faithI wasn’t brought up as a religious person. In fact, on our Easter holidays, when Mum and Dad would inevitably take my sisters and I to some camping ground in the Australian bush, you could frequently find me arguing with the local Christian group. They were the unofficial babysitters who provided free movies and activities for the kids and gave the adults some much-needed alone time.

From memory, my questions for these people usually featured the word ‘why’ a lot and relied heavily on rational and reasonable thought. I’m sure they cringed when they saw me coming and thought I was a pain in the backside.

My parents said we could decide what we believed when we grew up and, until then, our religion was officially Church of England. But we only went to church for weddings and there was definitely no Sunday School (thank goodness!).

As a teenager and then a younger adult I was a self-confessed atheist/agnostic. I guess I was hedging my bets with that stance.

A couple of years ago, a good friend (who’d known me in my 20s) asked me what I thought about God now. I’d just shared the story of my psychic awakening with her and I guess she was trying to get her bearings.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe in God like they teach you in the Bible and I still don’t buy into any religious doctrine. But I believe there is an energetic force that binds us all together.’

So I guess, despite all those cynical years spent harassing hapless Christians at the camping grounds, I have discovered faith after all. It is a faith that we are all connected; individual yet part of something bigger than ourselves. And I’ve realised that faith cannot be reasoned through. It is not about the rational mind. Instead it springs from a deep inner knowing based on what I’ve seen, felt and just know within my soul.

At 12 or 22 if you’d said I would learn we all have souls and return again and again to live in human form (thus explaining some of my déjà vu experiences), I would have dismissed your comments as fantastical. If you’d suggested I would eventually connect with spirit guides and family who’d passed over, I would have laughingly waved you away. And if you said I would uncover a strong capacity to feel what others were experiencing when they were nearby or even suburbs or oceans away, I would have felt very uncomfortable indeed.

But these days I know all those things to be true and I reflect on that mouthy teenager and shake my head. I gave those people in the campground such a hard time about their faith…and now I have discovered my own.

It’s funny how life turns out, isn’t it.