The other day I listened to a 94-year-old man talk about God on a social media post.

He was a professor of physics at a prestigious university for 38 years. He believed that when we die, there is no light, just total darkness, nothing more of an existence.

The professor admitted that he feared his own death from the very thing that he had been teaching for nearly four decades.

His wife of 51 years was dying of cancer. Just before she took her last breath, she held his hand and told him she was not afraid and that she was just passing through a door into something so very beautiful.

Her last words to her husband were: “Stop being so stubborn, dear. I’m just going to be on the other side, and I’ll see you when you get there.”

Witnessing his wife’s unwavering faith overwhelmed the professor, and the evolutionary ideas he had taught of how the universe had come to be, he now believes no more. He looks forward to seeing his wife again.

Despite what she said about what’s on the other side and what religious indoctrination we may have attained, there remains no undeniable proof that a superior being waits to greet us after we close the door on this world.

I was raised in the Catholic faith. I loved the liturgy of the Word that explicitly defines our destinies after we die. I read the “Word of the Lord” at Mass and then became a eucharistic minister who served Holy Communion standing next to our pastor.

I embraced my faith, and yet, deep inside me, I was somewhat cynical about the presence of God based upon what’s written in the Bible. God did not write the Bible, nor did his Son. Eyewitness accounts were recorded by men, imperfect human beings like us. What they saw and what they heard have been accepted as truth by millions of Christians, including their accounts of the many miracles they saw.

To put my cynicism into an example, I am to believe that God’s only son walked on water, but to believe Santa Claus flies on a sleigh pulled by reindeer would be grounds for my admittance into an institution for the insane.

Furthermore, I wanted a personal relationship with God that I couldn’t feel from the Bible, but an early 19th century philosopher was able to do that for me.

I was teaching American literature to high school students when a writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson convinced me of God’s presence. Emerson rejected institutional religions preached from pulpits in man-made churches. He said that the only true churches built by God were the woods, the mountains, valleys, lakes and oceans, any natural setting not constructed by man. Emerson said that we must experience nature to feel God’s presence.

“Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere,” he wrote.

Ever since I was a child playing in the woods by my house, I had felt something within the sights and sounds of nature, as if the wind was gently touching my face with a blessing from the sky above.

“God enters a private door into every individual,” Emerson wrote. Within his ideas, I was able to connect the dots between me and the universe.

Scientists say the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. It operates on a highly efficient and purposeful system that sustains relationships where creatures and plants benefit one another. Philosopher Wayne Dyer said that this remarkable organic system of life proves the universe had to have been created by a designer, and could not have evolved from a molecular explosion that fails to explain the wonder of how everything works so well together.

What does this designer look like? No one alive has ever seen God. Many religions have tried to depict God as humanlike with a face and a figure, a man who lives in the sky who makes judgments of human behavior.

I cannot envision a supernatural entity in any form of human physicality. I avoid using he, she or any personal pronouns. Since every human is imperfect, why would a perfect God look anything like us?

The thought that an imperfect man and an imperfect woman gave birth to imperfect me through the will of a perfect entity is almost incomprehensible.

That makes me feel pretty darn special, and I hope that you feel special, too. We did not choose to be born, but something much greater than us, much more extraordinary than us, decided to give us life and make us a small, but a vital part of this majestic universe.

I have a sensory and spiritual awareness of the evidence of this incredible entity. I see God in the face of a young child. I can feel God through the spoken words of a good friend. I hear God through the voices of a choir singing Christmas songs. God flies on the wings of a butterfly, runs through the woods with a baby deer and touches my heart with hugs from the people I love.

I respect those who live their lives each day by biblical word, but for me, God is alive in the woman I love, in my son and daughter, in my friends and family, and in the people I have met not by coincidence, but through God’s will to bring us together.

Emerson wrote, “I am part and parcel of God.” He says that everything in the universe is a part of God and that we are gifts from God that make us uniquely who we are.

I sense God’s presence every day; that gives me peace of mind and no fear of whatever comes after death. I am comforted by the words of the professor’s dying wife.

“I’m just going to be on the other side, and I’ll see you when you get there.”

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com