conversation not only allowed you to undertake these explorations, but millions of others
along with you. They did so vicariously, through your three published books, which have
been eagerly read worldwide—a huge signal that the general public is willing now, too.
Are you “able” now to know Me, and thus have more than just a conversation, but also a
friendship, with God?
Yes, because I have had no trouble moving from my old beliefs about You to an acceptance
of the new ideas about You which were given me in the Conversations. In fact, to be truthful,
many of those ideas were ideas I already had.
In this sense, the CWG trilogy was not so much a revelation as it was a confirmation.
My mail over the past five years tells me it was that way for thousands of others as well. And
this is as good a place as any to tell the story of how the book was written.
The Conversations with God dialogue was not written as a book. Unlike the material I am
now writing. I had no idea, when the dialogue began, that it was ever going to see print. As
far as I knew, I was having a private process, to which no one else would ever be privy.
That process began on a night in February of 1992 when I was on the verge of falling into
chronic depression. Nothing had been going right in my life. My relationship with my
significant other was kaput, my career had hit a dead end, and even my health was failing.
Usually in my life it had been one thing or another, but now it was everything at once. The
whole construction was collapsing, and I couldn’t seem to do anything to stop it.
It wasn’t the first time that I’d stood by helplessly, watching what I had thought would be a
permanent relationship dissolve right before my eyes.
Nor was it the second, or third, or fourth.
I was becoming very angry about my inability to hold a relationship together, my apparent
total lack of understanding about what it takes to do that, and the fact that nothing I tried
seemed to work.
I was coming to feel that I had simply not been given the equipment to play the game of Life,
and I was furious.
My career wasn’t going any better. Things had pretty much dwindled to nothing, my over
thirty years of hovering around the broadcasting and journalism businesses reaping pitifully
meager rewards. I was forty-eight years old with nothing much to show for a half century on
the planet.
Not surprisingly, my health had taken a downhill turn as well. I’d suffered a broken neck in a
car accident a few years before and hadn’t ever fully recovered. Prior to that in my life, I’d
had a collapsed lung and suffered from ulcers, arthritis, and severe allergies. I felt at forty-
eight as if my body was falling apart. And so it was that on a February night in 1992, I awoke
with anger in my heart.
Tossing and turning as I tried to go back to sleep, I was a mountain of frustration. Finally, I
threw back the covers and stomped out of the bedroom. I went where I always go in the mid-
dle of the night when I’m seeking wisdom—but there was nothing decent in the refrigerator,
so I found myself on the couch instead.