I don’t have much to give, but what I do have, I’d like to share with you. I’d like to share my own journey, but not because yours will be the same. What I’d like to pass on is that life is a journey and the only constant is change. So, the idea of being open to  a new stage of your journey opening up for you is something I hope will ease your transitions.  And sometimes the hardest parts are the fertilizer for growing more loving.

I grew up in a religion, but fairly early on questioned a lot of it. Because I didn’t know any better, I connected and limited the idea of a God to religion so when I became disillusioned with religion, I stopped believing in God.

Since I just naturally look for possibilities to make life better, I figured it was up to us to make our world better if there was no God. I became active in the Civil Rights movement to help give African Americans equal rights. I tutored children in a ghetto school who could not read and worked with a Catholic organization that was trying to get better jobs for African Americans, though I was no longer Catholic or Christian. After a while I realized that because of prejudice, learning to read would not actually give black children or adults a chance at better jobs. 

Meanwhile in my group of educated, supposedly Christian, white friends who were lawyers, doctors, and scientists, I witnessed not just disinterest, but a fear of and even hate many had for African Americans who were trying to get equal rights. Obviously neither religion nor a college education overcame prejudice.

Then, when Martin Luther King’s March on Washington came through Nashville, I was answering the phones in the NAACP’s office while the buses were stopping there. A number of young men, who belonged to organizations that were much more militant and violent than Martin Luther King’s, came into the office. Their obvious hatred of me and bullying , just because I was white, were scary. I went home convinced that we were going to have a bloody race war in America. And that terrified me for both my own children and for those sweet, friendly young black children I had tutored.

Martin Luther King and his Christian non-violent movement saved us from that.

I realize now that his willingness to not only devote his life to helping others, but to suffer and risk dying for them, came from his relationship with Jesus. He believed Christianity was about experiencing the love of God first hand and passing it on, even to our enemies.

I need to explain why, as someone who lived in the South most of my life, I was not consciously prejudiced. My father was an intelligent man, whose personality made him open to questioning the status quo. It was the hand he was dealt at birth, even though most of his family were not like this. He was a newpaperman with an insatiable desire for knowledge. He devoured history, philosphy, science, literature, and theology. He was also a frustrated idealist, who wasn’t always able to handle the gap between reality and his vision of how things should be without sometimes dulling the pain with alcohol. Idealists are not perfect, not even ones like Martin Luther King, who cheated on his wife even though he knew Jesus and was willing to die for others. But idealists are frequently willing to spend and lose their life trying to make life better for the powerless, including idealists who because of Jesus actually try to not hate those who hate them. So, I wasn’t taught to hate either side, even after our house was bombed when my newspaper editor father supported an African American for a place on the school board in the early fifties in Houston, Texas.

As I became more aware of the hatred on both sides of the race issue, I decided that we needed ways to change people’s attitudes, not just laws. So, I went back to college to study psychology. And though I eventually realized that many people don’t see a need to change, psychology helped me in my own personal struggle to cope with the gap between reality and the ideal.

In my personal life at the time of my search for ways to help people become more loving and open to those different from themselves, I lived a life of pleasures available to those who were affluent. When one of the couples in our social group decided to give up their sizeable income, their home, and lifestyle to work full time for Campus Crusade for Christ, that got my attention. They had always seemed to be  rather average well to do American Christians. But this was a whole new ballgame and though I didn’t understand it, I envied anyone who believed in something enough to give up all the perks of being affluent Americans.

The key to their change seemed to be that they had taken a leap from just attempting the minimum love in the ten commandments, into “Here I am, God. I am yours.” This opened them up to a growing give and take relationship with an accessible Jesus who fleshed out the unconditional love of God. Not an easy leap for a “show me” kind of person like me. But several women I met from Campus Crusade spoke about new self awareness and the grace to change. That revived a tiny bit of my lost hope that people could change.

A warning here: Everyone’s journey is unique. Humans are not cookie cutter beings. And everything from inborn personality types, to genes, family traditons, life experiences, wounds and gifts, and current trends in our particular culture will influence our personal journeys. The only inherent similarity is that a journey involves accepting a need for growth through change.

Along the seeking phase of my journey I had read the Bible all the way through. I found contradictions that seemed to me to be because of human evolution. Not having studied the Bible much, a lot of the claims of the New Testament definitely sounded against the laws of nature, as we currently understood them anyway. And when I asked my church going Christian friends about miracles, they didn’t seem to believe them relevant in the present times anyway. Since the New Testament was about miracles and changed lives with people becoming willing to die for what they believed God wanted, I have to admit that I felt some disappointment.

Another warning: In retrospect about my taking a leap that changed my view and gave me a source of love and strength, I can see how slowly and carefully God prepared me for that leap. There is again a unique journey with tiny steps that prepare us for the leaps. And someone pushing us either too soon or to a decision that is not part of our own journey, will not work for us. Studying psychology and having some therapy helped heal wounds I did not know I had. Wounds that kept me from being able to believe I was loveable. I’m a theory person, who is mostly oblivious to the concrete world around me. Abstract issues and theories were very little help in my role as a wife and mother of five children. I felt hopelessly inadequate all the time. Feelings of inadequacy keep us so focused on ourselves, that we have nothing left for loving others. Being accepted with compassion when I admitted I didn’t think I was capable of really loving anyone was the beginning of a new important stage of my journey. Knowing with BOTH mind and heart that we are loved just as we are is what frees us to begin growing more loving all our lives. It’s not a smooth journey even then, because there are deeper wounds and even new wounds that have to be healed to make our next leap in loving. But there are lots of sources helpful for healing. Growth is a life long process. And for all any one knows for sure, it might be longer than that!

As far as religion goes, the mystics of the world religions, both Judeo-Christian and others, agree that everything is one. So, whatever we do affects the whole. The mystics are the people whose lives are focused on seeking and encountering aspects of God. But, others also experience that oneness. Once I had experienced it, I found it’s a reality that undermines my justification for rejecting others different from me, ultimately even those that hate or hurt me.

I finally realized that either thinking I can know God fully or that I know there is no God is hubris. Even Einstein saw that. As close as I can come to describing God is Love. And for me, Jesus is not only a model of how to grow in love, but an actual expression of that Love that can become the source of healing, freeing, strengthening, guiding, and Love growing in us. He has also been my source of faith for and experiences of what we, in our ignorance, call miracles.

Though I searched in many places in and outside of religions, I found God only when I was ready to risk saying, “Jesus, if you are who you claimed to be, the Love of God expressed for us, then I want you as my Savior and Lord.” And for me that meant, “I want you as my guide, my best friend, as my go to source of the grace of Love,  healing, wisdom, strength, comforting, forgiveness, and growth in loving myself and all others.” In other words, a source of Love/grace that can save me from my selfishness.  I have no way of knowing how anyone else’s journey will be nurtured.  I know and love people who have come to believe as I do, that the purpose of life is learning how to truly love unconditionally, but they learned this through other ways.  I share my process in case it helps anyone else, but I don’t believe it’s the only way to grow in Love.  I do believe that however we come to believe in and experience unconditional love, it has to be with both mind and heart. 

Jesus gives God a face. The God who is way beyond understanding gives me a glimpse to help me trust that all of us tiny people, who are floating helplessly in a giant universe or perhaps even more universes, matter. We are tiny, but integral, parts of the whole.

This was something that made a difference for me… a beginning of a journey that has involved a lot of scary opening up to trying to understand and love people different from me……including fundamentalist Christians……and people whose prejudices I don’t share …..those who scorn my faith…. and those who hurt me or who cannot forgive me for hurting them.

It is not easy being weird. And as an evangelical, “born again” Christian and a liberal Democrat, who once danced for sheer joy at the awesomeness of God when reading a book describing evolution in the micro to the macro of our universe; as a person with several generations of intelligent, spiritual, and loving homosexual partners in my immediate family, as a person who recognizes truth in metaphors, so doesn’t take all the Bible literally, but has experienced the presence of Jesus, sheer overwhelming joy from the Love of God, and too many “miracles” to limit God in anyway, I definitely am a rare bird…..in other words…..weird.

No two journeys are exactly alike. And they call us to change often along the way.  And even with grace that’s not easy. But the joy of knowing we are all loved at each stage, even when we falter, makes it worth the struggle.