When Martin Luther was riding back home after attending university and he got caught in a horrible storm where lightning struck near him. In fear for his life, he yelled to the sky that he would become a monk if he could survive the night. Lo and behold, he survived the night and went on his way to become a monk and later the leader of the Protestant Reformation.

For a few years I've tried to overlook the heavier religious aspects of the holidays because I had been grappling with my own religion or lack thereof.

Growing up I went to a Baptist church almost every Sunday and on Wednesday's was part of the church's youth group memorizing bible verses and holding hands with kids I barely liked and singing songs I didn't try to memorize. At the time, it all seemed so meaningless and that I was just going through the motions I was told I had to go through so I wouldn't be condemned to hell.

At some point, I was (forced) urged to sit through the Passion of the Christ movie and was effectively in fear of my soul. I started to fear the very God that I was supposed to love and look up to. As I grew older and my peers began to question their own religion it begged the question "Why would I want to love someone that made me fear for my afterlife?"

After I stopped going to church regularly and was able to widen my horizons I just found more and more things wrong with the religion I had once studied fervently. I believed in the right to get married for everyone, no matter what sexual orientation or gender. I'm pro-choice and I don't believe that someone should be shamed for not waiting until marriage to have sex. So what God would want a person like me following them? Why would I want to follow a God that smited the people that I cared for?

I found solace in researching more religions across the globe only to find that every religion has its good points and its bad points. Time would prove to show that not all of the old laws would apply to the new times. (After all, you don't see human sacrifice very often anymore.) I let go of old grudges and just let everyone do what they thought was best, but allowed myself to be in a grey area of still discovering.

A lot of time has passed and I still found myself unable to really answer the question of what I believed in until a short time ago. Some people call it a religious awakening and others may just say I was touched by the Holy Spirit. But somewhere along the way I found my God, from within me, softly calling me to a good path. I may find a proper name for it someday but now I'm okay with just knowing that some big entity, bigger and wiser than any being, is out there doing things for a bigger purpose.

I can't give you a long drawn out story about how I found my religion again, but I can tell you in a moment of quiet desperation I asked for a sign to let me know I wasn't all alone and that one day, some day it would all be better. It didn't happen in a loud clatter of lightning and no oracle came to tell me good things. It was just a sweet wash of calm and a voice telling me to go to bed. It was how the sun shined through my blinds to wake me up softly and the way the wind blew to ruffle my hair as if to let me back into the world slowly. There was someone leading me so gently like a parent holding onto the handles of your first bike letting you know that someone was there.