I Needed Evidence Before I Got Weird

Senior Five. Break time. St. Mary's Kitende. I'm walking up from the canteen at the bottom, the one by the gate, near the O-level boys' dormitories, to the A-level boys' wing at the top, and I've got a flu. Nothing serious. The kind you'd sit through a class with.

I was low-key religious by then. Not properly. I'd started reading the stuff, but I was hanging back, because in Uganda the born-agains were the weird ones and I wasn't going to become weird without evidence. So I'm walking up the hill with a religious friend palying devil's advocate, half-arguing, half-testing and I'm like if this is real, prove it. I figure, I've got a flu, God does miracles. I want it healed. And somewhere on that walk the flu just went. Like instantly, my nose was clear. I wa amazed.

The next day I'm in class and the girl I liked walks in through the door. And I think: God, if you exist, make her walk over here. It wasn't a prayer. She had no interest in me whatsoever. So this prayer was a dare. Yesterday may have been a coicidence. To my absolute surprise, she walked over to my seat. I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember thinking surely there is a real God and he is involved in my life.

That was the evidence I needed. I was ready to become born-again. I went all in. Two days of tests. I gave the next seven years of my life to being a deeply committed born-again.

I'm religious but not as I was in those seven years. I want to believe the two miracles were coincidences. So I'm left reaching, and the two things I reach for don't agree. Some days I think the universe did this on purpose, pulled me into the church for a few years because there were things I needed to learn in there and wouldn't have learned any other way. Other days I think the gods just play games with us for their own amusement, and I happened to be the one that they played the joke on that week.