Looking for God in the Wrong Place

Sharleenne Farley

I was about ten years old when I concluded that God wasn’t going to answer my prayers. My parents divorced when I was seven. My sister, nine years older, figured out quicker than I, that our father wasn’t coming back home. No one seemed able to cheer my mother, so I thought I’d ask God’s help in this matter. Even though I prayed nightly, God did not respond. Instead I watched my mother gradually spiral into alcoholism. I decided that in the future, I would have to rely on others more dependable than God to help me. Although it would be many years before I would read Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance,” by the time I entered adolescence I had become quite an autonomous teenager. Even though my parents were struggling with their own problems, they took great pride in my sister’s and my educational achievements. School was my salvation and refuge. Intelligent, caring teachers mentored me, ensuring that I made wise decisions. God might not have heard me, but they did. For many years I did not contemplate whether God existed. Neither did I think much about the meaning of life, but life held great meaning for me. It came in the form of my children, my love of theater, books, and gardening. It came in the love I received from others and the love I gave back. It resided in the warm relationships I had with friends. When I entered my sixties, I began to revisit the notion of God and review my life journey. This reflection has enabled me to say that I now believe in God, but not the God of my childhood. I feel God as a spirit, an energy within me that first sustained me as a young child, then on through adolescence, young adulthood, and now into my later years. I sense that energy also in nature and in all other living things. Once I thought God irrelevant to my life. Now I realize I was mistaken. God was always there. I was just looking in the wrong place.