"You're different, aren't you?"
I'm the first person from Colorado you've met.
Rick and I were on break at our construction site in Coral Springs, Florida.
"No, that's not what I mean. You really are different from anyone I know, but in a good way, ya know?"
I know. The kindest synonym for "different" I can find is "distinctive" but the rest can and have been used. I am different and always have been. Now as I progress through my seventy-second amazing, astonishing, astounding year on Earth, I would like to offer an explanation for why I think I am the way I am. My current understanding is that what I have referred to as our worldview forms in us at birth and remains with us until death.
On my presumption that we actually are individualized expressions of God created for the purpose of experiencing the gift of Life, it is my present thinking that our initial personal perception emerges simultaneously with our God-self into what I have labeled our "Lifeview". The very first experience of all life, therefore, is acceptance or rejection. The very fact of existence confirms acceptance. Rejection many times is Life's brief and final experience.
This label, "Lifeview", might benefit from a name more easily recognizable, and in support of President Biden's societal and spiritual aspirations to save our nation's, let's instead call it our "Soul". I think that our Soul is born with us and therefore, I presume, dies with us.
When we started this journey I encouraged you to spend a little bit of your mindfulness contemplating the existence of God. Now I want to tell you why, again couched in the confidence that anything I have said thus far is not a bunch of malarkey, I think and behave the way I do.
I was about Wesley's age when, from my crib in the Platteville parsonage, I inexplicably became aware of a presence in the room with me. There was nothing hidden about the silent, neon-colored "pansy-like" apparition that remained until instantly disappearing when I called out for Mom. The waking dream of a toddler is an explanation difficult to refute and acceptable to me as just that. All I know is that what may have been my first awareness of my Soul, my life has never been the same since.
I accept God within me as my Soul, as the ever-present, ever-experiencing, and ever-comprehending part of me. I am confident that I am a child of God born to experience the gift of Life to its fullest!
I know and accept the reality of my Soul and its Source. Employing the metaphysical principle of First Cause allows me to look at my Life through a meaningfully theocentric lens that logically puts God first!
God is me but I am not God.
This is the Truth by which I attempt to live my Life. God is not my co-pilot because no one is piloting but me. God, instead, is my faithful companion residing in my Soul, experiencing, comprehending, but never directing my actions because that would violate the gift of volition. I am a child of God included among the whole people of God!
My thinking, fortunately, is not mine alone. It is a composite drawn from the great minds to whom I am indebted for their profound contributions to the Truth I strive to live in concert with:
