Welcome to the final post on the topic of my metamorphosis. Here is the last belief of mine I wanted to share with the big, bad internet:

Belief #6: God is Love.

This one takes a lot of defining, because love is such an ambiguous word in our culture. Fortunately, Darin Hufford already did a stellar job in his books, The God's Honest Truth and The Misunderstood God. I HIGHLY recommend getting your hands on a copy. The book The God's Honest Truth changed my life. 

Here is a summary of my belief system about love, and how it would look for God to be Love, most of which are revelations from Darin's writings with my own personal twist (based on 1 Cor 13):

Love is Patient. God is in essence patience. He NEVER looses his temper. It's not even possible; he's patience itself.

Love is Kind. God is not manipulative. He does not give gifts so that we'll GIVE THEM ALL BACK. He's not looking for or needing our time, talent, treasure, glory or life. He gave us those things freely because he's KINDNESS, not to get something out of us. He wanted to touch our hearts with them.

Love is not jealous. AMEN. God is not a jealous God in the sense that he craves and deserves all the gifts he's given us back again. He doesn't want all the glory, either. Can you imagine a father saying, "I'll love you and raise you, but everytime you accomplish anything in your life, make sure to give me ALL THE GLORY." God is glory, he's got plenty to spare and lavishes it on us. If you've accomplished something, go ahead, take credit. And he doesn't envy your love and attention on others. To love is to be God to those people. He is everywhere in that.

Love does not boast. A boaster is codependent. They need the approval of others to feel ok. I think Jesus is proof enough that God is not concerned about his reputation. He doesn't want to make sure you know at every moment the difference between you and him. That creates a gap. He came as Christ to close the gap. Going beneath us as a poor, dirty vagabond carpenter, so that he could lift us up.

Love is not proud. Pride indicates a core belief that you need no one. God needs us. He is infinite creativity, the muse for all artists. Artists need to create. He is LOVE, relational, and needs children, like a young married couple that hopes for children. His creation and family are what dwells in his heart.

Love is not rude. God doesn't "tell it like it is" without concern for stepping on the heart. Every move he makes has our care in mind. A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not put out.

Love is not self-seeking. It is relational. God is relational. He is father, you are child. The father looks out for the interest of the child. The father didn't have children so he could take advantage of them for his own interests. That would be sick.

Love is not easily angered. So you can quit worrying about a God that "gives up on you", "looses patience" with you, "turns his face" from you, is "grieved" by you, etc. All bullshit. All the wrath God has ever had was dissolved in the person of Christ and his sacrifice. There is no more wrath. It has been satisfied.

Love keeps no record of wrongs. Thank God. I used to do that. Every time my husband was late, I thought he didn't care about my time and felt free to waste it. He's late a lot. I built up over the course of our 19 year marriage quite a case against him. I had a mountain of evidence. When I learned God was not doing this oppressive, destructive habit with me, it set me free to set him free.

Love does not delight in evil. He doesn't punish, use fear tactics, guilt and shame people, or give and take our salvation depending on our behavior that day. He doesn't take vengence. Like before stated, he died and rose to conquer all that.

Love rejoices with the truth. God is Love and Truth, so he deals with us according to both. Gently guiding us to discover what is real and what is the fiction in our minds, he matures us by exposing us a bit at a time to truth. He chisles away like water carressing stone at the walls in our hearts. Never jack-hammer style. Such a God sets us free to respect where other people are on their own journies and leave them be.

Love always protects. How does God always protect? God's love is like a blanket hiding and treasuring the deepest, core truth and essence of who we are. Often in yoga, I guide my students to "go inward" to that part of them which is perfect, pure, stable, still and complete. It is you, and it cannot be molested by the outside world. Why? Because it is covered in the love of God. No matter what happens, when we take the time to go inward, through the layers of ourselves to our very core, we find it untouched, content, and complete. "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." The true self is never in want of anything, for it has LOVE to protect it.

Love always trusts. God always trusts you, because the first step in loving someone is to trust. You cannot love fully when part of your heart doesn't trust. His heart is all yours, and his trust is complete. He trusts in your way of being, learning, growing and becoming. The huge amount of freedom we have to act and become shows a lot of trust. Its the exact thing Church, Inc is so uncomfortable with. They want to box you in, so Christianity isn't just a big free-for-all. They don't trust Christians to find God and grow in love simply on their own, with nothing but the assurance of God's love for them to guide them.

Love always hopes. Hope is a trust placed in truth. Hope placed in falsehood is just wishing. Hope looks forward to what WILL be. Our value to God is not only who we are now, but who we will be. He knows our outcome, and is never without hope for us.

Love never fails. God never fails. That's why I don't believe in Hell. No matter how grim a person appears to be, they have a core self that wishes for freedom and redemption, that wishes for love. And they ARE loved. If they can't get connected with that enough to break free from their earthly hell in this life, then they'll be set free in the next. Love won't break them or snuff them out.

So there it is.

Love, 
AJ 

​Belief #4: There's no such thing as Hell. 

I'd just like to say here that according to the doctrines of the Christian faith, God is supposed to be the ultimate source of love and justice. Yet, the Hell idea sets him up for failure on both fronts.

His loving heart is too small to grasp that maybe not everyone's going to get it that the only way to heaven is through answering an alter call and "accepting Jesus into your heart." Can you imagine a loving, just Father saying to his kid, "You failed to trust me. Now, I will pour gasoline on your head and light you on fire! May you burn forever!! [insert evil laugh here]" 

Even the American justice system doesn't think the worst of offenders deserves to be eternally punished for screwing up royally. It believes in meting out punishments comenserate with the crime. How can any crime commited on the temporal plain merit eternal repercussions? Why don't people pull their heads out of the sand long enough to ask the question, "What kind of Satan have my beliefs made God into?" It's a valid question, and deserves some thought.

The God I believe in is Love, but more than that: Love with a Brain. My God has Logic down just as much as he has conquered things like Peace, Goodness, Mercy and the other classic attributes. But I know some of you out there might be attached to Scripture and think that unless I can prove from a Biblical standpoint that there is no Hell, I've got no argument.

Just to humor you, the concept of Hell as we know it nowadays wasn't present in Biblical times. They had three words for a place where souls go after death: Sheol, Hades, and Tartarus. And there was a fourth word, Gehenna, used a lot by Christ, which referred to a trash heap outside of Jeruselem where they would burn the dead. None of those words can be correctly translated to mean the place of unending torment we picture today, because the concept simply didn't exist at that time. Just like if you read a Biblical translation and found the words "cell phone" you might be suspicious of how valid the translation was, so too should the word "Hell" raise red flags. If you'd like more information on the Bible and the words Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna, here are a few references: Hell Defined I, Hell Defined II, and the documentary, Hellbound?

Belief #5: No Hell doesn't mean there's no point in Christ's sacrifice.

When the concept of not believing in Hell comes up, it hits some people in a weird place where they then conclude, "Well, if there's no Hell, there's no reason for Christ to have died!" Actually, that's not true. Humankind has most definitely fallen from grace. It is not perfect. But we have, deeply seeded within us, this concept that it "should" be perfect. We spend inordinate amounts of time and effort on perfecting ourselves, with our without the help of organized religion to egg us on. Perfection, that elusive human dream, is always just out of reach. But somehow, we think it ought to be ours and feel cheated that it's not. 

Perhaps it is a dilemma to have our cake and eat it, too. If we have free will, it stands to reason we might make imperfect choices that would harm us in tangible and intangilbe ways. And finding our way back to wholeness and goodness is apparently impossible. Seems once we fall, unless God stretches out his hand to lift us up, we can't get up. So, He did stretch out his hand. He manifested as Christ on Earth, saved us from our sorry selves, and now waits with infinite patience for reconciliation with us all. He gave us the cake: free will. And let us eat it: perfection, and union with God.

I don't think the lack of a Hell makes Christ's suffering, death and resurrection any less incredible. It makes it MORE incredible. Because it was good news for ALL humankind, and he was the savior of ALL the world. God isn't the head of a heavenly clique, letting in only the Christian elite. He made a path for all of us to follow, and allowed the complete reconciliation with God to be the end of every human journey. 

Given what I've just said, you'd think perfection would be a state we reach after death. But, I feel that is only describing the most obvious level of human conciousness. In the egoic mind, we cannot find perfection. In my own experience, exploring the inner self, I've found a place already perfect and whole that nothing can touch. Is it God? Is it me, with God? My intuition tells me this is so. Perhaps what Christ did was more than just a path to eventual perfection. Perhaps his sacrifice was that ultimate and epic anime blast going in all directions, touching the souls of the past, present and future, with the perfection they longed for. Truly making us a perfect race, where sin has lost its sting. 

Sure, on a purely egoic level, we can be caught up in sin and our own self-created Hell. But, we are more than inflated egos. We are infinite spirits having a human experience. Watching, learning, growing and maturing, but unable to be touched by it at our deepest, most fundamental level. Some of us catch on to the difference between who we really are and our thoughts, and no longer identify with them, going instead deeper into ourselves. And what we discover is bliss, a true self that needs nothing and is at perfect peace, united to God. That is enlightenment, and those who touch upon it have been enlightened for as long as they stay. 

To me, this life is a journey of reaching enlightenment, and then staying with God in your "Holy of Holies", your most inner soul, for longer and longer stretches until it becomes where you always dwell. It is a practice of remaining in the Truth. And being united to God in the inner self was made possible by what Christ accomplished. But, even if you never find it in this life, you are not lost, because of the God-man who came "to seek and save the lost". So, we can be utterly lost in the Hell of our own creation, but not forever. One day, we'll be reborn and remember God, and this Hell will evaporate like fog in the morning.

Moving right along: 

Belief #3: Fellowship isn't fellowship if you don't want to be there.

Ok, people. Let's get real here. You like some people, and other people are...a challenge. You click with some people, and other people are a dud. Why, oh why, do we fight reality? The human condition is fascinating. I agree with Ekhart Tolle. There's nothing quite so insane as disagreeing with reality. 

In the church subculture, there is this idea floating around which caused me a great amount of undue pain over the years: the AGAPE LOVE COMMUNITY. It is this idea that in the early church, and I'm talking year 0001 and 0002, people loved each other so dang much that no one was excluded or left out. It comes from this passage in Acts, if you care: 2:42-47.

From this idyllic community, we have steadily declined into the absolute hot mess of today. So, the church institution tries to fix this problem with forced FELLOWSHIP. That's where you are brainwashed into thinking you need to constantly get together with people you have no interest in and force yourself to love them unconditionally. 

The result is a group of people being entirely deceptive all the time with each other.

Don't get me wrong, it is possible to be madly in love with humankind all together and naively think each person you meet is an object of your fondness for the whole. And then get your heart stomped on, diced up and served for lunch to those people who are there out of obligation and don't give a rat's ass. How do I know? Ya, that was me.

I came in thinking "I've arrived, this new church will be the place where agape love happens, and I am accepted and appreciated and loved and hugged and it'll be great, great, great!" And then, the first small group they stick me in, I'd pour out my heart. Problem being, the people who are there out of compulsion are on the defensive and my effusiveness and honesty came across as a bit daunting. So they were rather cold. Eventually, I'd move on to another group, or another church, and rinse and repeat. I was sure that somewhere this agape community existed. I didn't find it. Are you surprised? I didn't think so.

Well, I don't know if it does. But I did find something close. You see, when I left the church, and got a little pissed off about it all, my true identity started to shine. I changed my name to my initials, got two tattoos and a nose piercing, sped everywhere and cussed a lot. People started to hear the real me talking, and not beating around the bush. I became a tangible human being. Amy the super-christian yoga rock star became AJ the super-cussing say-it-like-it-is reality enthusiast. 

Funny thing is, I couldn't make a close friend to save my life in the institutional church. Suddenly, outside of it, I had close friends coming out of the woodwork. There were frickin' cool people everywhere I'd never noticed before. And they crave hanging out with me! This is a totally new phenomenon. I decided to name it fellowship.