For me, believing in God was an alternative to death. At age 10 I got Blunt Trauma Childhood Epilepsy. Not very much was known about epilepsy then and my father and mother were more "Christian Science" in their beliefs so they didn't want me to take Phenobarbital (which is an awful drug anyway) so I was left with "Mind over matter" to survive my night time seizures about once every 6 months or so.
At first at age 10 my mother told me I had had a nightmare when I woke up with my head in my mother's lap on the floor. I only remembered being strangled by a "black hand" in my dreams so I thought that was all that had happened to me. Over time I came to realize that a "Black Hand" had physically strangled me in addition to being a nightmare. This was pretty terrifying in itself but that was a couple of years away in realizations for a boy.
By age 12 I had figured out that I wasn't (having a nightmare and that something physically awful was happening to me even though my parents tried to hide the truth from me. They were both scared I would die in one of these really awful seizures. At age 13 my parents finally took me to a doctor who recommended I take phenobarbital (my father said no) and he gave me B-12 shots in my posterior since my parents were raising me a Lacto-Ovo vegetarian since birth to increase the B complex vitamins in my body.
By age 13 I was considering committing suicide because my experiences were getting progressively worse and I was terrified of dying in this truly awful way. I didn't believe in God because if God existed he definitely didn't believe in me was my thought at the time. I didn't expect to ever see age 15 when I was 13.
At age 14 I had a really horrific experience of the kind that likely would have given anyone over 30 or 40 a fatal heart attack and they would have died. But, because I was young and strong I survived this. I was asleep and became horrifically aware that a seizure was coming on. I tried to get enough control of my body to run to my parents room for help in the middle of the night. But, the door to my bedroom was ajar and it smashed my nose and knocked me completely unconscious. This must have been really horrific for my parents to see my nose smashed and me in a seizure on the floor and trying to keep me from choking to death on all the blood coming out of my nose and mouth. So, an hour or two later I woke up in a pretty intense state of shock and my father said to me when I could say a word to two and I could talk a little again, "You've got to get some religion under your belt son. Otherwise you are going to die soon." Both my parents ran a church in Los Angeles about 20 minutes away from where we lived then in Glendale by Freeways. So, I started going to church about 4 times a week including Sundays and Friday Night which was Youth Night. I desperately wanted to live and not die. This was my primary motivation. So, I discovered God and lived.
When my next seizure started to occur I invoked God into my body and he came into my body and never left. I was 15 then and as the seizure began to start I saw armies of beings arrayed against me to kill me. But, the moment when God came into my body to stay, the armies all became mine as I was one with God and as we all know "One with God is a majority". I have been experiencing what this means ongoing all the time. Wanting to believe in God and experiencing God all the time are two very different things. It is sort of like the commitment of jumping off a cliff into the water. Until you do it you don't really know how terrifying a leap it is. It is a leap for life but at the same time you die in the process. It is commitment. It is like marrying God when you know divorce would be your physical death. There is nothing like it. It is not a choice unless it is a choice to stay alive eternally.
But, this wasn't the end if difficult experiences this was only the beginning. However, over time I became less terrified of God living in my body once I realized what he wanted of me. It was a little like what I read about Prophets experiencing in the Old Testament. There are certain rules to live by and mastering the rules is difficult because there is no one alive that can fully teach these rules to you. Most people read books like the Bible and they are only words translated about 20 times to the point where they don't make much sense anymore. However, if God comes into your body it takes on a different meaning. Every spiritual book on earth in every religion made sense to me. I came over time to see that every religion was a cultural way for that society to relate to God that made sense to them.
However, likewise I realized I had to make my own sacred covenant with God because God was coming to me direct which is what he does to people he chooses to live in 24 hours a day. It was an ongoing terrifying responsibility. I suppose the best way to put it is it is like being a Prince or King in some ways. You have been chosen for something beyond your understanding and you know you have to somehow some way honor this responsibility. You know that "Nobles Oblige" (French) or the "Obligation of the Fortunate to try to take care of the less fortunate definitely applies to you." Because you see every day just how fortunate you are in every way.
Being fortunate is not about money (although it can be) it is about the everyday magic in your life. For example, you will be in situations where maybe many people die but you don't. You will be in situations where somebody gets severely beat up and goes to the hospital. But you don't. You may be in a situation where the very things that almost killed you keep you out of the Viet Nam War. So, the very thing that God used to demand me to be one of his "Chosen Ones" saved my life and sanity when I was 18 to 26 and eligible for the draft. Childhood epilepsy that God gave me to bring me to him also saved my life and sanity by keeping me out of the Viet Nam War and the military in general. Instead I went to college, got married and started having children and then started businesses because I didn't like being anyone's employee. Besides, I belong to God, he is my father and my only employer. "Thou Shalt have no other Gods Before ME!" (I think that's the first of the Ten Commandments).
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