Reconnecting with God

 Some people believe take solace in the old adage "everything happens for a reason",but not me. Being the eternal pessimistic my repsonse to that adage has always been "Duh, but that doesn't mean it was a good reason."

After 22 years of not being an active member of a church I finally got the calling to start going to church again. My mother who has a chronic history of heart problems ended up in the hospital earlier this year and I got scared. I knew I needed some type of guidance. All sorts of questions resurfaced in my head.What would I do if she passed away? Would I feel at peace with my relationship with her? Would guilt settle in? How does one handle that and how would I handle it? Fearing this would be far much more than I am capable of handling I figured I needed some back up and started to go to church again.

After just a few weeks of church attendance I started to get this thought that perhaps it was my calling to minister to people. However, I blew it off as a message from me and not a calling from God. Why wouldn't I? I am self-serving. I have been known to call myself Walter Mitty because of all my self-serving fantasies. I want to be a rock star,a comedian,a highly successful business man, I want to be adored and loved by thousands, oh heck why stop there, millions.

Slowly though, I saw a few signs that perhaps it's not just me that wants me to be of service to my church community. The church asked me if I would like to sign-up for some of the service commitments so I went with it and I said yes. THen I was asked to do a skit where I played Moses and although I have no confidence iin my singing abilities I tackled the role on and the song that came along with is as well. At this point, I still felt that my Watler Mitty Fantasies of being some great minister were purely egostistical and misguided.

Then along came the pastor. One day after church service the pastor came up to me and had a request for me. She said that God gave it to her to ask me to give a testimony in place of the normal sermon in late June. We have never done this before but we are going to give it a try. I am nervous about the idea but I just knew not to say no to God so I accepted. This is where the "everything happens for a reason" question pops up in my head.

God has given me some constant challenges in my life and I never have been able to figure out the reason for them. I have chronic anxiety issues and I believe have a condition know as Asperger's syndrome,though I have never been diagnosed professionally. Many times I have have questioned the reason for my challenges and the only solace I take is that I figure God was balancing out the ledger. He made me slightly taller than most, slightly better looking than most and slightly smarter than most, so he's just evening the score for the short,ugly,and stupid people of the universe. I know that sounds mean and cruel but how the heck can we expect anybody to come up with a good answer as to why God does what he does?God created the universe and all of it's inhabitants and things that are so amazingly complicated yet efficient such as the human body and mind.  Our intelligence and our thought process is lights years away from God. Trying to put your mind in the mind of God's and figure out why he does things is moot. I have to come to the conclusion that instead of figuring out why something has happened to us and why we face challenges we need to just accept them. Instead of being weighted down and stuck on why did this happen for 20 or 30 years or a lifetime we need to see our experiences as resources. For instance, if you're a recovering alcoholic you may say ok, I've had sobriety for 6 years, I was miserable in my alocholism for 12 years how I can make this a beneficiary experience? You ask questions that put yourself in a position of empowerment . Can I use my experience to help others? Can I benefit from this? Can I use my challenges to bring others to God? Can I use this as a testimony to God and his ability to guide us through difficulities? These are the questions we must ask and these are the questions God will answer.