Connecting With God

When I was a very young child, I experienced a recurring nightmare. I would see myself flying through the air, suddenly landing in a sandy desert with no life – human or vegetation – to be seen. I was all alone in that desolate place. Then my observing eye, like a movie camera on a studio crane, would begin to move away from me, slowly pulling back while looking down on me. As I remain fixed in a tight ball in the center of this scene, the “camera” would continuously draw back and take in more and more of the desolate space surrounding me – the panorama steadily expanding, my form and presence steadily diminishing. I became smaller and smaller, gradually disappearing into a tiny dot on that vast landscape. Just before fading away completely, I would awake – screaming in terror. It was a terror not from fear of physical danger. It was a terror of separation, of disconnection from everything around me, of fading into inconsequence and nothingness. Of ultimate aloneness.

While perhaps less graphically illustrated to others, most people live an unseen inner life of similar experience – emotionally disconnected from and in fear of our surroundings, feeling that we are totally on our own for what happens to us and what we may/may not achieve. We walk among the people and the things of our surroundings, never fully reaching out and truly connecting ourselves to them. Our reaction to that deep sense of aloneness or alienation drives us in many confused directions, more often expressed not as our fear but as our continual “search for inner peace” – a peace that seems highly elusive.

This is where God comes in. Our inner being truly knows that there is some form of a Creative Force, greater than ourselves and beyond what we can see and envision, who has generated all that surrounds us. We are a product of that Creation; both we and our surroundings are all from that Source. We are all part of one greater whole, as one atom links to one cell links to one arm links to one body links to one community of people, sentient beings, and things that links to one universe.

We seek a peace, an accommodation, a connection with all those things we walk beside but do not really touch – an end to our aloneness and separation. Yet it is only when we cease seeing these things as “separate” that connection occurs. It is when we focus on the body of Spirit’s creation that our one atom of life then finds its connected place, its home of peace.

Our peace, our connection to Life, comes up through Allah and back out again. Connecting to Yahweh is connecting to Life. It is a connection we do not have to seek or find; it is already there, and has been with us since our birth. The One is always there with us, in us, encompassing us. We need only to invite our Mother-Father God in to our cognition, our hearing, our understanding, our feeling. That is why making time and effort for our spiritual life is so important. It is not a side venture to our lives; it is our life. The peace we seek awaits us when we commit to renewing our connection with Spirit that we have always had. In that reconnection, our individual self also becomes our Oneness with God and all things.

(Excerpt from forthcoming book A God Connected Life by Randy Bell)