Notes on Devotion
While Western civilization spends a lot of time trying to decipher the significance of dreams, many ancient cultures compare our wakened state to another dream - which could explain a lot of the clumsy bumping and grinding of gears we do during the daylight hours.
I lost my innocence in a very traumatic way, perhaps many ways, in experiences I was too young to understand, too ashamed to share, and too ill supported to barrel through. As a result, I've spent most of my life very angry with God (the Christian one I was raised with) and doing things the hard way, that is to say; on my own. That traumatized self-destructive teen ended up married to a troubled (also never grew up or faced himself) man, and when our marriage blew up a week into quarantine, I had no one left to be mad at besides myself.
On medical leave after a cancer diagnosis, draining my savings, losing my husband and stepchildren who I loved - in the following months I was repeatedly faced with the dark urge to end all of my suffering. I wouldn't say I actively made a choice not to. I had a dear therapist who kept saying "just do the next right thing," and most days, that's all I would do. One day at a time. It turned out the "right thing" put me in church every Sunday. Everything else had failed, so why not that?
During quarantine, I prayed for dear life. Every morning, and every night. Sometimes several times a day. I remember some of the things I was asking for, I wouldn't ask for now. I cried, I yelled, I screamed at God. But then something miraculous happened. My whole life I had been so angry with Him ("IF He existed") for taking from me, for shaming me, for making me less; it took losing everything I considered valuable to realize He was there all along, protecting me. I am here now not of my own doing, and the life I live doesn't look anything like the one I had. I have been blessed beyond measure. Some call it "saved."
There are a lot of things written in our hearts and minds that have nothing to do with God. "Til death do us part" is a beautiful commitment, and one that would have been the end of me in devotion to the wrong person. I don't have it all figured out, and I won't tell anyone else how to live, but whether you want to slap a brand on it (Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Islam, Hindu, and on…) - God is good, and only good, ALL the time. Awakening to this truth was my path to freedom.
"People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."
1 Samuel 16:7
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