Help!”It was a cry from deep inside me: “Please make my little son better! Make his fever go away!” I guess I was praying - and I didn’t even believe in God. I thought of us as the spokespeople of the New Consciousness. The newspapers called us “hippies.” But that night, in the emergency room of a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, I was just an ordinary young dad. And I had done what so many of us did back in those days - left a job, packed the family into an old converted school bus and headed off into the great “out there.”

But three days on the road, somewhere near Nashville, Tennessee, the fever hit Eric with a vengeance. He was two years old, and our comfortable little ranch house and my job were all back in Long Island, New York. The ER was busy. Of course the fever was my fault. It had been my idea to sell our house and furniture and move into the camper.

We sat there in the crowded hallway of the ER for more than an hour. After more than an hour, the young intern came and said, “Well, it’s some sort of a flu virus. He’ll be ready to go home in a few minutes.” I’d always been a seeker and an agnostic, which I defined as sort of fence-sitting, hanging around waiting for some sort of enlightenment.

I still have my problems with belief, but I’ll never forget how my cry was heard that night, my cry from deep within. This God, whom I said I didn’t believe in, had somehow saved my little son. And, in the process, me. — Beliefnet.com