Meeting Divinity

  I've always been a spiritual person.  Growing up, I went to various churches off and on.  However, I never really found a place that I fit.  I feel that I was really fortunate to be born of parents that encouraged spiritual questioning.  In my early childhood their seeking fed my own curiosity and fulfilled my need to build a relationship with Divinity.  Yet, our family experience always seemed to lead to the same result.  We would attend a church for awhile.  Then, due to some turn of events--conflicts among the congregation, religious megalomania, or our own disagreements with the church's doctrine we would stop going.  However, my desire to know Spirit never diminished.  Somewhere inside me, I knew something about God.  Something that all of these other groups of people didn't.  Well, if they did, they never shared it with me.  This inner knowing spurred me onward.  It drove me to seek the Truth.
  So, it began--the journey of a lifetime.  One of the first things I realized was that I had some inner conflicts.  These conflicts put my mind into direct conflict with my soul.  I had been taught so many confusing things about God and my relationship to Him.  Things like, "He is merciful."  Yet, ready to smite you if you didn't follow the rules.  "God created us in His image."  Unless, you are different in some way.  Then, you are doomed to burn in hell.  This wasn't the divine being that I wanted to believe in.  Moreover, all of the teachings I had encountered made it pretty clear.  This was God and either you believed or you didn't.  I felt lost and doomed.  Yet, I held on to one question that desperately needed to be answered.  That question was:

"If God created me this way, and I love Him

so much, why would He create me to suffer

a lifetime.  Just to reject me at the end?"

None of it made sense to me.  It made my head reel and my soul scream for answers.  In her book, One Day My Soul Just Opened Up, Iyanla Vanzant says,

"The fullness of truth as related to the Divine

exists at the core of every living being."

I, of course, didn't encounter this teaching until much later in life.  Yet, even in my youth, I knew the truth of it.

  So, I kept searching.  I delved into philosophy and world religions.  All the while developing a personal relationship to Spirit.  I began to dialog with this Divine Being.  The more I opened up, the more I heard.  I began for the first time, to develop a friendship with "my God."  But, wait!  I wasn't "supposed" to do that.  Well, that's what I was lead to believe anyway.  So, I didn't talk about it.  I didn't stop.  I just didn't talk about it. I was already harboring secrets.  What was one more?  As this friendship developed, I began to see things change in my life.  I began to feel joy and see the beauty in things around me. Then, in my early teens, I encountered a 12 step program.  I learned many things in that time.

  However, the single most important thing I took away from that learning was that I COULD have a relationship with Divinity.  Furthermore, that relationship could be defined by me.  For the first time, someone said to me, "you can have a Higher Power of your choosing.  Whoa! Wait! What?  Suddenly, I felt that my inner knowing was affirmed.  The Universe, in the blink of an eye, became much more than what I had been taught.  I could reframe my beliefs about God and I didn't even have to call Him God?  It was a whole new ball game.  

  In retrospect, I realize that this was the movement of Spirit in my life.  My prayers and pondering were getting answers.  I still had a lot to reconcile.  But, it was a beginning.