Where I started

So I was brought up in a Christian home.  My father was president of a Methodist college in a mid-sized town.  We went to this huge Methodist church complete with flagstone floors, stained glass windows, and pipe organs.  Damn place looked like a flippin cathedral.  But I never saw any evidence of God in that place with its cold, hard interior and everyone dressed just so.  Full of who’s who and gossip, but not God.  Turned me off church in a big way.  That was in the late 60s and

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early 70s.  There were not a whole lot of non-denominational churches, much less Spirit-filled ones.  So my Mom, God bless her, found a group of people meeting in a home and that’s where I finally found a true place of worship where the Spirit led the course of the service, not man.  This set the pattern for all of my future spiritual searches.  I tend to steer away from structured services with hymnals and organs to this day.  But thankfully it is a lot easier to find my kind of church these days.

But I always believed in healing.  I mean, Jesus did a whole lot of that in the Bible, didn’t He?  Then again, I had many friends who had way more faith than I, die from disease.  There’s that age-old dilemma … well, if the Bible says so, why didn’t it happen?  So I assumed that while healing was promised, sometimes the answer was “No.”

That remained that way until right after my diagnosis and we had just moved to Colorado annd were looking for a church.  I was told about one and we went.  Only a couple of weeks later, that pastor began teaching on healing and God’s will and that changed my life forever  I learned that, despite the fact that we lose loved ones to disease, that doesn’t mean it was God’s will.  I learned there were many reasons for disease to happen and most of them had nothing at all to do with God.  So I really started digging in that area but I was through my initial cancer treatment by then and honestly thought I was done with all of that.  It was a blessing that I had 8 full years before I really had to put my beliefs to the test.  It was good.  Much like a pilot needs to fly by his instrument panel before he encounteers the storm, the same goes for learning God’s principles before the shit hits the fan!  Oh yeah … I said shit.  And that’s why this category is Spirituality.  Because while I am very spiritual, and a big Jesus freak (yes, I still do believe He is the Christ despite my ever-expanding horizons), I am anything but religious!

Up until that point, I thought I pretty much had this Christianity/spiritual thing figured out.   Yeah, what I have since discovered is that I knew nothing!  God is so much bigger than we could ever imagine and so many of us just put Him in a box.  We say He can only work with this or use us in this fashion …. and most of it is about what we do.  But honestly,, what we do just doesn’t matter so much if we are in Christ … He already did it all.  Ahhhhhhhh grace is such a beautiful thing and so is God’s patience with me when I doubt, kick, scratch and claw.  I imagine myself much like a tantrumous 2-year-old and Him shaking His head at me and smiling.  He even loves me when I shake my fist at him and scream curses …. and I’ve had those moments as well.   And He loves me just the same.

So here, you will read my musings and follow how I went from so legalistic and fundamentalist to a much more centered knowledge of God  and how free we are supposed to be!  My mind has been expanding and my understanding growing for years … and it’s justt now getting started good.  Feel free to join in at any time!