Friday, August 8, 2008

Is any of it real?

I'm having a really bad day. A day where you know what? I'm tired of telling everyone it's ok and that God loves us and all that bullsh*t. What the hell kind of God takes someone's child away? And he does this EVERY SINGLE DAY. Not a day goes by where somewhere in the world someone's precious child isn't ripped from their arms. What kind of God lets that happen?

Sometimes I try to convince myself that it's not God that does this, it's satan instead. But really, if God is so much stronger than satan to be able to cast him into hell for eternity, isn't he tough enough to stand up to him and say no to childhood death? And if he's not, is he really that powerful at all?

I read these blogs of people who have lost a child but just continue to worship God and at times I am in awe of their faith and at times I want to grab them by the head and shake them and ask them who they are kidding. Maybe God is just an excuse we hide behind when bad things happen so that we don't have to face reality. Maybe our little bitty psyche's can't bear the thought of never seeing our children again so we cling tightly to that story the pastor told us about heaven. I think this might be true because in reality the bible says that earthly people won't even matter to us when we get there, that we will simply be in awe of the presence of the lord. So why do we talk about seeing our children in heaven? It doesn't even make sense!

I try to beleive, I try to keep my faith. I try to understand but the big man upstairs doesn't seem to be giving me anything that I need to understand. I've asked for help, I've asked for answers. I haven't gotten any. Sometimes I think if there is a God that he has some twisted and sick sense of humor to sit and watch so much suffering. Even the most uncaring people in the world usually couldn't fathom watching a child suffer in a hospital room with his chest ripped open, or slowly die from cancer, yet God does it EVERY DAY! What the hell?! And then as parents we are suppose to thank him? We are suppose to worship him? Hey dude, thanks for making pain the only thing my child ever knew and then making sure the rest of us knew what pain was too.... how nice.

Today my faith is tested. I'm tired of praying to a God who never seems to answer.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Kat - On my days of questioning God I always return to the Footprints poem/prayer - "It was then that I carried you" - I know (hope) those are the days I'm in God's arms and I can't see him because I'm too close. I am praying for you as always.

Danny said...

I hated GOD for taking my 5 year old daughter away from me!

(NOTE: I haven’t shared this with anyone before. I was scared that people would laugh at me or think I am delusional. But your pain I feel and so I will share with you a secret I hold. If it is not for you then I apologize. If it helps you as it did me then maybe that is what I was supposed to do with my little encounter with God.)

My wife and I were Christian addicts. For 5 years after we first heard about God and Jesus we were hook and in love with our savior. We couldn’t get enough praise and worship and we went to every church teaching and event.

My wife and I thought we were tight with the man upstairs. Then the unthinkable happened. Our 5 year old daughter Jamielee was killed by a drunk driver. We were devastated, confused and my wife and I hated God!

I did everything I could to be the man and father God asked me to be. My wife spent hours reading the word to our children and together we prayed the prayers and walked the walk humbly and innocent and childlike.

So what did we do wrong that God didn’t protect us and keep our devoted family safe and protected from the bad things?

God allowed my daughter and your beautiful Son Alex to be a victim. After all God is all powerful and could make these choices Right?

I feel Connected with you in the fact I also was looking for an answer. Where are all the promises? Why are we to suffer this bull crap? God, just end it, but NO, instead you put us in cruel situations and for what, to see your pleasure, to see how much power you have? OK, so now we know how tough and big you are. You’re not doing a great job at winning soles.

I was devastated and I walk out on my Family. I was going to end my life. I ran and lived in the streets. I gave up all hope and just wanted to die.

Then one day as I was searching for something to eat out of trash cans in Boston, I had a vision. It was God and he told me to go home and be the Father and Husband I was destined to be. What happened next still gives me shivers. I am in awe and it’s hard to articulate but I will try.

I found myself in a beautiful land. I was surrounded by everything anyone could ever want. Beauty, love, and all my needs met. God said to me that I now have all his powers to do as I wish. He told me that this land was my home and the beauty it possessed was my yard. I found myself in this awesome place with my family and yes my Jamielee was alive and with me. The land was surrounded by this huge picked fence. On the other side of the fence was barren land as far as the eye could see. There were dangers out there. Poisonous plants, disease, drugs, and violence.

My existence in my new home was fascinating. In an instant I was aware of everything. I knew and understood so much. Everything within me was intensified. The drawback… My capacity to love and feel hurt and pain was also at an unexplainable level of intensity.

There was neighbor on the other side of the fence. I remember he was so charismatic, good looking and he was able to talk so smooth. He would tell my children stories about the barren lands and tell how fantastic it is and how one could do anything their hearts desired without consequences.

I told my children that he was a liar. I know what is beyond our beautiful back yard and it is not pretty. I told them how dangerous it was. I told them that they could have anything they wanted and everything they desired right now. I told them just DON’T climb the fence and leave.

Suddenly I was struck with the realization that my children could get hurt. I was afraid that I might loose them. I remember also that my daughter was killed by a drunk, even though she was here with me, I still had the knowledge of my other reality. The pain of loosing her or any of my family was so overwhelming I became almost sick with fear.

I wasn’t about to loose my family again. Not this time. I have all these powers. This will be easy I thought as I removed the thoughts from my children of wanting to leave me for this so called better way of living.

Things were perfect again. I had my family and they will not leave because I used the powers God gave me to remove their doubt and they were now content in living their lives within the safety of my home.

My neighbor, the liar, laughed at me and called me a hypocrite because I took away the free will of my children. He proceeded to tell me that they are not here in your safe little home because they love you but because you turned them into robots. They have no free will and told me that I will never have a loving relationship with them because now they are incapable of real love. They will just be lip servicing you because of what you did to them.

The liar was right. My heart was empty and my children were nothing more than robots and I was pretending that they loved me.

Being God has some advantages. So I reversed my miracle of removing their free will. I instead removed the liar from existence. Ha ha ha. This made sense. Now that he was gone and my children had all the free will to love me I was back in control. What can go wrong? My children were in paradise and they loved me because I loved them and all is good right?

All these powers and yet I was stuck with yet another dilemma. My children started to doubt me. They asked question that put me on the spot. They wondered why I removed the liar from existence. They question my truth about what was beyond our wonderful home. They murmured to each other the questions; “What was beyond our home that Dad was is afraid of? Was the liar telling the truth after all?, Was there bigger and better things beyond the fence?” They wondered if I was trying to keep all my power to my self and that I must be afraid that my children would be equal to me if they go to the barren lands. I was loosing my family because I took away the evil neighbor who told lies.

I had to restore the Liar and now I am back where I started from. What are my choices now? How to I keep the love of my children and prove the liar wrong in the process? I did the only thing I could. I let them go. I let them go beyond the fence. They had to see for themselves. I realized that I could tell my children that the stove was hot but until they actually touch the stove and burn themselves, they would never actually KNOW what I was talking about. My heart sank in grief as my children ventured off into the unknown and dangerous barren lands.

My heart got the best of me. I couldn’t just watch them get hurt. So I followed them with pillows, protecting their fall. I put up walls to protect them from the winds. I made sure there were plenty of water and plenty of food so they would be hungry. I gave their bodies a resistance to disease.

All was ok. I missed them but they loved me. They would pray to me and I would hear them tell me how much they were thankful for all that I gave them. They wandered the world and I met their needs. No children will be hurt. No good people will suffer, No Bad Things Will Happen to Good People on My Watch. I will just wait here for them to come home. I waited and waited. A thought entered my mind, why would they want to come home? They have the best of both lands and are living in dangerous places and are in unhealthy situations with out consequences. I realized my beloved children are choosing to live away forever without me and knowing they will never choose to come home. They have no reason to.

I was feeling lonely and maybe a little cocky as well and so I confronted my Liar neighbor and boasted about how much my children loved me and what he said next rocked my world. “Do they? Do they really love you? The only reason they claim to love you is because you protect them and give them everything they want. Take away the protective hedge you surrounded them with and they will hate you and spit in your face and complain about their miserable lives and blame you for everything that goes wrong in their pathetic existence”. The Bible book of JOB all of a sudden came to mind and I saw the Parody of what I just did and said to the Liar.

In a nutshell, the book of Job tells a story of how God has this meeting of the minds in heaven. Lucifer strolls in and God asks him what is he been up to. Lucifer replies that he was looking over the world to see if anybody on it loved God because he was God or just because he protected the people. And God started to gloat about Job and Job went through some of the most painful tests and in the end proves to God and all the Angelic creatures and all of the children of God and Lucifer himself that Lucifer is a liar because Job showed the world that he was still thankful and loyal to God.

I didn’t believe the liar. I know my children love me. Not just because I protected them of this or sheltered them from that but because I am their Father and because I showed them how much I loved them first. Because I nurtured them and taught them and gave them all I was. I found myself having to do the imaginable. I have to prove to my children that the liar is just that, a Liar! That my children love me for no other reason other than the fact we are family.

I took away the inconsequence. As much as it pains me, I took away their protection. If my children choose to have unhealthy sex then they will have to know that they will get sick. If they fall because they are playing in dangerous areas then they had to learn that there is pain. How else would they grow to really be like me if they don’t understand the consequences of their choices? They would be like children for eternity never learning the truth of whom and what they are and what they are capable off.

All of a sudden I was clear headed and saw what need to be done in order for my children to grow and be full of wisdom and knowledge. In the past when ever my children had fallen prey to scrupulous people meaning them harm, I protected them by shielding their lives from that pain and mayhem. In the process I took away the freewill of the outsiders in the barren lands so they could not do what they chose again making me a look like a liar because I game people free will. The result of this decision is devastating.

But what happened next not only made me a proud parent but the Liar was starting to show his true colors. He influenced some my children and the some of people of the barren lands to do horrible things. He was trying to show the world how bad of a Father I was to allow all these bad things to happen. He would spread rumors and lies that it was me that was causing these bad things all the while he knew the truth, that it was him trying to undermined me and knowing well that because I gave my word to give people free will that my hands were tied.

Here is the miracle that makes me proud to be their Father. Most of my children still prayed to me telling how much they loved me. They thanked me for what they had and didn’t complain for what they didn’t have or have lost because they chose a different path. In the process, my children showed their love to others and as a result the people of the barren lands started to love me. They also started praying to me. So I adopted them and now I proudly call all of them my children.

The Liar was now the Liar. Not because I said he was but because the children could see it for themselves. My children started coming home. I was so excited that I had to enlarge the house. So many children coming! My children, singing and dancing to show their thankfulness and love of me because they could see the truth and realized how much I really loved them.

I lived a millennium of lifetimes in this exquisite vision. I knew and understood all things in a flash of a few seconds as I stood there holding an old donut and a half drank bottle of soda.

I stood there trying to comprehend what I just experienced. How can I make sense of all that just happened? Some much wisdom and knowledge just past through me in a fraction of a second and I knew I was given the answer to a very special question. My brain just could not hold onto the vastness of the vision. How will I be able to share this gift, the message of understanding, when I can not even articulate the experiences I have just been blessed with?

I ran Home. I ran so fast and found my family just waiting for me. They were not angry. They welcomed me home. My wife and kids loved me enough to forgive my selfishness and we cried for our losses. We cried for our Jamielee and we started to heal as a family.

It has been 20 years now since Jamielee’s death and my vision from God. I am just now able to make understandable sense of my experience and to speak of this miracle.

Some will say my vision was nothing more than a acid trip, a result of poison from eating out of trash cans, Some will say I lost my mind, but what ever way you chose to believe, know this, I have an answer that changed my life very profoundly. I am not a minister. I am uneducated and I am not the sharpest knife in the draw. I have and I am still making all kinds of mistakes in my life but; I have an inner peace that cannot be describe with words.

I like to think that when hard times hit me that God is using my life to again show the world and all of heaven that Satan is just as much of a Liar NOW as he was in Job’s time. I can find joy in my suffering and take pride in knowing that I am a useful tool God uses to bring upon the earth and the heavens the truth about our common enemy. I can rest and take solace in the fact that there is a plan of salvation and I will be restored to my full measure when God is done using me as his secret weapon against Satan.

Is it possible that God sees in you what he saw in Job? That You are the unshakable truth that will show all the world and Heaven that Satan is still the liar and that there are still those today that love God because God is God and not because he puts a wall up to protect us from the strong wind? I think so. I think you are this person. This is why I know why Bad things happen to good people. Peace to you and your family.

Danny

Unknown said...

kat i've asked that myself many many times i refuse to believe there is a god and if i go to hell so help it but how can a god "so merciful and powerful make people so evil to kill their own children and he takes babies away from mothers who loved them only for a short while.... those are just my thoughts

Trish aka timbar_98