North Star Writers Group

The state of Ohio recently executed a man who professed to be a prophet of God for the execution-style slaying of a family of five, including a seven-year-old girl.

Jeffrey Lundgren told the jury that God commanded him to kill Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their three daughters - reportedly because the Averys didn’t display enough of the right kind of faith to suit Mr. Lundgren.

People like Mr. Lundgren give God a bad name – or so I believed at one time.

The bloodstained history of the world’s religions prompted me (and many others) to the opposite extreme of denying God altogether. If people can murder, discriminate, rape and commit all manner of mayhem against others in the name of God (or Allah, or whomever), then it’s a nasty good riddance. Who needs that kind of vengeful, wrathful God?

I dismissed God, angry and disgusted at the divisive, judgmental religious rules and “thou shalt nots” promulgated and enforced in God’s name.

I don’t feel that way anymore. Twenty years ago, God’s unconditional love touched me and helped me transform my life, addressing and healing many soul-deep emotional and spiritual wounds. The God I have come to know, however, has never directed me as to how other people should believe, live, think, do or feel. It’s flat out none of my business.

Instead, God and I discuss our own relationship, my need and desire to be more whole, the issues in my life, God’s joy at my emotional and spiritual healing steps. We often end up giggling and finger painting a sunset. I take the browns and purples and pink tones, while God chimes in with the golds, yellows, oranges and crimson hues. We’re a pretty good team.

When God and I speak, I feel complete love and acceptance from God exactly the way I am. If God accepts me with all my (human-designated) imperfections, how can I not do likewise? And why then should I care what other people think about me?

Through my private conversations with God, I have come to understand and accept that free will gives us the right to question God, to blame God, to disavow God. Ironically, when God bestowed free will upon us, it came with the right to throw God away.

Yet I know that eventually, I was not able to function or to heal myself without God. And in the course of healing my wounds, I also came to experience the huge difference between human-made dogmas and doctrines and the reality of God.

God is love - unconditional love. That means God is love without limitations, conditions, standards, expectations of any kind attached to that love. We merit that love simply because we exist as created souls, not because we believe certain things, look a certain way, eat certain foods, are a certain skin color, gender or sexual orientation or follow a certain creed.

My experience of God’s love leaves me doubtful that any one person has the one and only hotline to God. After all, I found my way to God by a highly unconventional route, yet I still got there. And if I can find and speak with God and feel God’s unconditional love, surely anyone else can do so, too.

Somewhere, in some other world perhaps, there are colorful sunsets with God’s and my names on them.

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This is Column #CT9. Request permission to publish here.