What is God?
I do not believe we can truly understand what God is, a drop of water can not encompass an ocean and attempting to understand God I think is analogous to this. However, we can come to understand some aspects of God's nature through our experience and the recorded experiences of other human beings.
And to that end I felt that I wanted to relate some of my experiences and what I've learned from them.
Some background is necessary, when I was a younger child say around nine or ten years of age, my mother used to believe it beating us with a stick when we mis-behaved or were disrespectful. Specifically, we had a tree that grew these very flexible sticks that she would cut off and call "switches" and she would wail on our buttocks with them leaving welts and causing much stinging.
This created a great deal of fear for me when I was very young. So much so that I would have nightmares of locking myself in the bathroom and a switch trying to get me through cracks between the door and the floor or the door and the wall.
My mother was very strict at that age which contrasts greatly with how she was as I entered my teenage years (at that point quite the opposite, she became very lax).
One of the big things for her was when us kids went somewhere and were told to be back at a particular time, she was very strict about that time, and arriving three minutes late meant a switching (beating with stick).
We lived on the corner of 15th NE and 90th Street in Seattle, and about a mile to the north there was a bridge over a ravine. At that time the area below the bridge was undeveloped woods with Thornton creek running through the ravine. Myself and some of my friends used to go down there to play.
The woods had vines and on some trees ropes had been tied to branches. There was one portion of the creek that was deep and a tree near it had a rope that could swing out over the creek and in the summer we'd swing out and drop into the creek to cool off (and very cold it was). We'd play like we were in a Tarzan movie there, climbing trees and swinging from vines and ropes.
My mother would have dinner promptly at six and we were always to be home by six, and if we weren't the switch loomed. But being kids, it was easy to lose track of time while we were playing and occasionally, I would stop and look at my watch and see that it said it was after six. I would pray to be spared the switch and run home trying to minimize the damage, and somehow I would arrive home just before six even though I had left after six. This wasn't just a function of my watch being off, for it too would indicate that it was just before six when I arrived home.
The skeptical would say I just mis-read my watch, but this happened many times. I am convince it meant that God can answer prayers even if it requires violating physical laws of causality as we know them.
When I was in junior high school I had an interesting incident, although this one didn't involve prayer, it did seem to involve at the very least temporary suspension of ordinary physics.
I am a night person and always have been, not an early waker, and I used to watch television until 2am, and then I would have to get up and be to school by 8am. Invariably, I would not wake up until 7:30, spend twenty minutes getting ready, and then run two miles to school. This was not as hard as it might seem because the school was located in a big hole, and I lived on top of a hill, so the trip to school was downhill all the way making it easy to run. The downside was the walk home was a bitch.
The route I would take would be to run from my house on 15th and 90th down 90th to 17th Ave, then go north on 17th avenue to 94th, from there I would cut through a park and the playground of Sacajawea, the elementary school I went to, to arrive at 96th street and 20th Ave, then I'd go down 20th to 98th St, then down 98th street to Lake City way. I'd cross Lake City way at a light controlled cross-walk there, then go north on Lake City way to Fischer Ave, which went to Ravenna which I would follow to 115th Street which was the street my junior high school was on.
On the initial run down 90th, about fifty feet uphill from 17th Ave there was a fire hydrant. Each day, I would do a long jump at the fire hydrant, and each day I would achieve not an abnormal distance.
Except one day something happened. I felt I had gotten a particularly good launch and so I pulled my legs tightly up under my body to minimize air resistance and try to maximize the distance of the jump, but as I reached the apex of the jump something weird happened, I did not start falling down, instead I remained at approximately the same height but as the hill was falling away below me. I kept getting higher and higher with respect to the ground. I traveled in this manner all the way across 17th Ave and continued down 90th street.
At this point I was getting quite high in the air and I began to fear that either I would continue going up into the sky never to be seen again or when I did come down it was gonna hurt because I was up so high. As soon as I had that thought it was as if gravity gently resumed and I came down in a slow controlled manner and didn't hurt myself. Now I was quite a way down 90th from 17th and had to walk back up the hill to 17th Ave to continue my run to school. The total length of the jump I would estimate at being around 100 feet.
I tried to reproduce this every day after that when I ran to school, but never again did anything out of the ordinary happen, just normal distance long jumps like I had before.
I'm not sure all what to make of this experience, perhaps that God can lift and carry us if necessary, or perhaps that the laws of physics are not as immutable as we normally perceive. I am sure this is a lesson that will have relevance at some point in my life, but at present I still do not understand exactly what it meant.
In my experience, God seems to answer prayers inconsistently. Some say God answers all prayers it's just that sometimes the answer is "No", but I feel that to say that is just playing with semantics. But it does seem that answers tend to come when it's most important for them to. When I'm hurting the most, when I'm threatened the most, when someone I love is threatened the most.
My fathers wife got esophageal cancer diagnosed as stage four. I was very worried about my father being left alone, especially as he is getting up in years and has had a few health problems himself. The five year survival rate for this type of cancer is 3%.
I prayed for her survival, and it has been just about five years. Now, they have not cured the cancer entirely, cancer indicators still show that it is present in her body; however, they have been able to control it with chemotherapy and she has been able to maintain a reasonable quality of life throughout the process. I feel that this is a prayer that has been answered.
On the other hand, this year has been a shit storm if ever there was one. In a little more than a year, my mothers husband died from lung cancer and my mother became very depressed and stopped eating. I had prayed for his survival too but it did not happen. She lost 35 lbs and is way under weight as a result. She stopped losing weight after several months but still a year later hasn't regained it. Then a friend of mine visiting from Antarctica, who did blasting and drilling there and had wintered over and had been there eight years, died while here in Seattle visiting in an apartment fire. He had just shown us pictures of a house he had bought in New Zealand where he had planned to retire.
Then in April, an employee and friend committed suicide. Later our dog developed cancer and died. All of these things really contributed to functionality problems for me. I'm already prone to depression and this really pushed me over the edge. I also had ADD symptoms. I got treatment for these things and I was doing better near the end of September and working on getting things back in order, then my nineteen year old daughter left with a boyfriend for Utah with eight hours notice. To put it mildly I was crushed, a couple of more months of non-functionality followed.
I was pretty much maxed on the dosage of Welbutrin I was on for depression and ADD and increasing that dosage further wasn't really a safe option, too much can induce seizures.
I know that two factors are important to combat depression more than anything else, physical exercise and socialization. This was difficult for me to do because my daughter had always accompanied us to the gym and swimming, and when I'd go I'd really miss her presence and end up breaking down and crying, it just was no good. Most of my friends were on-line friends so there wasn't much opportunity to in person socialization since they were scattered all over the world. Most of my friends that were local had died, moved away, or just changed so much we didn't share interests during the time I had been raising children.
I prayed for help and I received it. I was pointed to a number of resources and ultimately did meet some people including someone who could accompany us exercising and that really made it more doable again.
Still, I have a lot of financial issues resulting from the time I really was not functional, I'm trying to work through those now but it's very difficult. I'm praying for help but so far it hasn't come.
I know I have not lived the type of life I should and I feel perhaps this is why I'm not yet getting the help that I need. All the pieces of the puzzle have to fit the plan and I've resisted and gone my own route and I think that has caused me these problems.
Adding to these difficulties has been A/C problems at the co-location facility which resulted in some equipment problems, not one but two dead washing machines, and during the recent windstorm a tree limb came through our roof and ceiling.
The mental issues, particularly the ADD, have made things like taxes reports problematic and I am behind in those.
It seemed like when I was a kid and got in trouble, prayer resulted in predictable and immediate results for the most part. One exception to that was when my parents divorced, I prayed for my fathers return but it was not to be.
But as an adult, when answers come they seem to be not immediate and not so predictable, kind of like we're supposed to experience more turmoil and difficulty as adults, although I know there are plenty of children in the world living under absolutely hellish conditions and I do not understand why that is permitted by a loving God.
But then sometimes love is tough. When my daughter left, I felt pain like I never had before. It was painful when my oldest son left, but then he only moved about ten miles away and once I was invited to his apartment and welcomed in his space I felt okay with it. But my daughter moved 900 miles away and really seems bent on total independence and even if I had the financial means to visit I don't feel like I would be welcomed. For some reason, she seems to feel that she can't "live her life" if I'm there interfering with it.
So this was very difficult for me. But after a time the reason for it was revealed to me in a flash of insight. You see many years prior, about thirteen years prior, I had a real bad flu with a very high temperature. This was during the inaugural day storm and we had no power.
I went to sleep with 103F fever, and in my sleep I went to God, and God spoke to me and told me I could stay with him then, or I could go back and complete a mission but my success was not guaranteed. I did not know what the mission was, but I knew I had young children and a wife that needed me so I chose to go back. And when I made that choice I woke up in my bed drenched in sweat, my fever was completely gone, 98.6F, and I felt fine.
So 13 year pass, and one night my daughter tells me a boy is coming from Utah for her and she hasn't made up her mind to go or not, and in the end I told her she had to follow her heart, knowing it would take her away from me. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, but then when I'm in the room with the entertainment center, Raymond is playing and he says out of the blue, "mission accomplished", and instantly I knew this had been the mission I had been assigned during that inaugural day storm, I had to raise her and at the appropriate time let her go.
I was given an understanding that this process was like that of birth. Women have a baby grow in their womb, for nine months it is inside their body growing, but there comes a time when the baby must be born. It can no longer grow within the confines of the mother. They say the process of birth is the most painful thing a woman goes through and afterwards there is often postpartum depression, still, it was necessary for the baby to continue to grow. And a woman doesn't stop loving her child when it is born, if anything that love increases.
I was present at the birth of all of my children and it was a beautiful thing, the most joyess moments in my life.
I came to understand that this was analogous. It was extremely painful for me, but it was absolutely necessary for my daughters growth. She could no longer grow within the confines of my space, she had to have her own space in which to grow. And she has grown, when I talk to her the difference in the apparent level of maturity is striking. She seems happy, she hadn't been happy for a long time. So it is good for her but it was painful for me.
After she did go I whined a lot and made a total ass of myself, but at least I told her to follow her heart when that was what she needed to do.
So I felt after this I had hoped there would either be some recuperation time or I'd be told what I should be doing next, but neither has happened. Instead I'm in financial and if I don't get some tax reports in soon, legal trouble.
I'm still praying for help but I wish I could say I feel 100% confident that it is coming but I am feeling very frightened right now.
Well, I'm just telling you about these things because they relate to my personal experience of God and how God has acted in my life.
What I want out of life now is financial and emotional security and to be placed into a position where I can help others and make a positive impact in the lives of others. I really don't care in what field, if it's in the computer field, or radio really the first thing I loved doing, or photography, a hobby of mine, or writing, something I've come to enjoy doing, or just something totally unrelated.
I just don't want to have to live in fear anymore and I want to feel like I'm doing something right with my life which I feel I haven't done a very good job of up to this point.
And to that end I felt that I wanted to relate some of my experiences and what I've learned from them.
Some background is necessary, when I was a younger child say around nine or ten years of age, my mother used to believe it beating us with a stick when we mis-behaved or were disrespectful. Specifically, we had a tree that grew these very flexible sticks that she would cut off and call "switches" and she would wail on our buttocks with them leaving welts and causing much stinging.
This created a great deal of fear for me when I was very young. So much so that I would have nightmares of locking myself in the bathroom and a switch trying to get me through cracks between the door and the floor or the door and the wall.
My mother was very strict at that age which contrasts greatly with how she was as I entered my teenage years (at that point quite the opposite, she became very lax).
One of the big things for her was when us kids went somewhere and were told to be back at a particular time, she was very strict about that time, and arriving three minutes late meant a switching (beating with stick).
We lived on the corner of 15th NE and 90th Street in Seattle, and about a mile to the north there was a bridge over a ravine. At that time the area below the bridge was undeveloped woods with Thornton creek running through the ravine. Myself and some of my friends used to go down there to play.
The woods had vines and on some trees ropes had been tied to branches. There was one portion of the creek that was deep and a tree near it had a rope that could swing out over the creek and in the summer we'd swing out and drop into the creek to cool off (and very cold it was). We'd play like we were in a Tarzan movie there, climbing trees and swinging from vines and ropes.
My mother would have dinner promptly at six and we were always to be home by six, and if we weren't the switch loomed. But being kids, it was easy to lose track of time while we were playing and occasionally, I would stop and look at my watch and see that it said it was after six. I would pray to be spared the switch and run home trying to minimize the damage, and somehow I would arrive home just before six even though I had left after six. This wasn't just a function of my watch being off, for it too would indicate that it was just before six when I arrived home.
The skeptical would say I just mis-read my watch, but this happened many times. I am convince it meant that God can answer prayers even if it requires violating physical laws of causality as we know them.
When I was in junior high school I had an interesting incident, although this one didn't involve prayer, it did seem to involve at the very least temporary suspension of ordinary physics.
I am a night person and always have been, not an early waker, and I used to watch television until 2am, and then I would have to get up and be to school by 8am. Invariably, I would not wake up until 7:30, spend twenty minutes getting ready, and then run two miles to school. This was not as hard as it might seem because the school was located in a big hole, and I lived on top of a hill, so the trip to school was downhill all the way making it easy to run. The downside was the walk home was a bitch.
The route I would take would be to run from my house on 15th and 90th down 90th to 17th Ave, then go north on 17th avenue to 94th, from there I would cut through a park and the playground of Sacajawea, the elementary school I went to, to arrive at 96th street and 20th Ave, then I'd go down 20th to 98th St, then down 98th street to Lake City way. I'd cross Lake City way at a light controlled cross-walk there, then go north on Lake City way to Fischer Ave, which went to Ravenna which I would follow to 115th Street which was the street my junior high school was on.
On the initial run down 90th, about fifty feet uphill from 17th Ave there was a fire hydrant. Each day, I would do a long jump at the fire hydrant, and each day I would achieve not an abnormal distance.
Except one day something happened. I felt I had gotten a particularly good launch and so I pulled my legs tightly up under my body to minimize air resistance and try to maximize the distance of the jump, but as I reached the apex of the jump something weird happened, I did not start falling down, instead I remained at approximately the same height but as the hill was falling away below me. I kept getting higher and higher with respect to the ground. I traveled in this manner all the way across 17th Ave and continued down 90th street.
At this point I was getting quite high in the air and I began to fear that either I would continue going up into the sky never to be seen again or when I did come down it was gonna hurt because I was up so high. As soon as I had that thought it was as if gravity gently resumed and I came down in a slow controlled manner and didn't hurt myself. Now I was quite a way down 90th from 17th and had to walk back up the hill to 17th Ave to continue my run to school. The total length of the jump I would estimate at being around 100 feet.
I tried to reproduce this every day after that when I ran to school, but never again did anything out of the ordinary happen, just normal distance long jumps like I had before.
I'm not sure all what to make of this experience, perhaps that God can lift and carry us if necessary, or perhaps that the laws of physics are not as immutable as we normally perceive. I am sure this is a lesson that will have relevance at some point in my life, but at present I still do not understand exactly what it meant.
In my experience, God seems to answer prayers inconsistently. Some say God answers all prayers it's just that sometimes the answer is "No", but I feel that to say that is just playing with semantics. But it does seem that answers tend to come when it's most important for them to. When I'm hurting the most, when I'm threatened the most, when someone I love is threatened the most.
My fathers wife got esophageal cancer diagnosed as stage four. I was very worried about my father being left alone, especially as he is getting up in years and has had a few health problems himself. The five year survival rate for this type of cancer is 3%.
I prayed for her survival, and it has been just about five years. Now, they have not cured the cancer entirely, cancer indicators still show that it is present in her body; however, they have been able to control it with chemotherapy and she has been able to maintain a reasonable quality of life throughout the process. I feel that this is a prayer that has been answered.
On the other hand, this year has been a shit storm if ever there was one. In a little more than a year, my mothers husband died from lung cancer and my mother became very depressed and stopped eating. I had prayed for his survival too but it did not happen. She lost 35 lbs and is way under weight as a result. She stopped losing weight after several months but still a year later hasn't regained it. Then a friend of mine visiting from Antarctica, who did blasting and drilling there and had wintered over and had been there eight years, died while here in Seattle visiting in an apartment fire. He had just shown us pictures of a house he had bought in New Zealand where he had planned to retire.
Then in April, an employee and friend committed suicide. Later our dog developed cancer and died. All of these things really contributed to functionality problems for me. I'm already prone to depression and this really pushed me over the edge. I also had ADD symptoms. I got treatment for these things and I was doing better near the end of September and working on getting things back in order, then my nineteen year old daughter left with a boyfriend for Utah with eight hours notice. To put it mildly I was crushed, a couple of more months of non-functionality followed.
I was pretty much maxed on the dosage of Welbutrin I was on for depression and ADD and increasing that dosage further wasn't really a safe option, too much can induce seizures.
I know that two factors are important to combat depression more than anything else, physical exercise and socialization. This was difficult for me to do because my daughter had always accompanied us to the gym and swimming, and when I'd go I'd really miss her presence and end up breaking down and crying, it just was no good. Most of my friends were on-line friends so there wasn't much opportunity to in person socialization since they were scattered all over the world. Most of my friends that were local had died, moved away, or just changed so much we didn't share interests during the time I had been raising children.
I prayed for help and I received it. I was pointed to a number of resources and ultimately did meet some people including someone who could accompany us exercising and that really made it more doable again.
Still, I have a lot of financial issues resulting from the time I really was not functional, I'm trying to work through those now but it's very difficult. I'm praying for help but so far it hasn't come.
I know I have not lived the type of life I should and I feel perhaps this is why I'm not yet getting the help that I need. All the pieces of the puzzle have to fit the plan and I've resisted and gone my own route and I think that has caused me these problems.
Adding to these difficulties has been A/C problems at the co-location facility which resulted in some equipment problems, not one but two dead washing machines, and during the recent windstorm a tree limb came through our roof and ceiling.
The mental issues, particularly the ADD, have made things like taxes reports problematic and I am behind in those.
It seemed like when I was a kid and got in trouble, prayer resulted in predictable and immediate results for the most part. One exception to that was when my parents divorced, I prayed for my fathers return but it was not to be.
But as an adult, when answers come they seem to be not immediate and not so predictable, kind of like we're supposed to experience more turmoil and difficulty as adults, although I know there are plenty of children in the world living under absolutely hellish conditions and I do not understand why that is permitted by a loving God.
But then sometimes love is tough. When my daughter left, I felt pain like I never had before. It was painful when my oldest son left, but then he only moved about ten miles away and once I was invited to his apartment and welcomed in his space I felt okay with it. But my daughter moved 900 miles away and really seems bent on total independence and even if I had the financial means to visit I don't feel like I would be welcomed. For some reason, she seems to feel that she can't "live her life" if I'm there interfering with it.
So this was very difficult for me. But after a time the reason for it was revealed to me in a flash of insight. You see many years prior, about thirteen years prior, I had a real bad flu with a very high temperature. This was during the inaugural day storm and we had no power.
I went to sleep with 103F fever, and in my sleep I went to God, and God spoke to me and told me I could stay with him then, or I could go back and complete a mission but my success was not guaranteed. I did not know what the mission was, but I knew I had young children and a wife that needed me so I chose to go back. And when I made that choice I woke up in my bed drenched in sweat, my fever was completely gone, 98.6F, and I felt fine.
So 13 year pass, and one night my daughter tells me a boy is coming from Utah for her and she hasn't made up her mind to go or not, and in the end I told her she had to follow her heart, knowing it would take her away from me. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, but then when I'm in the room with the entertainment center, Raymond is playing and he says out of the blue, "mission accomplished", and instantly I knew this had been the mission I had been assigned during that inaugural day storm, I had to raise her and at the appropriate time let her go.
I was given an understanding that this process was like that of birth. Women have a baby grow in their womb, for nine months it is inside their body growing, but there comes a time when the baby must be born. It can no longer grow within the confines of the mother. They say the process of birth is the most painful thing a woman goes through and afterwards there is often postpartum depression, still, it was necessary for the baby to continue to grow. And a woman doesn't stop loving her child when it is born, if anything that love increases.
I was present at the birth of all of my children and it was a beautiful thing, the most joyess moments in my life.
I came to understand that this was analogous. It was extremely painful for me, but it was absolutely necessary for my daughters growth. She could no longer grow within the confines of my space, she had to have her own space in which to grow. And she has grown, when I talk to her the difference in the apparent level of maturity is striking. She seems happy, she hadn't been happy for a long time. So it is good for her but it was painful for me.
After she did go I whined a lot and made a total ass of myself, but at least I told her to follow her heart when that was what she needed to do.
So I felt after this I had hoped there would either be some recuperation time or I'd be told what I should be doing next, but neither has happened. Instead I'm in financial and if I don't get some tax reports in soon, legal trouble.
I'm still praying for help but I wish I could say I feel 100% confident that it is coming but I am feeling very frightened right now.
Well, I'm just telling you about these things because they relate to my personal experience of God and how God has acted in my life.
What I want out of life now is financial and emotional security and to be placed into a position where I can help others and make a positive impact in the lives of others. I really don't care in what field, if it's in the computer field, or radio really the first thing I loved doing, or photography, a hobby of mine, or writing, something I've come to enjoy doing, or just something totally unrelated.
I just don't want to have to live in fear anymore and I want to feel like I'm doing something right with my life which I feel I haven't done a very good job of up to this point.
posted by Nanook at 6:33 AM
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