You’ve seen the Facebook memes about how normal conversation is boring and folks want to talk about things that really matter? I get to do that for a living.
There’s often a dark side to those conversations that people need to have. I’m comfortable with that. Serenity, security, and self-acceptance allow us to bring light into dark places.
The talks are often questions about God and what S/He allows.
The problem with these questions is that they’re rhetorical. We’re not really asking – we’re making passive statements like:
What kind of God allows children to suffer?
The same God that gives us free will.
If a man hurts me, that is not God hurting me. If God prevented the man from hurting me, He’d be taking away the man’s free will and the essence of being human: choice.
How we understand God has everything to do with how we approach Him. Fave FB meme: “When will we understand that God, if there is a God, is not simply a more powerful version of our fathers?”
Yet, if you didn’t feel the approval of your father, how will you feel loved by a power far greater than any man?
I asked questions of God that one might ask of an absentee father:
“Where were you, when everything was falling apart?” – The Fray
“Where were you while we were getting high?” – Oasis
My soul awoke when I heard U2 sing:
“I want to run, I want to hide. I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside.”
I continued to question. I used music to cope. I found a lot of my answers there. The simplest of which came from the Indigo Girls:
“The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”
I got to a place where I stopped trying to understand God. Instead, I seek to experience God. But I screw it up a lot and I forget to do the things that always work. I need reminders and inspiration and the words of people like me:
“I’ve been searchin’, wonderin’, thinkin’ Lost and lookin’ all my life I’ve been wounded, jaded, loved, and hated I’ve wrestled wrong and right…
I’ve been readin’, writin’, prayin’, fightin’ I guess I would be still Yeah, that was until I knew God’s will.” – Martina McBride “God’s Will”
Today I have peace and I am truly blessed. I’m a blasphemous heathen, but a spiritual man.
“All my friends are heathens, take it slow Wait for them to ask you who you know Please don’t make any sudden moves You don’t know the half of the abuse.” – 21 Pilots, Heathens
My greatest teachers have suffered more than most. They are the most enlightened, the most loving, and the most alive of us all. There is no question my Higher Power placed each and every one of them in my path.
Whatever stands between you and the God of your understanding…let it go.
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