I was living in the Philippines, teaching computer programming in a university.

I was very lonely, because white males have a terrible but very well-deserved reputation there as being a bunch of lecherous slobs out to do as many cheap hookers as possible. The other teachers would rarely speak to me, so I befriended American Fundamentalist Christian missionaries who I met in the streets, who I respected and liked a lot. I would go to their church services just for something to do and for the company.

I wound up really wanting to become a Christian, but was having trouble justifying the concept of redemption through faith intellectually.

The Philippines is a very, very religious culture. Religion is a very big part of people's lives and world view. I hadn't been planning on that when I went there.

One of the reasons that I had gone to the Philippines was that I had been having great difficulty meeting reasonable deadlines in my computer programming career since starting lithium, and my job had become a living hell. I'd gone to the Philippines to take a break and try to get my head together.

There's very low acceptance of mental illness in most of Asia. My shrink there warned me about that. I figured if it became known that I was bipolar, I would probably lose my job at the university and might get kicked out of my living situation with the family I was boarding with.

My shrink said the quality of the local mental hospital was terrible, people even urinated on the floor. I told her I'd much rather be in a room with someone urinating on the floor than running around saying crazy, highly offensive things to everyone I knew.

A new medication, Tegretol (Carbamazepine) was on the market, and my shrink had me try it. It was pretty good for a couple of months, but we slowly started finding out that it wasn't working. I remember going to see my shrink and being so enthusiastic that I jumped up on my chair in her office at one point. We agreed that I should go back on lithium.

But it takes a few days for lithium to kick in, and before that, I was going seriously manic. I knew it, I could feel it. I had no appetite for another conversation with an inner voice that might well be the devil this time, and realized that I was in no position to be "saving the world".

I took my antipsychotic and stayed in my bedroom, afraid that I would say things that would offend the heck out of anyone I ran into if I came out. I prayed to Jesus for calm and sanity.

I felt the mania, the insanity, swirling all through the room around me, and Christ providing a shield around me to keep me safe from it. I held on tight to my sanity and waited.

With time, the antipsychotic sank in and things became normal again.

Somewhere in all of that I came up with some theory about salvation through faith that was intellectually acceptable to me. Twenty seven years later, I don't even remember what it was.

I was really happy. I'd had a religious experience and hadn't done or said anything insane or ridiculous, or wound up strapped down in a mental hospital. This was a first!

The next time I saw my shrink she said "They told me that there was a foreigner in the mental hospital and after the way you were when I saw you, I thought it was you."

I arranged to have myself baptized Fundamentalist Christian. Total immersion in the ocean. I was entirely sincere about it.

When I asked to be baptized, the pastor said he'd do it on the condition that I be counseled in my new life as a Christian. I agreed, in fact, I was looking forward to it. This was the first time I was extensively counseled as a Christian since my first manic episode.

So I was counseled weekly by a Filipino pastor, but he wasn't very good at his job. Cultural differences between American secular culture, where I'd spent most of my life, and Filipino Fundamentalist culture, which was all he knew, were a big problem. I disagreed with Filipino norms.

I got a Filipino girlfriend, a teacher at the university, a mechanical engineer 3 years older than me. She was an extremely idealistic, noble, born-again Fundamentalist Christian. She had a beautiful soul. She didn't want to move with me to the US. She wanted the both of us to move somewhere poorer than the Philippines and be missionaries. But between her and my pastor, I was miserable as a Christian. I wasn't even sure this religion was working out for me. This meant that I wasn't anywhere close to being ready to start inflicting it on anyone else.

I said to a white missionary friend "The Philippines is so easy, so many people speak English and a lot of people are really pro-American, and I'm barely handling it. And my girlfriend wants to go somewhere worse." The friend showed me an essay about "culture shock" (which is where someone moves to a different culture and totally fails to adapt to it). It was a portrait of my life in the Philippines. It was clear to me that I had to get out of there.

At the end of the school year I went back to the United States and reverted to being an atheist.

I do remember reading something, many years later, in the New Testament that said that if you believe and are baptized, nothing can keep you out of heaven after that. Like, not even becoming a mass-murderer. I was completely sincere when I got myself baptized. Though I'm not going to church, I have no desire to do anything mean. Now that I'm married I'm not really doing much that Christians would disapprove of. I figure that, if Christianity is true, my ticket to heaven is punched.

A lot of Christians pray, and believe that an inner voice that answers is from God. They talk to, and listen to, God all the time and it works out OK. It appears to have a good influence on them and somehow they apparently don't get hijacked by Lucifer and driven insane. But I somehow happen to suck at that.