Spirituality 101: Finding God

1.  Who is God?
2.  The purpose of this mortal existence
3.  God is like a golden thread
4.  Prayer and Meditation

Finding God is the beginning point of true spirituality.  Without a belief in God, any kind of interaction in the spiritual realm is a mystical figment of the imagination.  So who is God?

God is like fog on this pond - visible yet invisible depending on how you look at it

(Photo: from my personal collection)

God is the parent of our spirits.  He is the creator of this Earth.  He put us, his children, here to have a mortal experience without his direct supervision.  Even though he is not intervening in our experience he is aware of everything that is going on here and totally present if we want to reach out to him.

God has attributes that describe his character.  He is both just and merciful.  He is loving and vengeful.  He is perfectly honest and true in all things.  He is powerful and gentle.  His character is a perfection of both ends of the spectrum in all things.

So it goes against the purpose of this mortal experience for God to be jumping in to assist all the time.  He is allowing us to see how far we can go on our own and He’s holding back because He knows what is best and He also knows He can cure any ailment we come home with.  However, we can reach out to Him at any time when we want His help and He reserves the right to say, “no, my child, you still have options open to you that you haven’t tried.” 

So how can we find Him?

He’s left evidence of Himself all over the place.  His creation is evidence of his ingenuity and brilliance.  His Bible is evidence of His character.  The greatest musical compositions are evidence of His beauty.  And everywhere that we find truth, we can feel evidence of His guiding hand among His children all through time because His children who have found Him have tried to encapsulate Him in their words and ideas.

“That which is of God invites and entices to do good continually; wherefore, every thing which invites and entices to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God.”  (Moroni 7:13 - modernized)

In my experience, finding God is like discovering a golden thread running through every subject of study that we begin to recognize after we have feasted sufficiently on the richness of the scriptures.  Ask any theoretical mathematician why they study the mysteries of mathematics and they will tell you of the “golden” beauty in math.  Read any great work of literature and the most beautiful passages will seem like “gold” as they pass through your mind and heart.  

And God can be found in the process of prayer.  Prayer is an action of speaking the thoughts and desires of the heart for as long as it takes to say them all.  When prayer is real, nothing that is really in your heart is hidden.  When God answers my prayers, He speaks to the things in my heart that no one else knows about.  When He speaks to my heart, it is soothing.  I will open the scriptures and one phrase or group of phrases will resonate with my concerns even if the words of scripture don’t give me an immediate solution.  That is how I know God is answering.  And sometimes a phrase will jump out from a book of great literature — and still I believe it is God speaking to my heart.  And sometimes God’s answer is very specific and does give me an immediate solution.  I accept His answer in whatever form it comes and whether it is a solution or just a soothing caress.

God can be found in the process of meditation if I am open to and looking for God’s presence.  I wouldn’t expect God to pass through my consciousness if I were trying to avoid Him.  But if I were looking for Him, I would expect Him to show up somehow.  It is like going for a walk.  If I am looking for flowers or fossils, I see things of that nature.  If I am hurrying through without looking, I see nothing.  In my opinion, God is there if I look for Him.

Patterns of Light (Video on Finding God)

Thank you for taking the time to read my words.  I will speak more to this subject later.