It was in May, and I was in second grade, walking home from Sacred Heart School. It was a sunny Friday afternoon. The next day I would receive my 1st communion. My parents had bought me my first blue serge suit, and I was carrying home the rest: a white clip-on tie, a white plastic-covered prayerbook, a small baptismal candle, and a small black rosary in a tiny black case. We had our last practice, and I being the shortest kid in class, had to go first and lead the others.(The chances for the "missing man formation" was multiplying in my mind.) As I got closer to home, I can remember thinking "God is all around me."

A couple years later, I became an acolyte and then a reader and then a sacristan and then an organist, and with the exception of a couple years in California, have been employed in the service of the Church most of my life. I have had serious doubts about religion and spirituality, I have gone past atheism and back, studied Zen and read the Talmud. I would probably be fully back in the Catholic Flock were it not for the mindless shepherds.

But through it all, thanks to sincere religious people who taught me how to "pray constantly", very rarely have I thought that God is not around me.  Some have tried to tell me that there's someone out to punish me, far away, yet always watching me. I managed to reject that while still keeping a personal faith.

Now I am still a church musician, I direct a choir of some of the most sincere singers I've ever worked with. I set up the utensils and vessels in preparation for mass. It was while carrying the unconsecrated hosts and wine to the back of the church that God's insight  came to me: "The miracle is not in the transformation, but in the belief in the transformation."
"God is all around me."