God is in the People

I don’t believe in God as some being in the sky that listens to our prayers and answers them. I don’t think that God would have created this world and then told us through any language that some people are less than others because of how they were made, or what differences they were born with. I don’t think any human being has the mental capacity to understand the big hard questions, and come up with an answer for all to follow. I don’t think God is a tangible or visible thing. God is not in a church, or a masque, a temple, or a pyramid. God is a force, in people, that starts a heart on its lifetime of beating. God is the force inside of you that causes your cells to multiply, diversify, and specialize. God is feeling and emotion and understanding and compassion. God is not tangible or visual.

I spent a big portion of my life not believing in god. I refuted the existence of existential power mostly because I was angry. I spent my youth in the Roman Catholic faith, and watched TV as preacher after preacher would condemn my very being. I was an abomination, a disgrace, a child molester, a “Gay Agenda pusher,” a scorn on the face of the earth. Hearing this made me hate those preachers more than they hated me. Because I hated them, I hated the people who listened and believed in them. Because I hated so many people, I was full of rage, and because I was scared I had no outlet to release my rage upon.

Then, when I was 16, I started taking care of people. My patients couldn’t take care of themselves, and despite their personal beliefs, they needed me. I could write a novel about all my job as taught me, and how it’s not just a job, but the biggest thing I have learned is this: If you can see passed people’s outsides, passed their prejudices and misguided notions, you will see that we are all people who need one another from time to time.

That change in understanding is what I believe god is. The human ability to change and understand.

I have friends that have held me as I wept, for no other reason than they love me. That’s God.