Are You Creative?

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be a newborn baby, to lie there on your back, looking at this marvelous world you’ve just arrived in without knowing where you end and the world begins?  Have you thought about how you ever determined that your fingers are yours and that you can learn to pick up things with them?   That the fuzzy thing that is next to you in your crib plays a song if you touch it with those fingers?  That if you cry (Wow.  I can cry whenever I want to), that certain face appears at your cribside to feed you?  Part of the answer is that you didn’t have any preconceived notions about what you CAN’T do.  Somewhere along the road through childhood and adolescence to adulthood, we seem to acquire a longer list of things we CAN’T do than those we CAN.

Finding Pieces

courtesy livingforgod.net

After rejecting the God of my childhood at eighteen, I spent (approximately) the next forty years searching for a notion of God that both my Rational Self and Spiritual Self could live with.   I know many people who seem to be able to compartmentalize their lives, saying, This is rational and belongs to my Rational Side … this, on the other hand, is spiritual, so I’ll listen to my Spiritual Self.  That perhaps sounds critical but it’s not meant to be.   I’ve resented such people at times in part because I envied their ability to find God in their lives without endless searching but I admire their certainty.  I don’t seem to be built that way and, hence, I’ve ended up (at least so far) spiritual but not religious.  Being comfortable with that has been a long road and it still has its bumps … for example, when I contemplate mortality.  It would be nice to believe in a home for eternity if only I did such and such instead of having just a notion of an eternal soul.   The Twelve Steps talk about a God of our understanding but understanding God is often an obstacle to me because my understanding is rooted in my Rational Self.  Perhaps I have a God of my not-understanding.