St. Paul says in effect, in Romans chapter 1, that our believing in God (or our saying that we do or don’t) has a great deal to do with morality. Lots of people say that they do not believe in God. But Paul states that when people stop keeping the moral laws of the universe, God gives them up further to all kinds of immorality in a spiraling downward regression. It is not so much that people do not believe in God, as that they do not want a God who tells them how to live their lives. They want to be free, to do their own thing, without restraint from God or man.

I wonder if the reverse could be true as well. Can one find oneself beginning to believe in God because one finds within a desire for something more — for someOne more, a longing to be a good person, and to be truly and deeply loved and to love, based on an increasing awareness and hunger for things Unseen, for a greater Real than what can be merely seen, heard, tasted and handled through the merely physical and sensory?

My father told me once that as a boy he spent many days ploughing the loamy acres of his father’s farm, and as he walked behind the horses, Ned and Junie, he would pray: – “O God, make me a good man. O God make me a good man!”

I wonder if people who feel within themselves a deep and burning desire for goodness, truth, justice and fair-play, with neighbours and others with whom they share community and this planet, who are touched by beauty and find joy in all that is around them, I wonder if God - rather than giving them up, actually takes and lifts them up in a loving embrace. Not only does God then carry them but  also He draws then closer to God’s-Self, in a knowing, loving and unmistakable relationship.