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Monday morning, I climbed blearily into the dark car and drove toward the beach and my weekly hike there. The notes from the classical station–which I can never listen to unless I’m alone in the car, and I’m never alone in the car unless it’s before sunrise–wafted through the speakers as I hugged the curves of our street. The announcer came on, introducing a piece of music called “Dawn on the Moscow River” and noting its aptness for the present moment, minutes before Sydney’s own sunrise. I had the window cracked because we’re in the transitional part of spring where air-con can be too cold but static air too hot, and as the music played I couldn’t tell if the birds I could hear chirping were on the radio or outside the car.

They were outside, it turned out. And I had the thought in that moment–along with the one a few minutes later when I crested the hill on Awaba Street and saw the sun beginning its rise–that I often have in moments of beauty: Nice one, God.

Of course, a thought like that requires believing in the divine in the first place, and as I’ve learned since we move here, such a belief is…rare in Australia. A friend’s (cute as hell) kid has recently taken to asking me, repeatedly, “Do you believe in God?”, the notion confounding his five-year-old brain. I get it. I’m more comfortable in most bars than churches, and some of my least favourite people are those who claim to be believers (especially the ones who put Trump in office; excuse me while I vomit). When we first arrived in Australia we went to a BBQ dinner at my only friend’s house (my only friend at the time; now I have two), and when asked what we did that morning, we mentioned having gone to church. “Like…on a historical tour?” her husband asked, and I knew we were not in Kansas anymore.

Kansas being, for me, a Bible-Belt upbringing where not attending Sunday services was more notable than showing up in the pew. Then I moved to New York at the end of my twenties and had to actually articulate for some people why I took an hour out of Sunday Funday (not every week, but enough of them) to hear a sermon. It was an education…for me. Not in the sense that I was exposed to a new heathen world (gasp! insert pearl-clutching), but that I saw, through living in it, how cool the people were in that world, and how graceless it would be of me to get up in their faces and ask if Jesus was their personal Lord and Saviour and whether they were going to hell when they died (though I do text that to my friend on the reg now as payback for her kid’s questions).

The more questions my own kids have about faith, the more I understand why other people can’t embrace it. Virgin birth? Resurrection? It sounds dicey at best, a bit insane if I’m being honest, and they haven’t even aged up to the Left Behind series and the damage it’s done to critical Christian thinking.

But also? The more my kids talk about faith, the more I believe. The other night, Little Brother was struggling with insomnia brought about by a car nap sandwiched between two birthday parties earlier in the day, and his mouth was running nonstop. “Mommy, God is everywhere,” he told me, and I murmured my assent while wanting to quote the title to one of my favourite books, Go the F*** to Sleep. “I can feel him in my heart,” he said. “Great,” I seethed. Then he started sniffing his arm. “Mmm, smells like God,” he exclaimed. Then, he licked that arm. “Tastes like God!”

I nearly fell out of bed laughing at the absurd beauty of it: God as Axe body spray all over my five-year-old.

Then, pre-dawn this morning, I was lacing up my running shoes when The Kid padded up the stairs to tell me about his dreams. As he headed back down, he tossed a “Bye, Mommy,” over his shoulder, and I ran toward another sunrise, this one blasting pink all over the ocean beside me, and while I know it’s not what makes sense to everyone else, I couldn’t help–can’t help–but think it again, to think it always–because, besides the sunrises, there’s also the list of fears I wrote before we got on the plane that brought us to our new life here, the list I fretted and prayed over and watched as, one by one, each item on the list was answered, and usually in the form of a person: a therapist for TK, a playmate for LB, a job breakthrough for The Husband, a friend (usually a champagne-swilling heathen, my fave) for me, and with all these people showing up, I can’t help but think that a Person must have sent them.

Nice one, God.