God Doesn’t Have Bad Hair Days (excerpt) Pam Grout www.pamgrout.com Introduction      Two months before I turned 35, my boyfriend of several years dumped me for a twenty- something, bleached-blonde law student. To say I was devastated would be a gross understatement. Keep in mind that this was about the same time the single woman/asteroid study came out. You know the one I’m talking about? The one that publicly revealed that women over 30 have roughly the same odds of getting married as they do of being sideswiped by an asteroid.      After seven days of lying in bed and staring at my ceiling fan, I finally came to the conclusion that I had two choices left. I could either slit my veins in a warm bath or sign up for a month-long work- study program at Esalen, the self-improvement mecca in California. Knowing how my roommate at the time despised messes, I opted for Esalen.      On the second night there, I met a handsome former surfer named Stan who convinced me to spend the evening with him listening to the Pacific Ocean crashing against the Big Sur cliffs. We accidentally fell asleep in one of the massage rooms huddled together to stay warm. Not that it worked. April winds off the Pacific can be ferocious and even with our combined body heat, we practically froze to death.      If Stan hadn’t been so cute and I hadn’t been so desperate to get over the jerk who tossed me aside like some used bag of Doritos, I probably would have excused myself and gone back to my insulated sleeping bag. But I stayed until the next morning when the “dawn’s early light” revealed there was a space heater next to the mat where we lay the whole time. A space heater that we could have turned on and used to keep warm.      In a nutshell, that’s what this book is about. There’s a space heater or rather an energy force that’ s right inside us and we haven’t bothered to turn it on. Instead, we lay here freezing, unhappy, and believing there’s nothing we can do about our sad, desperate lives. Most of us are totally oblivious to the fact that the space heater even exists. We think of life as a random crapshoot and believe we don’t have a lot of control over what happens. C’est la vie.      Those of us who do know about the space heater (i.e. the internal energy source that could totally heat us up, make us happy, and give us meaningful lives) don’t understand how it works. We’ ve heard rumors that praying turns it on, that good work keeps it going, but nobody seems to know for sure. This religion tells us to tithe. That one suggests meditation. The next one convinces us to give up our earthly belongings and trek to the Himalayas. So which is it? Is God really that vague and mysterious? And why does the spiritual force only work sometimes? God at best is finicky and fickle, certainly nothing you can bank on.      Or is he? What I’d like to suggest is that God—or what I’m calling spiritual energy—is 100 percent reliable. It works every time like a math principle or Newton’s Second Law of Physics. Two plus two always equals four. Blue and yellow mixed together always make green. Balls dropped off roofs always fall. Thoughts and consciousness always create matter.