God

With God as my witness, I witnessed God.

They’ll say I’m delusional or that I was drug addled but I don’t care because I saw what I saw and God saw that I saw.

At the time I was living in a bedsit in a seedy part of town. I was paying £45 per week for the room which was maybe 14ft by 12 ft, a single bed, a tiny little kitchen area at the foot of the bed with a fridge and two burner stove. In the corner of the room was a meter that took fifty pence pieces to power the electric. If you ran out of fifties you had to go to the corner shop for change, or else just retire early to bed. The toilet and shower were down the corridor and shared with the other residents of the house.

I was earning around £700 a month doing a job I hated. It was my first office job, my first venture into IT. Still painfully shy in my mid-twenties I struggled away in the office, programming in near silence. If I ever asked a question I was always told ‘just do it the traditional way,’ but I had no clue what the traditional way was. To me programming was sorcery by trial and error. Add eye of newt and toe of frog (chicken nuggets?) stir it up and see how it runs. If a program ever ran as intended, I was always wide-eyed with gleeful shock. Back then my programs would be saved to CD and shipped off to the client where the duct tape and wire that held it together would soon peel away and come loose, the client phoning in to say the code wasn’t working. My claims that ‘it worked for me,’ rang hollow even to me. I mean it mostly worked for me, when I cradled it and told it I loved it. The company owner was a narcissist who would ignore me for months on end. At one point he ended a three month streak of ignoring me to ask me to do some overtime that weekend.

Time in my bedsit was usually spent ruminating on how much I disliked my job. I’d worked hard to get a job in IT and now my job was my greatest source of unhappiness. Not just my job but work in general, and trying to find meaning in my fearful life. How could I ever escape my situation.

One evening I lay on my bed and fell into the most intense turmoil. Issues from my past deluged me like a tropical storm so intense I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t lay still. I was in perpetual motion tossing and turning in a world of emotional pain. And then I said it. I’d never asked it before; I’d never even thought to ask it. I asked God to show himself to me. I knew I was being crazy. But at the same time I knew my question made sense. Somehow, I knew I would get an answer.

Stuck on the ceiling of my bedsit were some yellowy-green plastic stars. I believe they are supposed to absorb light during the day and glow at night when it’s dark. I remember I used to have them in my bedroom at home when I was a kid. Well, these stars typically glow about as brightly as my personality did at that time. That is until that moment when I asked God to show himself to me. There are on the ceiling these stars that I had hardly noticed before began to glow in patterns, in a glorious merry dance and I was mesmerised, awed and terrified. I stopped thrashing. I lay stuck on the bed as though strapped to a gurney, looking up as the stars shone and dimmed in heavenly majesty. I wanted it to go on forever. Time lost meaning. It might have been five minutes, it might have been an hour but eventually the stars settled and dimmed back to normality. My agnostic mind was blown. What I felt went beyond emotion.

The following day I went to work. I was confused and scared. I couldn’t concentrate on my job. I was scared because now I knew that God existed, and I was terrified of his judgement. I pushed Him out of my mind. In the evenings I was drinking more, sat on my bed drinking cans of lager. Each night I checked the stars; they never glowed that way again. To be fair I never asked the question again. I didn’t dare. But if I had I know the stars would not have danced again. It wasn’t something that I could make happen or conjure up. For some reason, in that moment God chose to show himself to me. I’ve only ever told this story to one or two people, and then never whilst sober. It sounds a bit silly. He showed Himself to me in a manner that wouldn’t convince anyone. You were feverish they’d say. You were inebriated. Slowly but surely, I became agnostic once again.