new kid at school. When things were difficult for them, we moved. At one point their choices caused them to separate and date other people. This was not an acceptable choice in society at that time. Life was difficult for me, to say the least. I might have wondered, where was God in this, if God was even on my radar. 

At some point, my parents decided it was time to move again so they could start over. This time we moved to Miami. I was now a teenager. The move was great, the location was great, but my parents’ choices in friends – still not so great. We had to watch the grown-ups become inebriated by alcohol and drugs and losing their abilities to remain adults in front of the children, and that became a problem in my life, as I didn’t feel safe. How could I trust anyone? My mother did talk about going to church, and when my grandparents came to visit, we would always get new “Sunday” clothes, so we had the appearance of knowing who God is. We certainly looked the part! Again, I would ask: “Who is Jesus?” because I was still curious. I was given the same answer: “Jesus is our Lord and Savior”. But now, because of my age and misguided sense that I was much more advanced in wisdom than my parents, I dug deeper into the matter by asking deeper questions, like: “what does that mean, ‘Jesus is my Lord and Savior’?” I was told, once again that Jesus died so all my sins could be wiped away. So, having witnessed many things society had told me were sins, I asked questions like: “So, if I kill somebody, then it’s not sin because Jesus died so my sins could be wiped away?” The response I was given, “uh huh, yeah”. This left me scratching my head in disbelief since it was against the law to murder someone, but if it wasn’t a sin, why was it against the law? I found a Bible and just started digging around in it, looking for answers. What I found didn’t make sense because I didn’t read anything that said I could kill someone, and it was ok. What I did find was the Ten Commandments, and in my young life, I had seen many of those commandments broken, so I asked my parents about them again. They didn’t seem concerned about the Ten Commandments at all, because they had Jesus. My conclusion, all of this was hogwash and a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. I lost interest in asking any questions on the subject, because it just didn’t seem to make any sense, so it no longer mattered to me. All that mattered to me now was boys! I liked boys! 

This time in Miami didn’t last long. We had more threats of hurricanes than my mother cared to endure, and my parents were still trying to hold their marriage together, so they decided we were all packing up and moving to Texas, where my parents had grown up, met, married, and it’s where all our family was. My dad quit his job and we moved to Bryan, where most of my mother’s family lived. I was excited about this move because I loved my mother’s family. In my lifetime, they were the only people who had ever witnessed true goodness. They were hard working, kind and generous people. They always made me feel so loved! Looking back in retrospect, they actually did show me Jesus, I just wasn’t paying attention. 

Even though it was tough moving to a new state and a new town as a teenager, one of my cousins was the star football player at Bryan High School and he would often pick me up from school on his motorcycle. Even though I was the new kid, once again, I was now cool because of my cousin. Everyone would ask me how I knew him. I would flippantly say, “he’s my cousin”. It might be hard to see at this point in my story, because I certainly wasn’t seeing it at the time, but God was in all of this. You see, He brought me to a place, and surrounded me with people who would witness the reality of God in this world, and better yet, God in my life! He was there watching over me and just patiently waiting for me to truly seek Him. You see, God never forces Himself on anyone. We can freely choose Him, or not; but, He is always there, even though I wasn’t aware of this truth at the time. 

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was always one of my favorite people I had ever known. She was sweet, loving, kind to everyone, and the only time I ever heard her raise her voice is when I was six and my grandfather was caught drinking a beer in my presence, with a cigarette in his hand. Other than that one time, I never heard her raise her voice or say an unkind word to or about anyone, and she had a lot of tragedy in her life. About 4 months after that incident with my grandfather, he was tragically killed going out to the family ranch to hunt deer the weekend before Thanksgiving 1967. He left behind not only my very young grandmother, but also my aunt, who wasn’t much older than me. It was very difficult for her to be a young mother who was also a widow. She struggled financially and emotionally. I saw her cry many times, for many years, but never did she ever stop talking about her loving Lord. She believed God was real, even when life was beating her down. 

My grandmother showed me the greatest love of anyone I had ever known. Since moving to Texas, I had the privilege of seeing my grandmother every single day. Being in her presence allowed me to begin to ask again, only this time in the smallness of the inside of my heart, about God. I wondered if He were real and this time, I sought out people who might could answer that question for me. 

At this time in my life, as a teenager, so many things happened. There were so many people placed in my life who showed me they believed God was real. I began attending, on my own – without my family – the local Methodist Church and eventually desired to be confirmed and baptized and so I enrolled myself in the confirmation classes available at the Methodist Church. I got to the end and there was just one thing missing….. my parent’s consent, which they wouldn’t give. Where was God in this? 

Then, my grandmother became gravely ill and died very quickly. Where was God in that? After that, my parents decided to move again while I was deep into high school. Where was God in any of this? 

I felt so rejected by God at this point, I decided I would just live my life according to my plans, whether God liked it or not! After all, I couldn’t see God anywhere or in anything; or, could I? Was He there? 

My life spiraled out of control and all I wanted to do was get far, far away from the life I was living. In college, I had no guidance whatsoever and made choices to follow the crowd of many who were trying to establish their own beliefs as we all began to establish our own independence. Interestingly enough, I tired of this life pretty quickly and found myself gravitating toward others who also were looking for something better. Even though I continued to make the same choices, I was at least thinking about a better life after college and I made my mind up I wanted to marry a Christian man, because he would be able to help me find the life I longed for. 

While in my last year and a half at college, I experienced the loss of two very close friends. I was even at the house of one when we were shocked by the Sheriff showing up at his door to let us know he died in a freak accident. The other drowned in the pool at his own pre-graduation celebration. Both were 3 weeks prior to these friend’s graduation date and both were in our very small, close group of comrades. These deaths shocked all of us into the reality of life and we all began to think about God more. Was God giving us a wake-up call? These losses certainly caused me to think about how short life can be; and then what? If I didn’t really believe in God, then why would I think He had any part in these heartbreaking circumstances? I was sick and cried for almost a month. I was so lost! 

I left college as my life had no purpose, or so I thought. Not having any direction, I wandered for about 6 months. Then, while at my other grandmother’s house, celebrating her 80th birthday, I made a spur of the moment decision to move to Austin the very next day – without a job or a place to live. This is the point where I begin to notice God being present, even if it was in very small ways. I quickly found a job and a place to live. The friends I made are still in my life today, except for one very close friend who died suddenly and unexpected a few years ago. This friend was someone who had extremely strong faith and was not ashamed to show it. Making this move, I met the man who I have now been married to for over 35 years. Oddly enough, he is actually from the same town my parents moved me to while I was in high school. 

As soon as we married, I was ready to start having a family. I had a dream of having 6 children so there would always be so much love in the house. My husband came from a divorced family and had some apprehension about bringing children into our fallen world, but he finally came to his senses and we started trying to have a family. It took us six years before I would become pregnant, but once I did, it was like this big black hole I had in my heart was immediately filled with great love. God was definitely in this! 

During my pregnancy, God showed Himself to me in small ways. I had dreamed my child would be born on a very specific day – and she was in fact born on that date – and, premature with several complications. She was not expected to live. I found myself begging to God to exchange my life for my daughter’s, which He answered in a way I wasn’t expecting. What He gave us both is life with Him. God opened my eyes and my heart to begin to see He was there, every moment of my life, even when I couldn’t see anything but heartache, pain and feel abandonment. 

You see, what I have learned from my life is that in order to see God at work, we have to look through a different lens – the lens of Love. Even though God created the world and everything and everyone in it, in order to see God, we have to see through the eyes of Love and not what the world gives us as experience. When we suffer in life, we are being given such a loving gift of being transformed into who we are truly be created to be. Such a contradiction to how the world views anything and everything! 

I recall at different times in my life being told that there is no absolute truth. Well, if that statement is true, it contradicts itself as it claims an absolute truth. If there is no absolute truth, then that statement itself is a lie, and so is everything else;

and so breeds despair. Despair breeds no purpose in living, which would contradict any purpose in our existence. These are the things I thought about from my age of reason until I began to prepare to be a mother. Preparing to be a mother allowed me to see the sky as a great work of art; the flowers and creation as things made to work together for a greater good. At one point, during a drought, I was hiking, and everything was so burned and brown. I saw one small purple flower emerging from nothing. This was God at work. 

I could go on and on about how, over the next 30 years of my life I began to see God so real, in everything and everyone, but I’ll take the time to reflect back over the times I couldn’t see Him and give witness to how He was there and actively working in my life. If you knew even a small part of what I have left out in my story of how I know God is real, you would be amazed and know without a doubt, God is real! What I have learned is most people born into the Catholic faith don’t even realize what they have. So, I’m glad I’m a convert because I came into this faith with a clean slate and no prejudices against the Church, and no expectations except to continue on my journey to know God and know Him more deeply with each passing day. 

So, the beginning of my conclusion of how I know God is real …… 

Where was God when my own parents couldn’t show me God was real? He was there, holding on to me, so I would not have any reason to object to His existence, once my heart was open to the truth. Had my parents had the faith of their protestant parents, and showed it to me, I would have had so many objections to overcome. As it was, I was without all of this and able to be open to receive what our Lord desired to show me. 

All the moving around as a child and teenager taught me to be open to change – drastic change – a constant conversion – as I would need later in life, as God called me to Him, when He knew I was ready to accept. I never knew how to become complacent with my environment of life. Moving so often also taught me how to not trust in worldly humanity. I never had the luxury of knowing people for very long, so I was being trained to always be open to getting to know new people and accepting them, so I could learn about differences in all people and not be judgmental of those differences. After all, my next move would bring me to meet an entirely different kind of people because of their culture based on their life experiences. 

God was so real to me even in my questioning. He taught me to never stop questioning as my thoughts were an intricate part of who He desired me to become. Without questions, there are no answers. 

During the times in my life, when I said I didn’t believe in God, who was I kidding? If the question of God didn’t truly exist in the answers of life, then who was I trying to get the attention of by my disobedience? If God wasn’t real, then why did I continually try to prove to myself God wasn’t real? Why would all my questions matter if God isn’t real? Who prompted my questions in the first place if it weren’t for God’s real existence in all of our lives? 

Where was God in all of the hardships of my life? God was the Love that guided me through it and kept me from becoming hard hearted and bitter. 

My epiphany was when I gave birth to my very premature daughter. Caring about the life of another as being more important than my own takes a great deal of love. This kind of love is not the kind of love than can be described in human or worldly terms. True love goes beyond our imagination. True love is a verb, an action that causes us to desire something good for someone or something more than we desire anything good for ourselves. Jesus gave His life for this Love. I could have never understood this before. 

What have I learned about God to this point in my life? God truly is Love! When we open the eyes of our hearts and ears to see and hear God at work, then we will eventually all come to know He is real. The key is being open. Our hearts have to be open to see things from a different set of eyes – the eyes of love. As soon as I realized there was either a purpose in life or there wasn’t, all my questions became a true curiosity of heart. Only then could I begin to actually see God at work, not just in my life, but in all life. This is how I know God IS real. 

Now, if you are still uncertain and have not concluded for yourself God is real, then take heart and keep asking those questions. As long as your heart desires to know the truth for yourself, then God is listening. He may have to knock you over the head a few times, but know He will never, not ever stop gently, and quietly knocking at the door of your heart. You only have to be open to answer. 

I will promise you this: if you sincerely and with all your heart seek God, there will always be obstacles thrown in your path to keep you from your goal. It will often be difficult and will definitely not always be the easy path. But, if you will continually and courageously seek to know God, He will reveal Himself to you. He will never be over-bearing and He will never force Himself upon you, but He is always there. After all, He created you, and chose you to be with Him not only now, and throughout your life on earth, but He created you to be with Him for all eternity. He chooses you every day that you draw breath. You only have to choose Him and choose true, authentic Love. Then, you will know God is real, just as I now know.