This is a two part post. Read the first part here: Confusion.
In part one, I spoke about my confusion over God and all of the contradicting messages I received about God, Jesus, hell and the possible reasons for my son being born with disabilities. This post is about my understanding now. As I have said many times in my various posts, my son led me to discover the Truth. Part of that truth is that God is The Creative Force of Love.
I ended my last post with a couple of sentences about some of our religious leaders teaching us about a false god. That may have made some people angry, but I would not say it if I did not truly believe it. I do not think they are doing it on purpose. I think they believe what they are teaching because that is how they were taught and so far it has worked for them. It works for many people, at least until something happens to shake the foundation this false god is based upon. It worked for me, even though I had major questions about it because there was no reason for me to pursue answers until my son came along. My son is the reason I decided God did not exist. In my suffering, I dropped all my belief and everything I had learned up to that point. The door was wide open for healing and The Creative Force of Love was longing to be revealed.
Where should we look for healing? Most of the time we look to our clergy, but even when the answers do not feel right, we do not question their answers because we are afraid. If we do question them we are sometimes dismissed as a trouble maker or a non-believer. They might give us a quote from the bible for an answer and that is difficult to argue with. I used to think, ‘Well, there you go! It is in the bible and the bible is the word of God, so that is that!’ As a teenager, I discovered that the bible was not written as “The Bible” and that all of the books of the bible were not assembled until many years after the death of Jesus. Later I discovered that the books assembled were not the only books written; there are more books that were excluded and some were even destroyed. I also learned that some of the words in the bible, when translated from the original language into English, were misinterpreted and some of the words have many possible meanings. This blows my mind because it says to me that when we read the bible we are bound by the assumptions of the original interpreter. Not only that but too often, we are bound by the assumptions and interpretations of the clergy who are teaching it to us. It is kind of like the gossip game we played in school, where one person whispers a story and by the time it gets to the last person in class it is completely different. I am not saying the bible is all wrong, by any means, but this knowledge raised more questions in my mind. Why would someone want to destroy some of the other books? What do the other books say? Who wrote them? What are the other possible meanings for some of the words? I have found some answers, but I am not going to go into all that here because there is too much to talk about. I urge you to explore the history of Christianity and to explore other religions because what you discover may surprise you.
As I began to learn more and more about the history of Christianity, other religious teachings and about the nature of the ego, it all fell into place for me. The ego can be found everywhere and it can have an effect on everything, including religion. It can affect entire nations, races, genders, or any group of people as well as individuals. I learned that every confusing question I had was a result of someone’s or some group’s collective ego.
“You could rename your ego Fear.”
~ Michael Singer, Author of The Untethered Soul
The ego represents, fear. People fear what they do not understand. I can clearly see that, before the time of Jesus, people had a very different and limited view of the world and many things were beyond their understanding. Rob Bell speaks powerfully of this in his book, Love Wins. Imagine living back in the Old Testament days and not having the knowledge of science and physics and astronomy that we now have. They were not completely ignorant, but it is easy to see how they would have been very confused by things that happened that seemed to have no rational explanation. The famines, the fire raining down from the sky, the locusts eating all of the crops; in their minds, it had to be an angry god who did these things to them. What else were they to think? Now we have scientific explanations. It is not personal. God is not punishing us when disasters strike. When you open your mind and accept that God is not a mystical man in the sky, you can see that nature is impersonal. The universal laws of physics are just the way the world works; the way The Creative Force organizes the universe. We don’t have to choose between science and religion. There are things beyond our understanding, even in science. Some will say that is where God comes in and fills the void. Of course, that is where God fills the void, but not as a man in the sky is who is there to control us and punish us. I will never believe that a god made my son disabled for atonement or because I am strong enough to handle it or because I have sinned. I do not believe it was personal. I believe Jesus was telling us that it is not personal on God’s part, but we have some personal responsibility in the energy we put out. He tells us that it is up to us what we gain and what we lose.
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| Joshua, 8 months old |
I have learned that we must drop all of our false ideas and theories and concepts so that we are able to accept Truth into our hearts. We must learn to separate our Love based thoughts and feelings from our ego based thoughts and feelings, recognizing that we place our human traits onto God, not the other way around. We are created in God’s image, but we think of God in our own fear-based image. There is a difference. We do this because we cannot fathom the true wonder and power of The Creative Force of Love. We bind God to our own limitations. God is whatever there is beyond our human concepts and understanding. God is beyond male and female, beyond our sense perceptions, running through us and everything we perceive in this world and beyond. Strip away all of your mental concepts, everything you have learned thus far about God. The Creative Force of Love is more than you can imagine and everything you can perceive, all at once. Feel The Creative Force in your heart. See The Creative Force in all of the things within your view at this moment. Look at a tree or imagine one in your mind. Know that what grows and sustains that tree is also what animates you. It beats your heart without you thinking about it. This Creative Force of Love that beats your heart is the same Love within each blade of grass that causes it to sprout from the ground and reach toward the sky. It is the Love that moves the rivers and streams towards the ocean and twinkles all of the stars in the sky. It is the Love that allows us to judge, to love, to hate, to reproduce, even to kill a man like Jesus and still that Love sustains our lives. It is a love that allowed our collective ego to stand by and watch as Hitler brought hell on earth to millions of Jewish people. All the while this Love waited patiently for someone, anyone, to know they contain the same Power of Love and to act with compassion for the oppressed and stop the madness. Now explain to me how a love like that could send someone to a fiery hell for eternity or why it would even need to. Hell is our creation, not God’s. Sit in stillness and feel the truth that you cannot possibly understand all there is to know about The Creative Force of Love.
Rob Bell makes a very good point about hell in Love Wins. He tells of a 17-year-old boy being killed in a car accident. This boy has not accepted Jesus Christ as his savior at the time of his death because he was an atheist. This boy has lived 17 years out of all of the time in eternity. That is the equivalent of less than a pinprick on the scale of time, so why would god send him to hell for eternity because of a decision he made in the course of a pinprick of time? It makes no sense. It does not fit with a loving god, either. This story illustrates our ego based way of thinking about God. It shows that punishment and hell are based on our system of justice, not God’s, and it shows how we think of God in our own image. As for heaven and hell, Jesus says many times that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us and that we can have it now.
“Christianity is not about being rewarded with heaven or hell because you believe or do not believe the right thing about Jesus and God. Christianity, certainly, is not about God sending Jesus to earth to be executed on the cross as some kind of cosmic payment for the sins of humanity. God does not need a sacrificial payoff as some satisfaction to cool down divine wrath as if God had an anger management problem. God’s nature, power, and love are to forgive freely. That is the nature of Grace.” ~ Marcus Borg
Heaven and hell are creations we can achieve right here on earth through the energies we produce within. Think of a time when something wonderful happened in your life – you fell in love, you got a perfect job, a baby was born, you got a new house – you felt like you were on top of the world; like you were in heaven. Now think of a bad time in your life. It felt like hell, right? I believe this is what Jesus meant. It is your choice, your free will, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, to have acceptance for everything that happens in your life and to create heaven here on earth; or to behave in harmful ways, to want things to be different than they are and create hell. God allows all ways of being in the world.
Hell is:
When you are trying to figure out which one of your sins caused your child’s disability;
The feeling of realizing you will never hear them say I love you, Mom;
Your heartache when your adult child feels lonely because they are incapable of calling up their friends to get together;
Watching your child being ridiculed and humiliated;
What you feel when you are watching your loved one suffer cancer;
The feeling of wanting anything to be different than it is.
Heaven is:
When your child grows up and becomes a loving member of society;
The love you felt the day your child was born;
Knowing your family is healthy and happy;
The feeling you get from helping someone who can never return the favor;
The feeling of being grateful;
The realization that God is not something to fear and the only sin is the refusal to do better today than you did yesterday;
Accepting every situation in your life no matter what it is.
You move just a little bit closer to heaven when you feel that maybe your child with disabilities chose to enter that body because their soul loves you and wants to share wisdom with you; or maybe you attracted them into your life so that you could learn to be more compassionate or to help others learn compassion; or maybe there is no reason at all for their disabilities, it is just the way things are and it is up to you and other families like yours to teach the world acceptance and to see perfection in everyone.
“Every time your heart is broken it is God hooking up with you, inviting you to hook up with him. It is God saying, ‘I have no hands but yours, I have no arms but yours, I have no intervention of hope but yours.” ~ Rev. Ed Bacon
Our religious teachers sometimes tell us not to doubt, not to question, to just believe what they are telling us. ‘Follow the laws of God and someday we will understand,’ they say. We remain content with what they told us because we do not realize it is our own laws we are teaching each other. Our laws are fear based and came from our human egos in an attempt to explain why bad things happen. Even when good things happen we feel undeserving because we have been taught that we are sinners.
In our confusion, it is hard to know what to believe. We have a difficult time letting go of things we learned in childhood and have believed our entire lives. In our confusion, we must let them go to find the answers. If your childhood teachings confused you like mine did, but you feel you must hold on to something, let it be this one thing:
God is love.
That is all you need to know. God thinks with love, speaks with love, acts with love, creates with love, comforts with love and forgives with love. God’s will is purely and simply love. Add nothing to it. Take nothing from it. God gives you, with love, everything you give to the world. When any question arises for you, go deep into your heart to find the answers. Go deep down to where only Love and Peace reside. When you get down to the basic level of pure love, fully and completely, you are held in God’s peaceful embrace. How do you get there? You get there by stripping away all of the layers of fear. You get there through full and complete acceptance of all that is. That is where confusion dissolves into a healing revelation.
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