Tag Archives: Spiritual

Struggle

I am still struggling with the idea of ‘God‘ and ‘Higher Power‘, especially related to LOVING Higher Power or Loving God. And yes, while writing, I am also struggling why in the Twelve Steps in Step 2 there is a mention of Higher Power and in Step 3 it is about God. As if God and Higher Power are the same. But maybe they are not.

Photo

Photo that appealed to me related
to Higher Power right now (found on oalifeline,
I have no rights for this photo)

I just put the photo, based on my feeling, which did not make sense to me. But later I saw the clouds, the sky behind the dog, representing The Universe, Higher Power to me. And I just realized that my dogs, including two Rottweilers, like on the photo, support me so much recently, seeming to feel what I feel, feeling so bad, and still wanting to be me, as close as possible. That is such a great feeling, such a great gift.

A (loving?) Higher Power of my understanding

I wrote below the characteristics of what a loving Higher Power would be to me, like when a Higher Power would be loving. And I realized I ended up writing my definition of a Higher Power, which I realized could be interpreted as ‘playing God’.

Then I thought further and defining ‘loving Higher Power’ or ‘love’ in my understanding would indeed be something like defining like I did. As if a loving Higher Power would not match my definition it would not be a loving Higher Power in my understanding. Then it could still be a Higher Power, but not ‘loving’.

And looking at the things I wrote I expect from a loving Higher Power implies that Higher Power would have unlimited power, be able to do ‘anything’ in my life, in the world, in The Universe. And of course that goes back to my understanding of ‘God’, the God I know from the bible, the God that is all powerful. And that God is also like the God of Islam and such.

So if a/my Higher Power is loving in my understanding and all powerful, then why does He or She not give me what I want and think I need? Well, i guess those things go back to understanding life, to the dilemma of life, the dilemma I guess we all struggle with.

Characteristics I relate to loving Higher Power

Anyhow, I was thinking I could at least write down what to me the characteristics of a Loving Higher Power would be. So here we go:

A loving Higher Power would give me what I want, no matter what, or would at least help me get what I want.
One of the things I would expect a loving Higher Power to do right now is to give me enough money to do the things I want to do, or at least enough money to provide in my current needs, provide enough money ‘to pay the bills’ so to speak.
I would expect a loving Higher Power also to take away my current suffering, especially that terrible feeling I mostly, or lately always, wake up with.
I also would expect a loving Higher Power to help me use my talents in a way, yes, that I want, like use my talents to make some decent income, or at least make sure I have enough money so I could share my talents for free. As I love to work, use my talents, yes, provided that my work is somehow appreciated, which I feel it is not right now.
I would also expect a loving Higher Power to give me the love life that I want, the love life I think I need and deserve, like sleeping together and yes, making love, having sex, preferably with who I consider and want to be my lifetime partner, preferably with Lee.
I would expect a loving Higher Power also to find a way so I could visit my mom at least one more time before she dies, or before I die, as she would love so much to see me and I would also like to see her.
And yeah, I would expect a loving Higher Power to help me restore The Malasag House, renovate it, make it beautiful again, hopefully with the same spirit in which Lee and me occupied it long time ago, in 2006.
And yeah, I would like my Higher Power to take away the burden of my loan away, just pay it, just let it go, just leave it in the past. And I am not sure how much I learned from that experience, of how that loan all came to be, but it was not only my fault, my mistake, there were also others involved in that.
Ah, yes, I would also want my Higher Power to help get YokYok and Arf together, so we can be a family again, together with all the dogs in one place, happy together.
He or She would certainly not want me to do things I don’t want to do or don’t like to do.
Communicate often, show my love often, let Him or Her know I am here/there.
…

My part

Next to thinking about what a loving Higher Power would be to me I was also thinking to add what a loving Higher Power would want from me. And what comes to mind now, maybe also what a loving Higher Power would want to give me:

A loving Higher Power would want me to be happy and enjoy life, enjoy all the things there are in the world, all the things there are in ‘creation’.
A loving Higher Power would want me to be careful with everything in His creation.
A loving Higher Power would want me to love Him or Her back: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, Is just to love and be loved in return”.
A loving Higher Power would want me to do the things I love to do, do the things He created me for.
A loving Higher Power would want me to communicate often with Him or Her often.

What next?

So what is next? While writing it came to me that I can at least do my part. As by the nature, the definition of Higher Power I cannot control my/a Higher Power, whether of my understanding or not.

And then indeed, it is up to my Higher Power to do His or Her part. At least now He or She now knows more about what I would expect from a loving Higher Power, how I look at ‘love’ or ‘loving’. Maybe He or She could consider my thoughts on that.

So my part would be:

be happy and enjoy life;
be careful with anything in this/His/Her creation;
love Him or Her as I want or expect to be loved;
do the things I love to do and/or He or She created me for;
communicate often, show my love often, let Him or Her know I am here/there.

Sounds pretty simple, so let’s start from here.

Preliminary result

Writing this page, the above, a few days ago has had some kind of positive influence on me, as it gave me a way to focus on my part whenever I am angry or confused or whatever. Like I just found myself chatting to a friend “I hate God for …” and that brought me back to the fact that my part does say to “love my Higher Power”, not “hate my Higher Power”. It also made me realize that I can maybe only love someone or something if I can also hate him or her or it. Somehow anything also relates to its opposite, like there is no love if there is no such thing as hate.

It also helped me leave the things I expect from a loving Higher Power with my loving Higher Power, so I don’t need to ‘work so hard’ to achieve those things.

Love is blind?

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I am more and more amazed with the power of sex; or of romantic love; or love; or whatever one may call it. Or is it something else?

I find myself more and more in an impossible situation, or not really impossible, but a situation I could have never imagined before, when I was a child. It seems that many things I was told about life when I was a child were a lie, or at least not true. And yes, I guess my parents and other teachers didn’t know better. They could not have taught me things they did not know. And how could they have known?

And I guess many things they did not really teach me. Many things I believed came from my own imagination. Or from what I read or knew or heard of.

And no, I don’t like where I stand now. And yes, it seems I still blame it on my past, on others, on God, on whatever. Or yes, on the person I love, the person I love most. And it is not true a human being can just ‘move on’. As I have a big loan to pay and I have no clue how I would do that; or even agree to the new, very fair, agreement that is in the making. How can I make commitments on things I don’t know, on things I can’t control?

Yes, I believed in love, and somehow I guess I still do. But it seems indeed love is blind, stupid. How can that be, as to me love is still sweet and nice and pleasant and a good thing. But no, it appears not to be, at least not the romantic love I believed in.

So what is this thing I used to call love? Just lust, just sex, just sexual need, just instinct? And why is it so bad, why did it have such a bad outcome for me, at least the last few years and as of this moment? And how would I make up? And how would I control my sexual urges, my sexual needs? Just suppress them? But that just seems to create more unmanageability. Or indeed, try to remove them through castration or something? Yes, that is how far I have come now, even somehow considering something like that, although not really seriously, as that seems to only kind of sure way to take away sexual feelings.

But then what, what is the world, what is life without romantic love? To me a day without romantic love, yes without making love or something, a day without sleeping together, yes, preferably with my lover and partner, something I don’t have and somehow don’t want anymore? What is a day without that?

Or is it still all about the emptiness, the spiritual emptiness I am trying to fill and that cannot be filled without believing in some kind of loving God or loving Higher Power? Or about loving myself, but isn’t that the same thing? I often wonder if it would not be hard for (a) God to love Himself, as He would also need to live with the consequences of his choices, like the suffering that is probably the result of giving man ‘free will’.

The love of God

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I recently started a post A loving Higher Power. And maybe I better continue extending and improving that post, but somehow I wanted to start from scratch again as I am struggling so much with ‘Love’.

And today or yesterday the definition as given in The Matrix came back to my mind. It was said by, well, I forgot the name, but I will put later. The guy from the Machine World that Neo meets in the railway station. Found it: Rama Kandra.

Ah, and I feel so restless, not really in the mood of writing. But I also know writing is good for me. And so many things to do…

And it is a few days after I started this post now. And I just had a phone call with my mom in which she told me what she put on the grave of my dad: “God is love”. Not sure why she mentioned it and she did not know why she put it. She said it just came to here to put that.

And that brings me back to writing here, as this page is exactly about that. And I guess it cannot be coincidence that she mentioned it, even though I mentioned to her about my struggle with ‘love’ in relation to God, in relation to Higher Power.

And I thought I put a link to ‘Love’ as written about in Wikipedia, but apparently I didn’t. Or I did somewhere else. And this may be an important paragraph about it in Wikipedia:

Ancient Greek philosophers identified four forms of love: essentially, familial love (in Greek, storge), friendly love (philia), romantic love (eros), and divine love (agape). Modern authors have distinguished further varieties of love: infatuated love, self-love, and courtly love. Non-Western traditions have also distinguished variants or symbioses of these states. Love has additional religious or spiritual meaning. This diversity of uses and meanings combined with the complexity of the feelings involved makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.

And I remember the word agape mentioned related to the love of God, I think from a religious meeting or attending church. Not much in the article worth copying here though at first sight, so I guess I have to write myself a bit more and/or do some more research.

And I am pretty tired and still kind of upset, as today it was confirmed Iwa, one of my dogs, has a tumor that needs to be treated. And unfortunately the vet is on holiday for two weeks, so I feel pretty stressed and confused, as I am thinking of cancer spreading. And I would like, love(?!) Iwa to stay quite a bit longer, as she is not that old yet.

So yes, I feel like stopping now, need some rest. And yes, I will try to pray, hoping God will cure Iwa. Not easy believing in a loving God with things like this, like sickness and possible death from that.

Filthier than the filthiest rag

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History

I was a bit shocked when I realized what pastor Ferdie of the Great Alliance Commission Fellowship in Cagayan de Oro City actually said this morning, or what I thought he said (see update). As he said something like we humans are like “filthier than the filthiest cloth one can imagine”. And I know it is meant well, it is meant to show us the way to Jesus, but still, it is an affirmation, and when thinking about it I think it is kind of an insult to God. As I believe we are created in His Image, and calling ourselves filthier than the filthiest cloth, doesn’t that mean we also say God is filthier than the filthiest cloth? Or aren’t we saying He created us as filthy beings? Aren’t we saying He created humans as filthy beings?

Great Commission Fellowship

And this is an affirmation. And for quite a while I am trying to figure out where my negative thinking comes from. And I think it comes mainly from my upbringing, from my being raises as a Christian. And I am starting to believe more and more that my negative thinking, my thinking about a bad an punishing God (and life), comes from there, comes from the ideas I was taught when I grew up.

And when I was invited to join meetings from the Great Commission Alliance Fellowship I was happily surprised, especially with the worship gathering every Sunday, I was happily surprised that was and is quite a happy event every Sunday morning at 10 am in Cinema 3 of SM City (in Cagayan de Oro City) with modern music and modern preaching. Not the dull ceremonies with singing very old songs that didn’t make sense to me with only a church organ.

So after joining that event for the first time I decided to keep going. Mainly because I needed some more spiritual input, but also just to find new friends, to expand my social circle. And mostly I like the gathering, as mostly I am learning something. And I kind of like how pastor Ferdie mixes common sense self help type wisdom with biblical knowledge, with biblical ideas, although sometimes it is a bit too much for me.

And yes, I learned to be more myself, like joining things like singing or going to the altar when called. I learned to listen and participate as myself, not blindly following whatever is told or taught. I think that is big progress, not the least letting go of the past, letting go of this punishing God that has been with me so long, yes, that God is often or mostly still with me.

And this morning that God visited me, that negative God, that God that tells me that I am filthier than the filthiest rag. And I just don’t believe God is like that. I can’t believe that a God that I am told is a loving God, says or thinks I am dirty, that I am filth.

So also this Great Commission Fellowship has these negative teachings about human beings. And that turns me off. Yes, I know somehow I commit ‘sin’ as somehow I do things that I believe I am not supposed to do; I do things I don’t want to do; I do things that I believe are ‘wrong’. But on the other side I am just “me”, somehow I was just created this way. So why blame me for being me?

So why write this post? Well, I guess the main reason was that pastor Ferdie kind of brushed me off when I tried to share my concern about what he had said this morning. And this was not the first time he said it, but this time it just struck me as ‘wrong’. as a wrong message to people. As it may just make one feel bad. And I don’t think it is right to make people feel bad about themselves.

If God is good, aren’t we also good? And aren’t we made in His Image?

Update

Good I pushed through telling pastor Ferdie what I had understood from his sermon, as he responded that he had not said or meant that we are all filth in the eyes of God. He had meant or said that even if we were filthier than the filthiest cloth on earth God is there for us, Jesus has saved us.

And last Sunday, yesterday, I was happily surprised hearing him say things I have been writing about, like that we have been made in God’s image.

Absurdity and suicide

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“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy”. This is the beginning of the book “The Myth of Sysiphus” written by Albert Camus.

And I was pointed to it by the start of another book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos” by Brian Greene. I read that book a lot, but I never realized or remembered how it started.

And I don’t feel like writing right now, but I was caught by the phrase “judging whether life is or is not worth living”. As that seems to be the main thing I am struggling with. As life is not worth living to me, at least that is what I have been thinking for a long time, but somehow I am still alive, so apparently life is worth living looking at my actions; or non-action like not having killed myself until now.