Context: “Growing up, my Dad had left the Catholic faith and my Mom was a non-practicing former buddhist. Me and my sister did not grow up religious. When we were 7 (first grade) and my sister was 2, our neighbor was a baptist and the wife would take us to Sunday school. My mom didn’t know how to dress us and would always send me in pants. One day they prayed for God to help Mom buy me a dress and then later that week, her mother took her to buy a dress. Therefore, she and her sister started believing in God in some capacity.”

Analysis:  The story is a personal story of my informant’s childhood. As the progenitor of the legend, she swears that it happened. Since she was raised completely secularly, this moment functioned as a sort of religious conversion in her life. While she is not devout or following any particular Christian orthodoxy, she still believes that some higher power exists to balance the scales of fate and reward goodness. While not quite Augustine’s Confessions, it still represents a moment that challenged and changed her secular perspective. It does share many similarities with other conversion stories, having a protagonist whose choice of faith is met with divine grace. Even to this day, the informant has a strange devotion to the idea of a higher power and good karma, which may be a vestige of her mother’s Buddhist past. 

Truthfully, I doubt that her prayers were truly answered. In actuality, it is likely that somebody just told her mother to buy her a dress for Sunday school after that ordeal. In hindsight, she likely believes this narrative too, considering even she said that she only believes in God “in some capacity.” However, the veracity of the story doesn’t matter. What really matters is that this event has helped shape my informant’s worldview since it happened. In her life, she views a “higher power” as a sort of hand on the scales of fate, helping push her life in certain directions. While she often facetiously thanks “good karma” for her fortunes, this mentality goes beyond mere jokes. This mentality has helped her cultivate a strong sense of responsibility and fairness that has turned her into a highly motivated and successful person. To her, the simple idea that God could have perhaps helped her fit in at Sunday school was enough to convince her that she had His backing to chase down her dreams.