The Second Coming Of...

                   It phases me to think that we believe this is all there is to life.  Even adding in the concept of a higher power or place, a heaven and hell or an existence beyond what we currently experience.  For the most part, in my experience, people hold fast to their beliefs, but fail to develop a personal opinion of these fantastic worlds beyond our own.

                   What is life to you?  What is life after this life to look like if we were the lucky ones who got to sculpt this next universe; this next plain of existence to be free or to be trapped, to learn or to suffer, or both?

                   I have a personal relationship with something that is beyond me.  Something that is beyond what I see every day, and go to bed ‘knowing’ every night.  Something beyond a routine and habit that gives me a spark of desire and interest to be the best I can be while trying to never condemn myself or others in our daily affairs.  Am I right?  I don’t know, nor do I need to know if I am right or wrong when my choices and hopes can be reflected in the better of everyone and the lack of offense to anyone, including myself.

                   My intention in this excerpt is not to push a set of beliefs on you, nor is it to question your own set of beliefs.  My intention is to have you build on what you do hold close, and not rest on a laurel of what we hold as truth.  I think it is more than beneficial to strengthen our connection with ‘The Great Beyond’ and make it more of an effort than inwardly silenced memories.

                   What I feel as my connection, which for me is labelled God, helps me in nearly any circumstance I bring it into conscious effect.  I say God both strongly, and loosely.  The idea of God to me surpasses any single thought or thing, idea or belief, animal, life, or inanimation of existence.  God encompasses all, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

                   I am the ultimate agreeable soul, grown from my past beliefs of the exact opposite.  I used to fight everybody and question anybody on the faith they held.  I would throw logic and emotion behind all of my attacks, trying to shake and sway people from being trapped to narrow minds.  In essence, I was ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ throughout many years of my life.

                   Why did I need to fight?  If the people in my life were only trying to help me attain a connection to a way of thinking and belief which was to benefit me the same way it was them, why did I feel the need to fight this?  The answer became very apparent and simple when I sat down to think about it. 

                   I don’t like to take something at face value.  There has always been, and in many cases will always be more to the truth than people accept.  I don’t want to believe something because you say so, or they say so, or because I can’t understand its logic.  This is where my frustration grew to new levels, because I sincerely need to know as much as possible.

                   I was raised Christian, which is a superb life if the principles of it are followed.  But this wasn’t enough.  There needed to be an escape from the feeling of constant guilt and the confusion of being forgiven and loved unconditionally, under the condition that I accepted this specific brand of God.  Please know that I am not going against this view, I only wish to show how I came closer to the understanding in my own heart.

                   There is no condition on God’s love.  There is no condition on His forgiveness or His graces that He has freely given us.  I do not need to believe in the figurative idol of Jesus.  I need to accept me for who I am.  I need to forgive myself, because God and Jesus already have forgiven me.

                   In my mind, to accept Jesus or God in my life, what I actually need to do is accept myself.  I need to be aware and obedient to what I know is the next right action.  I don’t feel like I am saying anything sacrilegious when I claim that accepting myself is the exact same as accepting God and Jesus, because if my memory serves me correctly God lives in all of us.  Jesus died for all of us.

                   In not accepting myself, or not understanding what graces were actually given to me in His crucifixion, I am denying the very gift He died for.  I am denying the unconditional love, and in the end, I am the one placing conditions of myself on that love. 

                   I struggled for many years believing that not believing what people claimed as truth made me a non believer in the message and life of Jesus.  This was wrong of me, and of no fault of the people I did not understand.

                   Though I don’t know the story in its entirety, I know enough that when I accept His love through loving myself, it is infinitely easier to live the message and carry the truth than it was when I always felt like my life was under His sandal.  This is exactly the type of fear I believe Jesus came to rid us of.  It is, to me, the greatest sin I can commit.

                   If I bury myself early, and don’t allow life to unfold as it will, then what was the point of Jesus dying for me anyways?  There would be none.  There is no sin beyond our own guilty conscience.  And there is no sickness beyond it as well.

                   Yesterday was Easter.  The day that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.  And I would always ask how somebody could have died on Good Friday and be reborn on Easter Sunday every year, in a 365 or a 366 day year.  It is represented with a different date every year.  And that is my old fighter inside that came to this conclusion.

                   The truth of it is, man made time.  God goes beyond this to me. Man separated himself with borders, and God tries to unite these.  Man fights itself over possessions and land, where God said drop your possessions and make the world your home, and make your heart your home.  Jesus said to call no one your father beyond your Father in heaven, and I have no doubt in my mind that that very same Father represents love, the love of our self.

                   The Ten Commandments all speak clearly if you see them as respecting our neighbour as we should hopefully respect ourselves.  Not holding any of them higher than we do our own heart would be the same as not having a false idol.  Believe in me, that’s what I hear.  And part of believing in me is the 'believing' in itself.

                   We are all one; this is spoken very elegantly in my bits of study in eastern religion.  There is no life without our self to live it, so as soon as we disrespect that life, we are disrespecting the whole.  The Golden Rule of treating others how we would like to be treated could not be more Golden.

                   Any religious belief, as far as I know, is partly experienced through meditation.  The idea to me is quieting our mind, the conscious facet of delusion that constantly runs rampant.  I believe when I hear the story of Adam and Eve summed up to be the sacrifice of solitude and peaceful thinking to the chaotic state of constant thought and analysis.  Eating the fruit and listening to the serpent was likened to digesting the lies and falling prey to them.  Knowledge is not power.

                   There can only be a second coming of Christ if we have only pushed Him away once.  Christ, or the idea of a Saviour, is only necessary when we are not whole in our own being.  The story of the Passion ends quite typically.  We don’t want to be faced with our own demons, so when a Saviour brings to light that we are saved and loved, we push it away because no one has that power if we are not willing to accept it ourselves.  We instead kill the love and blind the idea of it by labelling the fact that we are not OK insane and, in Jesus’ case, a crime and illegal to think otherwise.

                   This makes me sad.  We are good people.  We are loving beings at our core.  Many of us will deny this fact until the day we die, and put on masks and acts to prove the opposite at every turn.  These are the people Jesus broke bread with, and it is not curious as to why.  These are the people who ended up finding the truth in the end, and devoted their human make up, both flaws and affections, to the true path.  It is the righteous ones who crucified the idea when their power was at hand.

                   The ‘Us Against Them’ mentality is evident in almost any social structure.  Power versus power, money versus struggle, love versus absence of love.  Pity versus empathy, greed versus humility, and so on.  Turning the other cheek does not mean taking abuse from others, it means not abusing yourself.

                   We are all human, and that means we will make mistakes.  This is perfect, exactly as it is intended to play out.  We all have our idea of ‘free will’, and we will all use that free will to achieve what we believe we are entitled to, whether or not that is what we believe we were intended to.

                   Mistakes are essential in becoming whole, it is acceptance of these mistakes as an excuse or reason why we cannot be otherwise perfect that begins our deterioration in any belief structure we hold.

                   I will accept that everyone has a little piece of something that they hold which make them tick, and allows them the comfort they have been freely granted.  I will not accept that a mistake or a series of mistakes makes any one individual less than perfect.

                   I don’t need a second coming of Christ to believe that I am loved and that I am forgiven, I need a second and third act of forgiveness and of kindness towards self and others to know that the idea of Christ has never left, no matter what religious beliefs get flung around in front of me.

         I love.  And I always will.

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