I want to educate myself. I want to know mathematics, science, sentence construction, and a foreign language. So I've gone to my bookshelf and pulled the M encyclopedia off the shelf. I have read it four times now. I have learned a lot; but no matter how many times I read it, I still have not learned everything I want to yet. My mind yearns for more.
I want to take care of my body. I am sure that mangoes are good for me. I've been eating them for weeks now. Just mangoes. As well as toe touches. So I'm eating something healthy and I'm doing toe touch for exercise. Yet I don't feel all that great. My body yearns for more.
My spirit is craving connection with my creator. So I pray to God and I read the Bible. I study the Bible as the word of God. I feel closer to God, but I don't feel communion with God. My spirit yearns for more.
I have learned over the past five years that to nourish my spirit in only one way is as ridiculous as trying to nourish my mind with one book or my body with one type of food.
When I was growing up in the Baptist church, it was (still is) widely taught and hammered home, that there is only one way to God. Through Jesus Christ. Any deviation from that path is the devil leading one astray. That belief had its grip on me very tightly until about the time I hit my 40's. I truly wish it hadn't taken so long for me to examine this closely held belief. I might've been able to save my daughters from years of spiritual struggle.
What I now believe is that my spirit needs taken care of just as much as my physical body and my mind. I believe there are many different ways to nourish my spirit and I am unafraid to listen, learn and decide for myself what ways are best for me. For me, meditation nourishes my spirit more than prayer. I prefer to sit still, in communion with God. Spirit to spirit. I take that time to connect to the source of my spiritual energy and refuel. I take that time to ask God to use me to help others. When I commune with God through meditation, I feel Him with me all day long. It's so much deeper for me than using feeble words to communicate with him through prayer.
I watch my daughters struggle and I remember struggling like that in my twenties. With good and evil. Darkness and light. Never realizing it was all an internal struggle and not some outside force trying to lead me astray. The church teaches us that we are inherently evil because of Adam and Eve's disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden. That we are not good enough. I do not accept this as truth. My spirit is neither good nor evil; it simply is. And although I do not yet know its purpose, I do know that it craves to commune with God; who knows, maybe that is the purpose.
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