Last week I did something I have not done in a decade.

I prayed.

It was difficult. I stumbled in the beginning. I felt foolish. I had rejected God for so long and now that things were falling apart in my life, suddenly I wanted God to make it all better. But that evening the walls were closing in on me, and prayer was the only way out.

For the better part of ten years I dismissed religion completely. Even as a child, I vividly remember sitting in church thinking, "How do we know we're right?" The rigidity of Catholicism was stifling. Sit, stand, kneel. Don't do this, you'll burn in hell if you do that. I looked to science for proof that God did not exist. Religion was a story people had made up to comfort themselves about death and the unknown. I held steadfastly to that belief, reassuring myself that people who bought into religion were just too uneducated to know any better. And so I trudged along in life, rolling my eyes at "Coming to Jesus" stories and church services.

Coincidentally or not, I really stopped believing in God right around the time my mother was first diagnosed with cancer. She was too sick to drive us to church and I fell out of the habit of going. I didn't miss it. Sundays were for sleeping now. Besides, if there was a God, he wouldn't give people cancer. I didn't pray. I didn't do anything, really. That period of time is hazy. I didn't write about it; I didn't talk about it. Eventually she went into remission. She was better, no thanks to God.

She stayed better for a long time. But by my sophomore year in college she had gotten sick again, and from that point until the present she's been in and out of the hospital, receiving treatments, some conventional and others experimental. Her days are spent mostly sleeping. Her weight is dwindling. Two weeks ago she became violently ill. She woke up in the middle of the night, screaming in pain. She was vomiting and refusing to eat. My sister and father took her to the hospital, and it was in that window of uncertainty that I broke down.

Now I was the one who needed to be comforted about death and the unknown.

I was fully prepared to plan her funeral. I was ready to fly home, black dress in tow. I was thinking about how my life would be without my mother. Taylor came over; I said I couldn't be alone. I heaved into his arms. He said nothing. The pain was tearing away at my insides. I felt utterly exhausted. I just can't do this, I thought. I just can't do this.

While I lay in bed that night, wondering if I'd ever see my mother alive again, I looked at this situation from a scientific perspective. Rogue cells in her body had begun developing too quickly and had become defective. That was her cancer. These cells would slowly destroy her organs and her body would be unable to function properly. In a matter of time her organs would fail and she would die. She would decompose, and then only a skeleton would remain.

That was the science of it, and that wasn't good enough.

I greatly respect science; after all, my mother's life has been prolonged because of drugs borne from science. But at as I lay there, awake as ever, watching my mother march steadily towards the hour of her death, science was of no aide. I had to know that my mom would end up somewhere beautiful after the earthly hell she'd been living in for so long. I had to know she'd experience comfort and serenity. I had to know that in death, she'd do more than just push daisies. I had to find faith.

That night, I let logic fall to the wind. I couldn't reason with this disease. I couldn't live with this suffocating pain any longer. I needed to let God take over, and I felt so foolish about it. Foolish because here I was, asking a being I had been so sure was just a fairy tale all along to bail me out. It sounds crazy, but I felt like I was being led to God. Like he was calling out to me to trust him. It was okay that I'd rejected him all these years. I just had to talk to him.

I told him how scared I was. I asked him to please, please, please let my mother be okay. I didn't want her to die yet because there's so much I wanted her to see. But if he was ready to take her, I would be thankful that she would be free of pain. And then I fell asleep.

I woke up feeling a bit lighter. I was still worried, I still couldn't eat. I felt that I was no longer in control, and that was strangely comforting. That day dragged on for a thousand years as I waited for her diagnosis via text message. Finally, at 11 that evening, my sister told me it was a blockage. It wasn't life-threatening and they'd do a simple procedure to remove it. When I read the words, my eyes shut and I inhaled deeply. Many times, I've uttered the words "Thank God." But that night, I really did thank God. I knew he had heard me. I didn't care how stupid or naive that sounded. I didn't care if my friends thought I was losing it or thought I was being sucked into the Bible Belt. Because of God I had solace, and that I couldn't deny.

It's been a few weeks and my mom is home, doing well. But she still has cancer and it's still not going away. And I'm still wondering when the other shoe will drop; wondering when I really will fly home for her funeral. But this time around I have faith in God. Because I can't face death on my own. I can't watch her deteriorate on my own. I can't walk down this horrid, dark path on my own and no human can comfort me like my renewed faith can. I still believe in evolution. I still greatly respect science and medicine. I don't buy into homosexuality being a sin. For me, coming to God has been a deeply personal and intense experience. I didn't get here because a missionary convinced me that I should; I got here because I was led here. Really. I've heard so many people talk like that, and I've thought every single one of them was loopy. But I found that in my darkest hour, when I couldn't run any longer, I had no choice but to believe.