There is a creator I have decided

When it snows in Alaska, my favorite part is when it catches the light.  The snow refracts it and becomes a glitter sparkle in the pile of countless other glitter sparkles.  For no other reason except the snow flake is designed that way, in all those lovely shapes, each one a different combination and becomes a glitter sparkle.  I am always in awe of the fact that the things that happen around us are just so beautiful. 

I have had a hard time in my life in the areas of love and trust.  To love god and accept him into your heart you have to trust that what the bible says is true.  That was hard for me. It was hard to see terrible things happen to good people or watch children grow up and die in unloving environments –  with no happy ending. I have a hard time trusting that the god of the bible is Loving.  My dad for one reason or another has been distant in my life. It is hard to identify god as my father with that understanding of a father.  The people I can identify with the most are the prostitutes, the unloved, the unworthy.  Jesus was kind to them and I can get behind that.  But faith has been a journey – maybe slow to me since I am still discovering how I feel about God and who he is to me at 35 – almost 20 years to my date of collision with the biggest constant thought in my life. 

When I think of the universe and the passing of time – our understanding that the world is billions of years old, I want to go back even further and watch the birth of the universe.  But if it was a big bang, even further still, where did all the elements come from to create the boom? How are so many things connected in our growth as a species if we are all so accidentally big banged?  And even further, something had to create the elements.  I have decided that there is a creator.  A mass of energy? A wispy cloud of element we call god? A sentient being? a transcended power that resides in another dimension parallel to us? I don’t know but for me it takes more faith to believe something clapped its hands and here we are with all these complexities.  I am resigning to believe there is a creator. 

I have always known of God and have been in church since I could remember.  I know all about the stories, the donkeys, the cross, the whole religion – from a churched child perspective.  And then I asked God to really have some kind of relationship with me ( I didn’t know what that meant really – it was just in the prayer I was supposed to say) when I was younger and it was real for me.  I spent a lot of time trying to atone for all that I was and really missed the concept of free grace because that is NOT what I was taught in every day life and couldn’t trust or accept this reality. I met a guy and my faith was really formed around his ideas of the Christian church.  Unfortunately this was coupled with some religious emotional abuse and I had a really strange understanding about God.  I kind of back and forthed and relied on god whenever I needed to whine about something and blame someone. When I was praying to leave my marriage, I was mad that God wouldn’t do it for me.  When I shut down emotionally at the peak of the abuse in my last marriage, I blocked any and all amount of God out and gave way to any and every sin I wanted. 

Then I hit a moose.  But right before I hit the moose, I felt instructions download into my brain on what to do when a moose comes.  When the moose came, I didn’t even have to think – my body did everything for me, exactly like instructed.  And as I lost myself, spinning, around and around and around down the icy hill in the middle of the night, I let go of the wheel and surrendered myself to whatever the universe had for me.  Because in that moment everything that I thought I knew was surrendered too.  I was stripped to nothing and gave everything.

I have been looking around ever since with a new beauty of the life around me.  It pulses through the cycles of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun or the waves of the ocean.  The Flowers, the passing seasons, the birds, how animals love, the way babies and children grow, love, and trust, the beauty of every person – different in every characteristic, shining like glitter sparkles all over the earth.  I have decided that God is the universe and the universe is my creator and I kind of think maybe he's an artist, a poet, also beautiful- because the story goes that we are made like him. 

When I make something, I am really proud.  I pick all the colors I want and put them all together and I stand back and stare at my creation and I am so proud at the ending result.  God made this world and I can only imagine he is so proud of who we are as people (… maybe not all of us).  And the fact that God created the world with snow sparkles and wish flowers, animals that accompany us and the circle of life- tells me it was thought out.   All the way down to our DNA sequencing, there is order and when there is not, it acts as if it was written to be wild, without order, free to evolve the way it wants.  Kind of like the people God created.  We are all so different, allowed to be full of disorder, allowed to grow and rebel.  A creator that allows me to grow the way I want to and still finds me worthy to keep around ( every morning I wake up again is a gift) is something I can get behind.   And so the journey to faith for me begins here.  My walk into understanding this world and who the universe is.