Does your higher power speak to you?

Do you get answers to your prayers?

Does your spirituality comfort and provide you with strength, courage, and the desire to live the best life you can?

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I'd be grateful for any responses people care to make here. If possible, I ask that you not reply in terms of your religious teachings; I was sexually and emotionally abused by a minister, my father, until I escaped him. For now, my spiritual search can't have anything to do with churches or biblical teachings.

jer

Jer:

Yes. When I listen.

Yes. When I'm ready to really pray and receive the answers I'm given.

Yes. When I let it, when I let my Higher Power do that for me & with me which I cannot do alone.
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No wonder...

Take care Jer.

Victor

Hey Victor, damn man, yer fast

Victor and all - please sprinkle some 'how does it happen' in whatever you care to share on this topic

grateful jer

Jer,

You need to have faith that the higher power exists. Its like believing in the wind. We don't see the wind, but we know and believe it exists by seeing the results of what it does from the gentle rustling of leaves, to the uprooted tree from a storm. This too is how a higher power works. Some times its not so obvious (like the uprooted tree), its more subtle (like the gentle rustling of leaves). Only when my faith grew to this point, did I receive what you asked in your three questions. One thing to add, when my prayers are answered, they are answered in such detail that they could have only been answered by someone who personally knows my heart and mind. And I mean details that I didn't even ask for when I prayed, its just the added extra to show you that the relationship IS personal.

Also, so sorry that you had that experience with religion as a child. I too had hypocritical "Christian" parents (though not as extreme as your case). At 16, I set out to reject everything they were, including Christianity. The joke was on me...over a decade later, I realized that they weren't really Christians after all. By rejecting and rebelling against what I thought they were, I became like them in that respect. Ironic, isn't it?

Sandy

Hi Jer -

"Religion is for people who fear hell. Spirituality is for people who've been there".

Music has always been my spiritual source. Whatever I've been through and whatever I'm going through - someone has been there and written a song about it. Put on your headphones and sing and dance like there's no tomorrow !

Hey Jer,

Yes
yes
yes

as for people like your perp, I totally agree with Sandy:

Most or all of the people I thought were Christians weren't either.

Peace
MO Healing

Wanderer:

Never heard that one before but I like it!

Like what you say about music too, and really resonate with it.

Mo:

Agree wholeheartedly. If walking into a church makes a person a Christian then guess what I was in the swimming pool the other day so I must be a . Went to get my wife's car fixed the other day so I must be an auto mechanic,
or maybe I'm a car? Watched Jackie Chan the other night so I'm a Kung Fu expert ...

Victor

I'm feeling pretty down and out right now, and think I've found a good place to be. I've gotten some sense of connection to my higher power in the last few weeks and months going to Church. My work place is pretty unenlightened, for my taste and health. The Twelve Step groups have given me lots of support and allowed me to find out what really happened to me, and just how screwed up the world can be.
That's my most effective spiritual practice, it has turned out. The Twelve Step groups are a place where I can open up and speak my mind honestly and pretty darn openly. All my prayers and meditations open up after that.
Take care, everybody. Thank you all again. May you be well, reasonably happy, and plenty successful.

You too Integrator.

When I was 10 years old, My family and I went to my older sisters house the night before Easter. My sister and brother-n-law and mom and step dad went out drinking that night, of course they came back drunk and fighting. My step dad decided we was going home so at 3:00 AM Easter Sunday we loaded up the car and headed home.
I was so scared because I knew when we got home my step dad would continue the fighting and abuse with me and my mom. I prayed to God that we did not have to go home. The next thing I knew was that my stepdad had driven off the road and went flying into a 30 foot ravine and the car hit a big boulder at the bottom.
There was blood all over the place but my step-sister and myself were unharm. My step-sister went for help and I climb into the front seat and honked the horn , hoping another car would hear it and stop. My step-dad almost bleed to death that night and my mom broke her tail bone.
I always believed that God had heard my prayer that night and protected me from any harm. He also punished my step-dad by almost bleeding to death. I thought maybe this would change things, maybe this was a new beginning. It was for a short time but then the drinking started again and along with it the abuse. I still believe God was trying to give my step-dad a message that night but he refused to listen.

PeteT:

Certainly you would think your stepfather would have gotten some kind of message from that besides
pause & then keep doing what I'm doing.

Well, perps can be crafty, but they are also foolish. To put it nicely.

I'm glad you were protected that night, I'm sorry your abuse continued, and I'm glad you have come thru it a survivor.

Victor

Hello jer and all!

Your question is certainly a good one. There is a big difference between religion and spirituality--although, all religions have a spirituality. Religion is about creed, cult, (worship) and code ( a set of rules meant to assist one in their journey to God.)

Spirituality, for me has been a connection between the God I do believe in and very much love, and myself. God speaks to me, I bellieve, in music, plays, sunrises and sunsets, in various happenings in the course of a day, or week. The beauty of flowers and bushes, the ladnscape, all speak to my heart and give me peace and joy. My beautiful Lake Michigan speaks powerfully to me of so many things at different times. So do infants, even crying ones with smelly diapers, the laughs of little children, the decency of so many good teens these days. I feel as though a spirit of love, joy, peace and strength is all around me and I just need to plug into it.

An 18 year old friend of mine died 8 days ago. I felt overwhelmed with grief. But the huge funeral he had and the hundreds of teens that came and cried and hugged each other were a bit of beauty among great sorrow..

God does help me and watches over me more and more. I wondered where he was when I was suffering. But I think maybe it is because he was there helping me that I am even alive today.

Spirituality does impact my life a lot. I get comfort out of meditating about the things that happened to Jesus on the way to the cross--somehow that makes me feel very much loved. My spirituality has given me a more peaceful and sensitive outlook on people and events. I am not the awful crabby man I used to be. There are a lot of ways my spirituality give me an idea of how to think, act, and respond to daily living.

jer, I am so saddened at the way you were abvsed by the man you should have been able to trust the most. I have no idea how you learn to trust and experience yourself as both loved and loveable. But you are a pillar here and I think you know that you have hundreds of men here who admire you and who would protect you with their own lives. I hope that you can rejoice in that.

Your brother,

Bob

Bob
I find my spirituality in these, and similar, things -

And I can appreciate to a degree how they connect you to your chosen God or Religion.
But I'm one of these atheists that's often looked through the Church doors and thought about what I see, and I remain an atheist.

The connection I get from these lind of spiritual inspirations is a connection with life, with those around me, and I feel my strongest connection with those others who also appreciate these connections. Whether they are religious or not, my instinct leads me towards people who display appreciation and understanding of lifes pleasures, however simple they might be.

If we appreciate the pleasures fully then the horrors seem less, or at least the occasional respite from the horrors seems better.

Dave

way cool and thanks for the replies ya'll. it's all food for thought as i find my way in the dark it seems. willingness to try other ways... hmmm, i suppose i gotta be willing.

sometimes i feel like i'm open to new ways of being, thinking about life, about myself. and sometimes i'm not.

yeah, being able to enjoy a recent warm sunny day... it can be sublime when one knows the frozen depths of hell.

as i've posted elsewhere tonight, i'll be coming back to this thread when i have more energy and have digested these posts.

yo

jer