“Om Namah Shivaya,” I chanted for the hundred and eighth time as I opened my eyes, blinded by the light of the sun shining through the temple’s windows. I looked around, and all I could see was people chanting their prayers and mantras. Then, I looked in front of me, and there it was: a stone idol of Lord Shiva - one of the many religious figures in Hindu worship that I had been praying to every Sunday since preschool. I was tired of coming here every Sunday to worship a rock - to worship an inanimate object that everyone around me believed was God. “Does God even exist?” I asked myself. How could someone prove the existence of a supernatural being who created the universe? Moreover, why did all of these people around me believe in it in the first place? This event occurred while I was in fifth grade and prompted the time I questioned God’s existence. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrinnnnnnnnnnnnggggggg! The temple bell rang, dismissing me for the day. My unanswered questions about God seemed to vanish into thin air because I knew that I was not independent - I still depended on my parents to take care of me, and I knew they thought I was not ready to have my own beliefs about God yet. As I rode home in the car, my inquisitiveness on this topic had gone away like a snowstorm in Mississippi, and it was not to come back for a long time.

      “A singularity is an infinitely small hot area with infinite pressure and density, and it created the universe,” said Dr. K, my eighth-grade science teacher, as she showed my science class how a singularity created the universe. I began having flashbacks to the day in the temple in fifth grade when I began to question God’s existence. My head started spinning, and I started to feel sick - I would do anything to forget the day I realized I was worshiping a rock. Suddenly, questions started to form in my head, faster than a rocketship flies into space. Once again, I started asking myself questions like, “Does God even exist?” or “Why do people believe in God if his/her existence is not proven?” However, unlike fifth grade, I was more independent now, and I wanted answers to my questions more than my little brother wanted his toys. Thus, I began my quest to figure out my own beliefs.

      “God, if you exist, make it start raining!” I screamed out into the distance in front of my house. Nothing happened - the sky remained sunny, blue, and cloudless, just like it had been before. I continued experimenting with this, trying to talk to God, but everything remained the same. It was almost as if God was not there. Then, a central question formed in my mind - Has God’s existence been proven yet? I already knew the answer to that question: no. Then, I asked myself another question: “Has God’s existence been disproven?” Once again, the answer was no. If God’s existence was not yet proven, but there was no way to disprove it either, which path was I supposed to follow? I found myself amidst a two-sided conflict that I couldn’t seem to solve. I looked at my front door, towering above me like a skyscraper, and I wanted to run inside, to give up on this search to find the answers. It was like my brain was at a deadlock between these two spiritual paths. Furthermore, this deadlock made me realize that I would need to dig even deeper into the realm of spirituality to find my true beliefs. This new sense of looking at the issue gave way to the outcome of this time of questioning: I now had an irresistible urge to figure out my own religious beliefs, a mystery which I would now embark on a journey to discover.