I was a very happy atheist. I proclamed loudly that Christians were people who needed a featherbed to protect themselves from the realities of life. I faced those realities with the calm confidence of youth. I believed that when I died that was the end of me and I was OK with that. I'd just have a good life and go into oblivion without a regret and at least I didn't have to worry about Hell!
During this period I met and married my agnostic husband and we had our first two children. Oddly enough, as we planned our wedding it seemed as though neither of our families would be attending for completely opposite reasons. Mine because I wasn't getting married in a Catholic Church, and my husband's because he was marrying a Catholic! It made no difference that I had left the church. But by God's grace we did finally get married in the Church. My family had been very upset when I stopped going to church and became a very aggressive atheist but worse was to come. A few months before the wedding one of my younger sisters was killed in a road accident. This was a shocking grief to us all but completely devastated my mother. Despite my beliefs I couldn't cause her any more pain, so we had a quiet wedding in our Catholic church.
This was going to be my last ever church service, but the God in whom I didn't believe, had other ideas.
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