My Idea of A God

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."

These are words that we have been taught to chant as a beginning to our prayers, as Christians. It is to signify that we are invoking or calling on the attention of the Holy Trinity before we say our prayers. As a child, I was taught to say this as we make the sign of the Cross.

The four points of the sign of the Cross: Forehead, Chest, Shoulders and Lips. Contrary to what may have been mainstream practice, we are supposed to kiss our thumb as we say "Amen." My Christian Living teacher, as I remember, explained the significance and meaning of the Sign of the Cross and its four points. However, I forgot what she explained to the class, mainly because it has been years since that lesson and also because I've shed my affiliation to the Christian religion.

I'm no longer a Christian, although I've been baptized as one. I'm a Deist and, as one, I believe God has no intervention in this world after He created it. Man alone now is responsible for the events and tragedies that happen in this world. For me, those that say that it is God's plan that he/she suffers that way is blasphemy and irresponsibility.

In all my years of pondering, I found that I have never felt the presence of God in churches, songs, and ritualistic worship. I have never felt Him there; instead, I felt Him in nature. I see His infinite wisdom in the plants, the animals of His creation, including Man himself.

But why would such a Creator sit back and let his steward handle all this work for himself? It's because, I believe, God wants us to know our potential. We are lesser gods, as He created us "a little less than angels." We have the potential to be like God, not to surpass Him, but to share in His perfection and wisdom. Man has the capacity to transcend what we really are. That is what God wants us to realize, and in that knowledge we may find our strength.

People ask each other, "Why do we suffer this way?" Kebelle himself asked in a blog "why is life always 'Why?'" I say it's because man doesn't understand everything that comes this way. We feel sad about something, because we don't understand why it happened. As a result, we become confused, distraught. Then we struggle to try to find the answer, though some of us would lapse into nostalgia and a hopeless longing for how things used to be, and in the end we suffer because we can't let go. When we let go, I believe, we start to understand because things can now move into their natural course of things, towards the end reason why things happened the way they did.