“At this stage of my life, pursuing a relationship with my creator is very important to me: seeking out something greater than myself; knowing and believing that there is something greater; having faith that we as humanity know there’s something greater that we should all be reaching out for. That would probably reunite us and give us more cohesive ways to deal with the problems we’re facing right now.

I think I pursued that relationship when I was young, but a lot of things got in the way. We get older, though, a lot of things get out of the way. Our children grow up and go their ways. We have fewer stresses and fewer problems. So we become more open-minded to the pursuit. We have more time. It’s almost like we’ve put our creator on hold while we’ve lived our lives; but now as we get to the end of our lives, we want to pursue him more. We have the time, the freedom, the desire… and the importance of that pursuit just becomes more evident to us. It should be the other way around, really, but materialism and all these other desires get in the way.

Faith has been a struggle. We’re bombarded with so much stuff. But I think true faith is an individual’s pursuit. When we pursue our faith through religion—we go to church, we pay our tithe, we find that a great deal of our teacher are so corrupt—it dims us and dulls us. We get a little apprehensive and pull out of all of that; we start to pursue him on our own. And, frankly, I think we do better when we pursue him on our own. Especially when we have someone else beside us that’s in that same kind of individual pursuit, and we can talk to them about it. Conversation between like-minded people helps us get where we need to be. I have a lot of friends who pulled out of religion because of mistrust and all that stuff. But the desire—the pursuit—is still there, I don’t think it ever goes away.”