Converting to Christianity provided me many answers to questions I had long debated in my atheist’s mind. It also, however, introduced me to questions more unanswerable than anything I tackled before coming to faith. The biggest questions I had, once deciding to take a crack at Jesus, were what real worship, prayer and connection with God looked like: if there was a specific position in which I had to hold my hands or kneel for God to accurately listen to my prayer, or if He cared whether I sang along in church or just listened to everyone else.

Some of these questions concerning Christian “logistics” had quick answers found right at the center of God’s word. I learned from the Bible that there is no best way to pray, no one way to genuinely worship God that is any functionally better than another. God listens even if I pray standing up and doesn’t need me to sound like Boyz II Men to feel worshipped.

But the one question I had about God when I first joined the Christian faith that still seems unanswered is this: Where is the best place to go to experience God directly? I feel like I can grasp the “who, what and when” of God’s message, but haven’t a clear answer to where He is at any given moment.

And maybe there isn’t one. God is compared to “light” enough in scripture that I shouldn’t be surprised that He’s hard to locate; both inside and outside of time, the universe, my mind at once. A particle and a wave simultaneously.

People have told me that God is “everywhere,” but I think that’s a bunch of crap. I think God has the potential to be anywhere, but I don’t think He’s anywhere near KKK meetings, whorehouses or the most evil place in the world. I’m not saying God doesn’t care about people in these locations, it’s just that He’s not going to be easily found there. (Alright, maybe you can find God at a Buckeye’s game, but that remains to be seen.)

Simply walking around the streets near where I grew up in Manhattan, I frankly don’t feel as close to God as I do in other places. And if I ask the common person where to best have a spiritual experience they almost always tell me that it’s in the woods, the wilderness and part of the earth closest to creation, that one must go to experience God.

I’m not going to lie, I’ve felt very close to God in the woods at times — even in the Arboretum here in Ann Arbor. The chirping birds, the peaceful silence, the serene landscape —  they’ve all helped me feel more comfortable talking to God, experiencing Him. I’ve gone on prayer walks through woods in other places and felt a similar closeness to God. But the wilderness of the Bible has startlingly less glowing reviews than it does in the mind of a romantic like naturalist John Muir, or even a more empirical nature-loving Christian like Al Gore.

After all, it is in the wilderness where Jesus toils for 40 days being tempted by the Devil himself. It’s into the unforgiving wilderness that Adam and Eve are banished once God wrathfully boots them from the Garden of Eden. Actually, we used to believe the wilderness was much more closely associated with sin than with salvation, more associated with immorality than the kind of purity or oneness or Nirvana we nowadays think we achieve only under a tree. Not until the likes of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau did we even conceive of God being present in the wilderness, let alone being closer to us there.

There is an inherently American desire to see God in the trees, bushes and brooks that is perhaps the reason I feel more distant from God the closer I get to New York City, but I’m not sure this feeling makes Biblical sense.

I’ve always sought solitude when trying to feel closer to God, instinctively assuming that being close to God meant being far from people. Perhaps that’s why I bought into the idea that undomesticated wilderness was the best place for someone to talk to God directly, without walls or honking horns or text messages getting in the way.

But perhaps the wildernesses in which I’ve searched for God have been the kind that are more artificial and manmade than the concrete block I come from. While it’s widely known how much of Manhattan sits atop landfill, and — in terms of the natural world — shouldn’t even be there, the fakest, most expensive and most intentionally manipulated part of Manhattan is Central Park. The Arboretum in Ann Arbor is a similarly “fake” wilderness, a wilderness occurring no more naturally than the dorms or liquor store that flank it.

So maybe I need to rethink my question before I go looking for an answer or go looking for God in the wrong places. Maybe my question shouldn’t be: “Where is the best place to find God?” like He’s some kind of rare bird or constellation. Maybe I should really be asking: “What did I do to feel this distant from God in the first place?”

Because if I get to a place where the particle/wave God — who endlessly pursues His children —suddenly feels far away, then who moved?

Ben Verdi is a man with a Bible and a laptop and a nasty curveball. He can be reached at jetboiz@aol.com