It’s not that I don’t believe in God. It’s that I don’t believe in your God – the one you have made in your image and that seeks to protect and preserve only the people you can tolerate, excluding the people who are not like you and do not believe like you do. God is not who you think God is. And God is not who your religion says God is. If that were so, then God would be small and containable inside your finite brain. God is not who I think God is, either. God is bigger than that.

We must be continually letting go of everything we have thought about God thus far. God exists outside of the structures and accoutrements we try to hang on God, even apart from the words and ideas we have about God and all the images we associate with God. Growth is simplifying and removing all things that might hinder a free and wild Being, and letting those things dissolve. Your view of God should be continually being reborn. That is how life works.

Just when you think you know God, they reveal themselves from a place you least expect it, and push into territory that before seemed off limits. God and life are seeking to do two things at once: expand your view of what was possible (create) and put things together that heretofore have not been melded together (reconcile).

Though words fail, the best way we might describe God are “Spirit” and “Presence.” There is something occurring beneath and beyond the normal way we think about all our experiences. God is moving in silence, carefully enlivening and promoting cell growth and reproduction. We experience it as a Gestalt – something greater than the sum of the parts, and beyond the normal channels of our experience – something greater and more alive. To try to contain God with only a thought or belief or image is not a full representation of what is happening. It is on a different perceptual level.

You might remember a time when you felt the most alive, the most like yourself, the most joyful, peaceful, euphoric or powerful. Locate that feeling and try to practice it. It is likely that was the time when you were feeling the Presence, perhaps without thinking of it that way. The practicing of that Presence is how you bring solidness and goodness to any situation you are in, rather than trying to convince people you “know” how to get to God and then trying to teach them through the normal channels (usually logic). Here’s hoping you will consistently find your ideas confounded by your experience and maybe by the way another person is having God revealed to them – in a different way than you.