PERSONAL GROWTH | SELF

I Wrote A Dear John Letter To God

Why it happened and how I renewed my relationship with Him again

​What I knew

As far as I knew, God was the creator of all things great and beautiful, all things big and small. In my limited understanding of the world, everything small and big was great and beautiful, like its creator.

Every storybook, every nursery rhyme; every children’s game, every bedtime prayer taught me about how great and caring this God of mine was. I was in love with my God. I never wanted to make Him angry. I surrendered to all that was good about my God because I was a child, and that’s the closest I ever came to being like my God.

I had no reason to doubt my teachers, the priest, or my parents. My world was secure and happy,

…until I crossed over to the other side when I went to high school.

For the first time in my tethered life, I was introduced to my first philosophy class. Little by little I started to feel smarter than the creator of all things; so smart that I started to question and test my God.

What kind of God

-lets children starve?

-lets people get sick and die?

-lets bad things happen to good people?

The innocent faith of the child that lived in me was confronted with questions too large for the minds of my God-fearing parents to understand. They prayed for me. They prayed over me. But their praying could not exorcize the questions that continued to plague me.

Enraged. Disillusioned. Full of myself, I felt I had been lied to by all the adults, especially my parents and the priest, and it was this feeling that made me come to decide I didn’t need anything from this God.

One year during Easter break, I wrote a Dear John letter to God.

In my letter, I told God

-how disappointed I was at learning that all these years I had been misled into believing that everything was the way it obviously wasn’t.

-how foolish I felt for letting others paint me an image of Him that was so incredulously false.

-how embarrassed I felt at the thought that I must have appeared needy to others that they had to fill my head with fantastic stories about Him.

I also told Him that as soon as I was done completing this letter I was going to burn every poem, every song I had written to him over the years. And that as best as I could, I was going to try to forget every poem, every song, every prayer I ever memorized about Him.

As far as I was concerned I was done needing Him for any and all things, big and small in my life.

To end in a positive tone, I told Him not to worry about me, that now that I was so well-read I would stop living in the clouds; that from this moment forward I was planting my feet firmly on the ground, following my own path that I had already decided on. (This last part was untrue, but I didn’t want God to think that He was in control of me anymore.).

I ended the letter — Not yours anymore, and I signed my name.

Pumped up with arrogance, in a season when Christians were preparing for another Lenten Season, I tested God; I told Him how I felt. I was done with God.

Have you ever felt this way about God? What did you do about it?

I wondered how people my age in other countries dealt with this kind of shakeup. There I was, feeling above everyone and everything but with no way of knowing how to properly go about it.

…and then the first Christmas came

In my hometown, December was a time for celebrations of every kind. It was after all a collective exodus from the old year to the new. The celebration made sense to me. I participated in the Christmas celebrations but ardently removed my heart from the religious meaning of the season. I managed alright.

Next, the first Lent and Easter came. That year I celebrated as well, but sadness overwhelmed me. I felt restless and alone. I looked stern on the outside but inside I crumbled. Secretly I started to pray, not for myself but for the Man whose death Christians observed during that time.

I kept it up for a couple of years not thinking — ever — that I was being two-faced. Shucks, you adapt, right? That’s what I did.

Eh? You see a conflict in that.

How weak, you say.

Is that what you’re thinking of me?

Something was amiss

I wanted so much to stand my ground, to show maturity and understanding of the meaning of life but no matter what I did or where I was, I always felt something was missing from my life. The times when I was honest with myself I felt pain; not in any particular place on my physical body, but pain somewhere else. I also felt as though I was always hungry. It was weird.

I sensed in my gut that there was some cosmic order to things but try as I did, I couldn’t figure out how anything applied to me and my life. It would have served me well to talk to someone about what I was feeling but I didn’t want anyone to know that I didn’t know how to live my own life.

I read philosophy books on different religions and teachings. My books introduced me to the different ways other religions referred to God. Slowly I came to understand the way others understood their God. Slowly I came to realize that the God everyone spoke of was the same God I had known as a child.

I wavered none when I realized this important lesson. Finally, I felt I was ready to renew my personal relationship with the God I’d known of through my parents, teachers, priests, and books.

The God I know is ALL LOVING

The state of our world has nothing to do with the hand of God, rather it’s a direct consequence of the absence of the presence of God in our lives. I now know that God IS the protector of Children, not the purveyor of starvation. He IS the healer of the sick not the cause of it. My perception of God has changed.

“One of the biggest paradoxes of your physical senses is that your eyes actually show you what you believe, not what you see.” — Mike Dooley.

I broke down and cried. I fell down on my knees and I began to pray: “Um, God. It’s me. I miss you,” was all I said. And in that moment I felt a load lift from my shoulders, literally.

But as I was getting ready to get up I heard a voice. “Now that you’re down on your knees, stay there.”

I prayed some more. And before I knew it I had renewed my personal relationship with God.

Today I commit to surrendering my grievance-ridden test pattern.

I claim my true-self as LOVE

Now I’m not afraid to seek help and truth without the arrogance that ruled me that Easter long ago. I turn to my books and to the Holy Spirit (another name for God) because only He knows how to help me to see luminosity, beauty, and joy in the ordinary.

Today, I have accepted God into my life again — not in a purely religious way, but more in a psychological way; no longer feeling insulted or embarrassed.

The pain I felt before, I found a name for it — it was emotional pain. I also found the ingredient I needed — the awareness of love’s presence, and the place it fills is my soul.

Catholics all over the world are getting ready to celebrate Easter this weekend. What will you be doing then?

THANKS FOR READING. I Wish you Miracles, Selma