Believing in a Grand Thing

When I was a boy, religion in our home was tender to the touch, sometimes even raw. Our forays into organized religion were subject to fits and starts. My parents lost three of their six children and my father suffered from a debilitating ailment doctors could not diagnose for years. We lived on a farm, and it never (well, almost never) rained from the time I was six until I was twelve. As I watched my father's health decline, our crops and cattle suffer, and our financial predicament change from poor to desperate, I wondered what we had done to deserve such punish­ment. And were our neighbors also guilty of making God angry?