The message of this old spiritual, sung by thousands of gospel choirs and soloists, probably is most often interpreted as one of comfort and reassurance that God is watching over each of us individually. Certainly that interpretation helped my mother through her years of pain and challenge as a single parent.

But the message came to me with quite a different meaning. In the fundamentalist church of my youth, it was yet another warning that I had better behave in a Christian way, because if God could keep an eye on every sparrow, He could surely keep an eye on me and would know when I did anything sinful. The idea of an all-knowing and all-seeing God became a heavy burden.

I admit that I gave up on Christianity for a long time. I figured we all might be better off if we just gave Jesus a rest for a while. The more I saw of some Christians and how they seemed to want to recreate our world in an image I would not be able to recognize as “Christian,” the more I thought, Why encourage them by even participating?

At the same time, I realized deep within me that I was a Christian, but it had not been a smooth path. Even as a high school student, I found myself growing more and more skeptical of religion as I was experiencing it as a young person in the Protestant South, so when I finally went off to college I stopped going to church altogether. Yes, I felt guilty from time to time, and when I shuttled back and forth between the homes of my divorced parents, I went to church with them. My father was a Southern Baptist minister, and when I visited him, I was even asked occasionally to lead the congregational singing. But if those churches hadn’t included among the congregants a supply of dateable girls, I’d have been a lot less interested in worship.

In those days, I never heard the phrase “spiritual journey.” While many college students at that time must have studied matters of religion and philosophy, I in my journalism/English education did not get any of that—and I can assure you that religion and the inner life were not part of our late-night dormitory discussions.

In the 1970s, when I was in my late forties, I found myself associating with people who had an entirely different orientation to religion and to spirituality. When introduced to Jung and the idea of a universal unconscious, I was astounded, as I was later when reading about synchronicity. Fritjof Capra’s and Gary Zukav’s writings about the mysteries of quantum mechanics delighted and fascinated me on the one hand, and emphasized how ignorant I was on the other. But that ignorance became a quest to learn more about the mysteries of the world, mysteries that seemed to me connected to a power beyond anything we could define or identify, except perhaps as the great unknown, the higher power, the ultimate reality, God. Yet at that time, I did not feel the church would offer me the opportunity to learn and grow as I wanted.

Friends became my teachers and let me hitchhike on their spiritual journeys, and those kindnesses helped me get closer to my own path. I went to weekend spiritual retreats of various kinds, associated mostly with the human potential movement or what some people like to call “New Age” philosophy (although I’ve never been able to define that term.)

I have fundamentalist Christian friends and family who seem threatened by the “New Age,” its focus on connectedness, and its openness to Eastern philosophy and religion, but to the contrary it was through these experiences that I found my way back to my Christian faith. I had worked hard to learn to meditate, without much success, but finally I came back to prayer. However, it was a different kind of prayer: not prayers focused on my laundry list of what I want God to give me, but prayers focused on others.

The story of a fundamentalist-reared Christian rebelling against his upbringing and then finding his way back to religion is an old story, and I won’t beat it to death again on these pages. But fast-forwarding through and looking back at the years — marriage, children, divorce, remarriage, careers, and success, with traditional church-going as well as experimentation with other religions and spiritual disciplines interspersed throughout—I realize that I have experienced the presence of the divine many times, and still seek to experience it many more times. Some people refer to that as a spiritual quest. I call it “looking around for God.”

I think it’s important to keep on looking because I believe God is partly in the looking itself. Besides, I never know where I might just happen upon God, perhaps someplace I’ve looked a thousand times but never noticed God was there. I could even say God sneaks up on us, but the fact is that God is always there; we just have trouble seeing God, not because we keep looking in all the wrong places—there are no wrong places—but because we are looking at the wrong angle or we are wearing the filter of our expectations. We expect to find God in a certain place or in a certain way; we expect signs from the heavens; we expect to find God where we want God to be.

In fact, I’m sure that experiencing the divine depends on each person’s life circumstances or background or interests. The nature lover, the musician, the poet, the scholar, the athlete may more readily find God within those experiences. Mies van der Rohe once said about architecture that “God is in the details.”

Having spent my life as a generalist, I don’t think I had a particular filter of expectation, and perhaps that’s why I began to see God popping up here and there. At first I didn’t recognize what was happening, but I knew something had happened. I felt touched, visited, even transformed in my thinking.

From those unexpected and surprising times that I felt “with” God, I began to open myself to the possibilities that God was all around me and that I would do well to be attentive. This is probably another way of saying I wanted to remain open to the presence, or the possibilities, of God. I realize, even in saying this, that I risk sounding phony, like some otherworldly spiritual seeker who, having now found God, is passionate to share the inner journey with others, to show the way, to witness.

Nothing of the sort. I don’t fancy myself a guru, prophet, or even a seeker for that matter. I’m a writer and poet, a former jet fighter pilot, editor, and business executive. I claim no theological credentials, no enlightenment or road-to-Damascus conversion experience, no spiritual insights, no nothing. I claim only to have found that, although my Christianity may be unconventional, I nonetheless profess it because those values are deeply part of my consciousness. I can accept the community and ritual and liturgy of the church and I can participate fully in it without being controlled by the institution of it; I can accept and respect and learn from the truths of other faiths because I realize that no religion has the only truth; and most important, I can find God if only I pay attention to everything and everyone around me.

I think the true message of that old spiritual is not just that God has an eye on the sparrow. It’s that God is demonstrating that if these details are worth God’s attention, they are certainly worth ours. It may be that we will more readily find God in the details of this world, and of our own lives, than anywhere else.

In assembling these personal essays and stories and poems, I have had two goals. One was to share how God has been revealed in many different circumstances of my life. I’ve not attempted to be explicit about that in every instance, hoping it will be self-evident. My second goal was to draw on the experiences of my own journey to comment on the Christian churches of my experience and offer a few ideas for how they might better serve in making God’s love and presence manifest in the world.

Some of you may find here irreverence—perhaps even heresy—but I fervently believe that these writings are, at their heart, deeply reverent.

My greatest hope is that these words will be helpful to you and perhaps will stimulate you to begin your own journey. If you’ve read this far, you may already have begun.

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