Find Your God

Even from my childhood I had a great desire to know who God is? I grew up Catholic in a large family with 10 children in a very small Texas town. I was a “different” child. I was fat, wet the bed, had acne, and very different from children my own age. I was tormented on the playground. At home I desperately wanted affection and acknowledge from my parents who were unable to give it. Not that they didn’t care, because they did. Their Germanic background of not expressing emotion was our home norm. By the time I was a teenage I was suicidal. I was Goth before it even became a term. I was certainly headed down a very bad path. I was starting to “act out” as they say now. I hated myself and knew I was destined to Hell. A deep existential fear hung over my life. And I had no way to deal with it.

With my attraction to “religious” things I was considered to “have the calling to be a priest”. So, I began to pursue religious life as a Catholic priest in a religious order. Most probably, I felt this would “save” me. I attended university in a very large metropolis while living with the religious community.  The adjustment was terrible but God saw this was my saving grace. I began to deal with my feelings about myself, my self-hatred, my feelings about spiritual abandonment. God placed wonderful, loving, caring, insightful people in my path that eventually helped me to “find my God”.

At one point in my last semester in university I was having a “spiritual breakdown”. I would sit and look out the window and try to make sense of all the spiritual and human confusion, anxiety, self-loathing, and fear. For days this went on. All I could see in my mind was a world of destruction, darkness, and desolation. I finally cried out to God, “God, WHAT can I believe IN?” The voice in my head said, “I…LOVE…YOU!”. I started to cry. I knew this was the voice of God. Instantly, the ruins of my world were swept away in my mind. There were fields of flowers growing and blooming where once stood the ruins of my beliefs! I cannot describe the wonderment and joy that filled my heart and soul at that moment! I knew NOW ONE belief that I could hold TRUE! GOD LOVES ME!  But more importantly:

GOD love me!

God LOVES me!

God love ME!

Anyway I looked at it I knew God loves me! I decided to, then and there, make this my cornerstone upon which all of my life would be built! I took a stone in my mind and engraved on it; GOD LOVES ME!. I took the stone and placed it as my corner stone! NOW I had something I could hold on to, to pull me from the abyss, to build my self-worth on, to create my future, and begin the path of knowing who God is for me. I was saved! Even now, writing these words 36 years later, I feel the power of that moment. This powerful truth was the only thing I knew and the only idea I could build my life on. After that, everything I questioned was put up against my cornerstone. If it “fit” then I added that block. For example, if God love me so completely, then God MUST love every human equally and completely. Yes, that fit! Then all of the Bible came to life in a new way.  For example, “who am I to judge my neighbor?” took on a whole new meaning.

Soon, my new expanding faith was growing by leaps and bounds! My faith could no longer be contained by the Catholic church, or the Four Square Gospel Church, or the Pentecostal movement…all of which I was involved in! I KNEW my faith to be true for me!