May Your God Go With You

Written on 27 January 2005

I proudly showed a friend my new homepage, expecting high praise for my amateur efforts. Instead, at the first page I recieved a surprising and disappointing question,
"You don't believe in God, so why do you write for your visitors, 'May your God go with you'?"

That my friend said, "You don't believe in God," already shows that she missed the point.
She also did not understand the difference between my God and someone else's God.
She also did not understand that I should want someone to be accompanied and protected by their own God, just because I believe in something else, or nothing at all.

It all comes down to how one defines God. If everyone in the world were to write down what God really meant for them, most people would write something unique. Some would write nothing at all, but only because they could not find the words to describe their ideas. Some would write only what their religious leaders had brain-washed them with, without understanding the words. However, we all believe in something, without a belief, we would spend our entire lives doing nothing more than running around procreating, eating and sleeping. Yes, I know there are some of us who do that anyway, but even the most primitive of us know that there is more than that to being a human.

The real reason for going on from day to day, eating, drinking, producing children and working is a highly complicated mixture of everything that is important to each individual, the sum total of our hereditary genes, upbringing, education and experience, and is unique to each individual. The real reason for living IS God. Therefore, each and everyone of us has his own highly personal God that is right for him, and him alone, not for any other person in the whole big wide world. A God that goes with him wherever he goes. God exists only in one's beliefs, and one cannot leave one's beliefs behind on the hall table like forgetting the car keys, anymore than one needs to go to church to be reminded of God.

I enter churches for births and deaths, or just to wonder at the, sometimes, amazing architecture. I do not kneel before my bed each night to pray. But I believe there is something that makes it worth getting up in the morning to greet another day. I also believe I must respect other people's Gods, as long as these people do not use their God as an excuse to attack me, or my way of life.

Therefore, when I wish visitors to my homepage, "May your God go with you." it is a sincere wish to my fellow human beings that their beliefs may stay strong enough to guide and protect them through each day of their lives, through each decision, through each grief, and through each moment of joy.

last updated on 13 March 2010