My expectation of good was explained

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.