On our first date, the woman who later became my wife asked me, out of the blue, “What do you think about God?” My answer was brief: “Not much!” 

I had been raised in a traditional Protestant church, and during high school had become disenchanted with what I was learning there. Later, while in college, I decided that after I finished school I would spend some time seriously considering my relationship with God. After doing so, I concluded that while the moral precepts espoused by my religion made sense, a God who created and allowed all the sin, disease, lack, unhappiness, and death that we see in our daily lives did not make sense and wasn’t who or what I needed to spend time with.

Following my response, my future wife explained that she was a Christian Scientist and that her religion was very important to her. I have to admit that a relationship with someone who had two teenaged boys and a dog and was not close to my age didn’t exactly fit my plans at the time. Also, she had a strange religion that seemed to contradict my very matter-oriented engineering training. But as she explained the concept of material existence as an incorrect understanding of a good God’s creation, I was intrigued enough to try to understand what she was talking about.