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I got into a conversation the other day with a friend about what I’ll call “moments of clarity.” Initially we were just talking about religion and god and all that sort of stuff, which I find endlessly interesting. She’s a christian, she attends church regularly, she absolutely believes in god… you get the drift.

I asked her if at any point in her life she had an experience or set of experiences that reaffirmed her belief in god. I wanted to know if there there was an experience that she walked away from thinking to herself something along the lines of…

“No one could deny god’s existence if he/she could stand in my shoes right now, having experienced what I just experienced.”

The first example she gave me was a car accident that she survived a few years earlier. She explained to me how god had saved her and it was his will that let her live. Now, you have to understand that despite having thought long and hard about god and religion, I was still so naive and ignorant to christianity that I didn’t know that people actually believe in the devil. For some reason I thought that people believe in god, but that no one took seriously the concept of a devil. What an idiot I was to assume that.

So, after she explained to me how god had allowed her to survive the accident, the first question that came to my mind was…

“If god saved you from the accident, then who or what caused it?”

Being ignorant of the concept of the devil, I fully assumed that the answer had to be that god not only saved her from dying but also caused the accident to happen, and that his will is mysterious (or something like that). However, I was shocked when she told me that it was the devil who had caused the accident. I had to clarify to make sure I was hearing correctly.

“The devil caused your car accident– the one that almost killed you– but it was god who stepped in just in the nick of time to save you?”

I figured that the next question was obvious, but it actually seemed to catch her off guard. I asked…

“If the devil caused the accident, and god saved you from dying in it (after all, he’s all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good), then why didn’t god just prevent the accident from occurring in the first place?”

She stared at me blankly.