According to research conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life in 2010, roughly 55 percent of the human population believes in the existence of a higher mind that guides their lives. I’d never been one of that majority until I came to the American South.

1. The background.

Growing up, I never thought about God. My country, Turkmenistan, became independent of the atheistic Soviet Union six years before I was born, so I grew up in a household where adults didn’t believe in, or talk about, God. Of course, I knew that some people believed. Some of my classmates went to church, and some of my classmates went to mosque. The neighborhood mosque chanted a morning prayer on a loud speaker at 5 a.m., and it resonated off the walls of my house. I had a good life growing up, so I guess I didn’t feel a need for God.

Books were perhaps what opened to me the mystery of faith. I remember reading about Robinson Crusoe, the sole survivor of a shipwreck on a deserted isle, who organized his life until it was not only bearable, but luxurious with all comforts of a settled agrarian, and then started feeling empty. He was alone, and it weighed on him. That’s when he started reading the scripture. The strange intensity of his faith and the relief he obtained from it astonished me.

Then, my family broke into a spectrum of religious views. My sister decided to be baptized, and my mom started attending a mosque while dad still didn’t believe it all, and I was caught in between. I was a teenager, and if that doesn’t say enough, I will clarify: I thought it was dumb. All of it. I wasn’t buying their faith, and seeing my mother kneel on a prayer rug made me uncomfortable like I was at a bad play.

2. Discovering Christianity.

Then, I came to America and went to a church for the first time, but still felt just as out of place as I did in a room with my praying mother. Small group was the only place I opened Bible. I couldn’t understand it on my own and for a while thought of holy trinity as God having Horcruxes.

When I was a freshman at Troy, I went to different churches, and all of them were very nice, but I didn’t know what I was doing there. I think I just liked the people who went to church and sought to be more like them and failed. I felt like I was pretending to be someone I was not because while I could imitate what they did, I didn’t feel the way they did. I had no faith. I felt fake next to my good RA, Kirsten, whose face lit up when she was in church as much as when she was with people. It seemed to me that faith manifested itself in her through hard work, kind words and lots of love for people. I couldn’t understand how she could be so good.

This year it really kicked in, the whole faith thing. I took on a leadership position, started working in a fast food industry, writing articles and drawing cartoons for the newspaper, on top of my 15 credit hours. And it was hard. I won’t get into describing it because there is already a very good story about it by Olivia Walleser, which you can check out here. But the point is, for the first time I was struggling to adult: to pay my bills, to keep my promises and to work with people. I became an emotional wreck, a bundle of nerves under pressure ready to explode when something went wrong. I think I started hating people. They had it easy in my eyes, and I was the only one who struggled. I would be filled with hatred and raging storms all of a sudden and didn’t know what to do about it. I felt as lonely as Robinson Crusoe on his island in a university with a 6,000 students. And there was no escape from this island that’s my head, so I thought I might have to make it habitable. So I went to church again to see if it will help me get relief from these persistent angry thoughts that I knew were not a part of me.

And it was different this time. Maybe it was the atmosphere of the South or "Blue Like Jazz" or "Paradise Lost," but I felt different about God. I decided that God was good, like the peace and joy of a bright spring Sunday when water falls with a roar on the globe fountain and cedars rustle in the breeze overhead. That’s what I felt that day in church, and I wanted to feel that way all the time. I didn’t want to imitate the good people around me anymore because that got me nowhere before. I wanted a principle by which to live in faith. So I tried to hear what was in the center of Christianity, which, of course, as I found out later, is the imitation of Christ. So I just had to figure out what he was all about. I was surprised to see his name in a philosophy book, but it makes sense because religion is philosophy. And his philosophy, from what I understood, was one of love.

3. Application.

Then I heard one of Troy’s best professors, Mr. McCall, share his favorite saying “If I get to know you, I will love you,” and went about the business of getting to know people around me. Like really getting to know them. I made the effort to look at them, notice their mood, remember their dreams, follow up on that test they had in the morning, to find out about their parents and siblings, and what worries them when they toss and turn in bed. And I realized that people around me are all very complex, tangible and struggle just the same. Before, I believed I was the only one who struggled, so I was waiting for other people to ask me questions, and when they didn’t it made me miserable, unloved and unwanted and very lonely because others would not come to my island to cheer me up, when I could have just sailed to theirs. I should have been the one asking questions all along.

The thing I learned is that receiving love is easy, but love is not something you get from others; it is something that you feel when you make the choice to see the person sitting across from you and to love him or her as a precious creation of God that they are. You have to choose to love people. And that’s what Jesus was all about, right? He preached on the mountain that we must love our neighbors even if they don’t love us; even if they make it hard to love them, we just have to remember to get to know them. Even if we don’t have the time to get to get to know them, we have to accept that they have a past that makes them the way they are. So to be with God, I just had to do as the man on the mountain did -- love people. Now every time I feel angry or don’t know what to do, it’s like there is a pop-up in my head saying “What would the man on the mountain say?” and I am humbled because I know he would be kind even to me, as confused and angry as I was. And I set sail from my island where angry thoughts chase me like demonic children with sticks. I set sail to another person’s island to see what they are up to until my demons settle down.