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| WHERE DO WE FIND GOD?, by Gail Gupton |
Most people look for God in church, in a temple or synagogue, or in the pages of the Holy Bible. Day after day, year after year, one goes through the ritual - hoping to someday be ready to meet God face to face. At most, the majority of persons only come to know about God. The majority of persons accept a concept of God they have learned by the attendance in church or the reading of the Bible. Surely, God is in churches, temples, and the Holy Bible, but that's not usually where God is found. On September 11, 2001, over 6,000 families had a reason to seek God for comfort and answers to before unthought-of questions. Brought about by the most heinous murderous crime imaginable, these families sought God in individual and collective ways. In the aftermath of American tragedy, a new spiritual thirst occurred. As the human world is one of opposites, and in the spiritual world there are no opposites, one actually finds God in the opposite place from which one would expect to find God. 1. In the pit of hell 2. In the agony of despair 3. At the bottom of the barrel 4. At the end of the rope 5. In the throes of heartache 6. In the darkness of fear 7. In the cavity of loneliness 8. On the ledge of insanity 9. In the sickroom 10. On the deathbed The list could be endless. These are but a few places in which one finds God. Would one be looking otherwise? It is when one finds God in the unlikely places that one's life is transformed. Then that "hell" becomes heaven and one discovers God was there all the time. Hell is transformed. Despair becomes peace. The barrel becomes full. The rope gets pulled up. The heartache melts. The darkness is replaced with light. Loneliness finds companionship. Insanity becomes sane. The sickroom becomes healthy. The deathbed discovers Life. It is the universal belief in two powers that sets up one to experience a manifestation of apparent negative powers. Again and again in these newsletters, ONE God is emphasized - Omnipotent God - One God who is ALL POWER. How can one experience two powers, a seeming opposite power - when there is none? Because one has not yet REALIZED it. Let's suppose someone deposited $500,000 in a bank account in your name, unaware to you. Continuing your everyday life because you had not yet come to realize the money was there, you would undoubtedly keep experiencing the struggles and worries so familiar to you. Ignorance of the truth, whether it be money in a bank or God being All, limits one's resources. Once a person discovers money they thought they had not, the person's lifestyle is changed. Once a person has discovered God to be in all the places they thought God was not, the effect of the false belief in two powers has no validity. Once a person has come into a new understanding of who and what God is, church and the reading of inspirational literature are simply reminders of the Truth we already know and are inwardly aware of, just as looking at the bank book reminds one he really does have money there. One does not need to "study", one needs to be reminded. Contemplate the idea of when you had to "learn" the multiplication tables. The understanding of the principle came from within you. With the understanding, the "dawning" of the principle, came the realization that no teacher could have given you. If the teacher had the power to have pupils learn, then every student would learn the same thing, at the same time, at the same rate. The same is true of spiritual understanding. As long as the world believes God is a power over something else or that God has to defeat a second power or heal something of another power, that long will the world suffer from the belief in two powers. To those people, evil and terror and poverty will continue to reign. People continue to look for God in obvious places of worship and come away with a temporary, although wonderful, emotional feeling. God's presence is felt in many places. We feel God within us. But, where do we find God? In the looking, God is FOUND in hell. God is FOUND in every negative situation. And finally God is found to be OMNIPRESENCE.
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