As a teenager, after my second year in high school, I took a backpack trip with two other friends for three weeks in the John Muir Wilderness of the Sierra Nevadas.
This was meant to be a life changing adventure for us, as we were on our own and carrying on our back everything we needed for our time away from civilization.
While the trip was a rite of passage event in my life, something even more significant occurred during that time away. One night, laying in my sleeping bag in the open next to a lake high above the tree line, I was gazing at the stellar display. The moon illumined the landscape around me.
As I was considering the heavens above and the earth around, I had an epiphany. All that I saw was not some purposeless organization of matter, as I had been taught in school and by the media. There was something behind all this. There was an orchestrator, a creator of all that is. The knowledge was intuitive, from the creation itself.
This glimpse of God, or at least the necessity of God, started me on a journey which I am still on today. The most important highlight along the way was encountering the risen and living Jesus Christ.