It did not begin with the shower.

The shower was simply the Rubicon, the point beyond which there was no turning back. No truly meaningful personal change takes place in an instant--it can take years for us to notice that we have changed in any significant way--but that realization can happen in a single eureka moment, and can leave us breathless and amazed nonetheless. Indeed, the shower might have meant something utterly different than it did had I come to it with other ideas, other assumptions, other beliefs.

I know what happened. I felt that certainty in my bones, in my flesh, and that blood-certainty has never left me. My conscious mind can rationalize anything, but in the crucible of my heart, the truth remains pure and unaltered despite any alchemy of the intellect. Nothing I say, however, will convince anyone. You are free to derive whatever explanation from the following story that you wish.

But it is, after all, my story.  And like I said, I know what happened.

The story begins many years ago, with a fall that never took place. I was twelve. Our family took a trip to a state park a few hours away from our home in central West Virginia. The public area of the park was a rocky trail that snaked around the various prominences of a glacier-scarred hilltop. In some places, the path had been cut through solid rock; in others it passed through natural chimneys of stone. Tall, leafy trees were everywhere; the entire park seemed to exist under a high canopy of green specked with gray from the clouds overhead. It was overcast, but not raining. The day was cool and there was no wind.

Being twelve, I wanted to spend as litle time as possible with my family. The natural desire to escape them impelled me up a rock face that looked to be an easy climb. There was a ledge about twenty-five or thirty feet up from the boulder-strewn path and I made directly for it. Since it took me several minutes to reach the ledge, I became rather intimate with the rock face that I was climbing; searching for hand and foot holds, picking the best possible route of ascent. Tiny plants jutted from patches of dirt here and there, but nothing larger than a weed managed to eke life from the rock. The wall I was climbing was uneven and rough, an easy climb. I've never been a seasoned mountain climber, but young boys who live in small town West Virginia have little else to do other than climb on things; you get pretty good at it.

When I got to the ledge, it turned out to be less flat than it had looked from the ground, which was now thirty feet below. The ledge rose at an angle of about twenty degrees to the next tier of rough wall. Above that was the top of the hill. I decided to go for the gusto. I was wearing sneakers, not hiking boots, although it probably wouldn't have mattered either way. The ledge was smooth-looking and covered with a cirrus haze of green moss. I strode confidently up the slope, eager to take on the second-tier. I reached out my hands to begin the second stage of the ascent and took hold of what looked like a solid handhold.

It was not solid. Shale-like slivers of rock crumbled under my full weight and I dropped hard onto the ledge. I landed awkwardly and lost my footing, wheeling my arms as I tumbled backward. I hit the slope on my side and began to roll, skidding, totally out of control.

I thought, "I'm about to die." And I knew it was true because there was nothing to stop me from pitching over the end of the ledge and down the thirty feet to the rock path below. There was nothing to grab onto; everything was moving so fast. I just thought, "I'm about to die," and closed my eyes.

I slid to the end of the ledge, could feel my feet drop down over the edge, then something slammed into my stomach so hard it literally knocked the wind out of me; I exhaled in a weird, loud yelp. I was no longer in motion. The pain in my stomach was intense, but I didn't care; something had stopped my fall.

I opened my eyes and discovered that I was wrapped around the base of a tree, the trunk of which was not much thicker than my forearm. The tree was growing, rather impossibly, out of a solid rock face where just moments before no tree had been. A tree that until that moment had not existed had just saved my life.

I know what you're thinking. I simply didn't see the tree when I climbed up. I was confused by the fall. I fell toward a different section of the ledge. Something. There has to be some reasonable explanation. But when I finally stopped shaking long enough to unwrap myself from the tree, I saw that I had landed at exactly the place where I'd climbed up. There was only one possible route up the lower cliff face, and it was the one that I'd taken. Had the tree been present when I originally scaled the rock, I would have used it to pull myself up onto the ledge. But there had been no tree.

There had been no tree. I was certain of it. And now there was a tree.

I rarely tell this story, because I doubt that anyone will believe it, sometimes including myself. From that day to this, the event and its significance have baffled me. The reason that I mention it here is to give you fair warning that I am a person who has been forced by circumstance to reconcile at least one apparently miraculous event. The notion that I had been spared by God for some reason never occurred to me at the time, and still makes me uncomfortable. I don't like to think of God poking around in the fabric of the Universe, making trees spring up at opportune moments. It's weird. It raises questions better left unasked.

But here's the weirdest part: it seems as though many, if not most, people have had just such an experience. A story of being snatched from the jaws of certain death or maiming at the last moment by an extraordinary coincidence or set of circumstances. Granted, not all of these stories are as inexplicable as a miracle tree, but some are so improbable that they might as well be. The skeptic in me wants to say that over a lifetime everyone is bound to have experienced some event that they can't categorize, something that seems miraculous but simply is not. Wants to say that given enough time, the improbable becomes the inevitable.

But that doesn't even begin to explain my tree. The probability of a tree spontaneously coming into being is zero. If you accept that the tree was not there and then it was, then there can be no rational explanation for its existence. You have no choice but to consider that which is thought to be beyond nature.

So you would be excused for assuming that this was the day I began to believe in God. You'd be wrong, though. I didn't believe in God when I was twelve and it would be another fourteen years before I took the matter up seriously at all. Other things had to happen first: I would have to encounter a dead man in an elevator and I would have to go crazy, although not at the same time. I would have to experience something as terrible as grieving with my family over the loss of a child and I would have to do nothing more than read a book. Any of these things can lead a person to believe in God, or to lose faith in God. I don't know why they led me to God, or how they led me to a place where I could experience the reality of God's presence firsthand, and in a shower. This is just how it happened. What the pattern is, if any, remains to be seen.

Next: Phobos and Deimos