Finding God

If someone would have told me two years ago that I would be writing a blog post entitled "Finding God" I would have laughed. I didn't have an overtly religious upbringing, we didn't go to church every Sunday and we were never consistent about any religious celebrations. My parents were alcoholics and upon quitting they took very different roads to sobriety. My Mom's path led her through a lot of different support systems such as but not limited to...several different churches, women's groups, spirituality and AA. I don't ever remember having a belief system. For as long as I can remember I stood on the hill of "we'll never really know how we were all created and why we are here so why bother believe anything at all". That mentality led me directly to a boy who I fell head over heels for when I was 14 years old. I dated him for 5 years and he had a huge impact on how I learned about the world and shaped the beliefs that I was creating within myself as I entered adulthood. Needless to say I became more and more willing to die on that hill as I got older. I didn't realize that sitting on that hill, stubborn and angry was killing all of my joy, it was taking all my freedom to feel love!

At first, upon realizing that I was holding myself back from my own joy I was still very hesitant to use the word the God. It seemed like a dirty word to me. A word you only used if you believed in the things that I'd always associated with organized religion. I had SO many biases about religion and the use of God that I had completely closed off an entire section of the world because it made me uncomfortable. Anyways, at first I would use the word universe or source, then I discovered that love also works and soon I interchanged them all. Slowly I started intermixing God into the mix. It felt good, like I was reclaiming a word that had power over me in the past.