I have to start where I began
As I head towards 50 I want to say some thank yous
It occurred to me yesterday as I walked back from town that it is thirty days until I hit the half-century mark. I hadn’t given it much thought as I like to think of myself as ‘a man of the moment’. But as I have come to learn sometimes it is right to listen to what may be an inner prompting.
So I decided today I would open myself to that possibility as I will each new day to write about someone, something, that has influenced me in this last 50 years.
I have to start where I began and that is with, ‘what’, ‘who’ is commonly referred to as God. I have chosen the flames as a symbol of how I see God. I have never seen his/her face. I usually if not always refer to God as he. A reflection of the culture, time and place I entered into when I left my mother’s womb.
I can never remember a time when I did not have an awareness of God, he was just there. In time I would not only see him as he but as a Father. I developed an inner life quite early on. It began by talking to God as a child may to an imaginary friend. He was forever listening, he didn’t seem to say much but I was aware that he was listening and I wanted him usually to fix things.
I knew about Jesus but perhaps as he showed how he related to God as Father I followed his example and adopted God too as my Father.
I have always known him to be for me. Indeed my lacks as a kid and a teenager became a strength in our relationship as he knew how much I needed him. I needed him to believe in me and he did. From him I would make decisions knowing if he was with me why should I fear. It didn’t mean I didn’t fear but it did get me to make decisions and act.
Our relationship did get confused over the years, I denied he existed, I rebelled against him, I listened to people who I thought knew more about my Father than I did and gave up the truth of what I knew for a lie. That gave me a relationship with a belief, an ideology but not my Father. No wonder it led to strife. It was as if I was relating to an idol unto which I could project whatever image of God I wanted.
It was perhaps in my own rage against it that I smashed it and saw it and me for what it was, broken. Yet within me remained that of him which is within us all and although I had deceived myself, the truth of who I was, am and will be was ever-present.
Reunited with him our relationship was now and is one of Father to an adult child.
I started with him and it is to him I will return. For now, I am upon this earth to work with him for his desires.
Best day,
g
