How has God led me into a relationship with him? I think it's been a long time coming. I think He's been influencing my life for longer than I knew. But recently I met a friend, someone I used to know a long time ago. Back then he was in a bad way, addicted to heroin. He told me when we met again (12- 13 years later) about how his life had turned around because he met God. God saved him, showed him a path and offered it to him, and my friend chose to walk with God from that day. He has had the most extraordinary life since then, hearing God, having visions, travelling around talking to people about God and helping them. He's seen angels, he's known things about people and about their futures, he has never been alone from that day. I know everything he told me is true, I mean as he told me nothing in me felt inclined to doubt what he said, I just knew it was the truth because I felt it was and it made me so happy and I wanted to know more and more - as William Blake says, "The truth cannot be told so as to be understood and not be believed."
Being with my friend, I fell in love, but it was not like falling, it was like being lifted up into Love, like being immersed in golden light, like a halo, we felt such incredible outpourings of energy and light, flowing between us and around us, and I FELT this word - 'Blessed'. I mean it was like I heard it but I didn't hear it, I felt it, like it flowed into me from beside us. I've never had an experience like this ever, could never have imagined it. I knew it was Love but not like I’d ever felt before, so thrilling and exciting, sort of making me feel a fullness and a rightness, like touching eternity. I know it was God's Love. This happened before my friend had told me much of his experiences with God, so I know it wasn’t influenced by those stories.
I believe He's been showing me signs of His love for a long time, and guiding me to the best things for me.
I have for a year or so maybe, been talking to 'the Universe' or the 'big sky', and the number of times the sun has broken through and lifted me out of despondency, or a rainbow has made my heart leap up, I cannot count. I think the miracle of these moments is not the sun or the rainbow but the lift in the heart, the change inside that means you find relief and strength when you thought all strength was gone. I have always thanked 'the Universe' for these gifts.
Also I switched onto my degree course in English Literature 3 days before it began, no application, no interview, it just happened. There I studied Wordsworth and crucially Blake, through whom I began to experience some very new things, as if the veil between me and 'the Universe' was thinning. I felt such bursting joys, like stepping into a channel of infinite energy, also influxes of enormous harrowing grief from somewhere outside of myself. I don't know how else to describe that, I tried to tell it to a friend and they suggested I should eat more carbohydrates! I kept it to myself after that. He also directed me to finding my new job, which as soon as I saw it I knew it was for me, and everything just fell into place so perfectly. Anyway, my point is that I feel I've been being prepared for this for some time.
So I have now this new conception of God, which I had in my mind as a universal force of good. I have asked Jesus into my life and I felt I had been spoken to just before I woke up, I couldn't remember any detail, but I very much felt that I had a friend beside me and I woke up smiling and happy and my first waking thought was 'thank you'. I spoke to him the following night and again when I woke I felt I had been spoken to, and the message was that I should read in order to know him. That's pretty much where I am up to. Although since then, as well as the joys have been some very dark moments of feeling wretched and like dirt, like I need scrubbing from the inside out, like not so much a person as a pile of broken bits. Nothing about this is like I think it’s going to be. The certainty of Love that I felt doesn’t seem to stay, I am coming to see that part of faith (or all of it?) is about trusting God’s Love is there even when you don’t feel it. But really I know nothing about it.
Being with my friend, I fell in love, but it was not like falling, it was like being lifted up into Love, like being immersed in golden light, like a halo, we felt such incredible outpourings of energy and light, flowing between us and around us, and I FELT this word - 'Blessed'. I mean it was like I heard it but I didn't hear it, I felt it, like it flowed into me from beside us. I've never had an experience like this ever, could never have imagined it. I knew it was Love but not like I’d ever felt before, so thrilling and exciting, sort of making me feel a fullness and a rightness, like touching eternity. I know it was God's Love. This happened before my friend had told me much of his experiences with God, so I know it wasn’t influenced by those stories.
I believe He's been showing me signs of His love for a long time, and guiding me to the best things for me.
I have for a year or so maybe, been talking to 'the Universe' or the 'big sky', and the number of times the sun has broken through and lifted me out of despondency, or a rainbow has made my heart leap up, I cannot count. I think the miracle of these moments is not the sun or the rainbow but the lift in the heart, the change inside that means you find relief and strength when you thought all strength was gone. I have always thanked 'the Universe' for these gifts.
Also I switched onto my degree course in English Literature 3 days before it began, no application, no interview, it just happened. There I studied Wordsworth and crucially Blake, through whom I began to experience some very new things, as if the veil between me and 'the Universe' was thinning. I felt such bursting joys, like stepping into a channel of infinite energy, also influxes of enormous harrowing grief from somewhere outside of myself. I don't know how else to describe that, I tried to tell it to a friend and they suggested I should eat more carbohydrates! I kept it to myself after that. He also directed me to finding my new job, which as soon as I saw it I knew it was for me, and everything just fell into place so perfectly. Anyway, my point is that I feel I've been being prepared for this for some time.
So I have now this new conception of God, which I had in my mind as a universal force of good. I have asked Jesus into my life and I felt I had been spoken to just before I woke up, I couldn't remember any detail, but I very much felt that I had a friend beside me and I woke up smiling and happy and my first waking thought was 'thank you'. I spoke to him the following night and again when I woke I felt I had been spoken to, and the message was that I should read in order to know him. That's pretty much where I am up to. Although since then, as well as the joys have been some very dark moments of feeling wretched and like dirt, like I need scrubbing from the inside out, like not so much a person as a pile of broken bits. Nothing about this is like I think it’s going to be. The certainty of Love that I felt doesn’t seem to stay, I am coming to see that part of faith (or all of it?) is about trusting God’s Love is there even when you don’t feel it. But really I know nothing about it.
