I wonder about a lot of things.

When I was younger, I would sit alone under a big old oak tree and look up at the summer sky asking myself, “Is that where heaven is?” I wanted to see what was beyond the white clouds. Were there people living in a big city of God? What did they look like?

If I could see my father up there, I wondered if he looked like the 15 year-old kid in the Indians’ baseball uniform in the photograph I have of him. Perhaps he would look older, but not sickly like I remember him most of the time.

A priest once told me that we don’t take human shape in heaven. We are spirits or entities floating around like autumn leaves swirling inside a mid-October breeze. He also said we are not up there as earthly families looking down upon loved ones. Their spirits are without memory and they are now consumed with the beauty of living in paradise forever and ever. But then, I wonder how he knew all this.

I wonder how we got the story of Adam and Eve. I’m assuming there were no witnesses. I wonder why we believe in the words of the Bible, not written by God, but by man and yet we mistrust as truth what any man writes today about what he says he witnesses.

I wonder how so many people believe in the existence of a god they have never seen, yet they reject the idea that ghosts or aliens are real and are nothing more than creatures of our imagination.

I wonder if there is only one God or if there are many. Is heaven like a strip mall where Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews and all the other faiths are admitted into certain corners of clouds based upon what they had believed before they died?

What about all the non-believers, the atheists and agnostics? Do they go straight to hell even if they lived righteous lives and treated everyone kindly unlike some Christians who go to church every Sunday?

I also wonder what hell is like and where it is. Maybe if I kept digging in the dirt for days and days, I’d find hell. After all, it’s supposed to be underneath me and far away from where heaven is that is right above me.

I wonder who is in hell. There have to be murderers, rapists, and Adolf Hitler, Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler.

But would there also be men who cheated on their wives, little boys and girls who never went to church or how about Bernie Madoff, Harvey Weinstein or that woman who neglected her 16 cats in her house until half of them died.

I wonder if all of these bad people had asked God for forgiveness before they had taken their last breaths, would they then have gone to heaven?

Is hell really what religion says it is - an eternity of torture and hot fires stoked by Satan, a brutal punishment for the souls of everyone who committed both small and large transgressions against humanity?

What if there is no heaven or hell? What if there’s nothing after life but death and decay in the dirt of a 6-foot grave? But if there is no God of heaven, it makes me wonder how I got my life, how two people brought me into this world with the miracle of my birth or was I just a physical result that any medical scientist could explain.

I wonder how I am now the proud dad of a wonderful son and daughter. When I was in my thirties, I was tested and told I would never be able to biologically father children.

I wonder how my brain can think in words and pictures. A scientist could tell me how the brain works and that thoughts are created though electrical impulses, but can that scientist explain to me how I can imagine yellow dragons or butterflies the size of eagles and can he explain to me how I can feel love?

I wonder if I was born with a preset system of beliefs in my head that just needed to start when I was old enough to push a button. Perhaps I was born with a completely blank slate inside my brain and I would build my conscience with ideas and influences I absorbed from my environment.

I wonder why I feel so strongly about living a past life of someone who was not related to me when I’ve been taught that everyone is a product of their genetic ancestry.

I’ve also been taught that the natural universe is an organized system that follows a prescribed pattern, but if that is true, how does one explain the randomness of unpredictable weather events or the mutation of an albino animal?

Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had grown up in Montana or Louisiana and had different friends, different jobs and relationships with different women.

I often wonder how I got to this age without my father’s guidance or much of my mother’s love to help me become who I am. I think back to that day when I sat under the oak tree looking up into the sky.

When I was trying to see heaven through the clouds, I thought I heard a voice inside my head say to me, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right.”

And it has been all right; in fact, it’s been a great ride so far. I can feel true joy now and I don’t have to wonder why.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.