I have always, always, always, always, always believed there was a God out there. Or I mean...I believed in the idea of a God.
Until very recently.
I can remember being tiny and wondering if God was angry that I yelled at my sister. I mean it has always been in there despite my parents really not being all that religious at all. We certainly never attended church regularly. I never "felt God's presence," but of course, that was "my" fault and blah blah.
However, despite "believing"...whenever I heard a
description of God, from any religion, it rang false to me. Even the float-y "God is the 'all' and includes us and is not apart from us and blah blah" stuff felt...not quite right.
It just has never felt right. Ever. But I have never been brave enough to be logical and say, "Maybe there isn't a God," until recently.
Here's the way my spiritual searching history -- close to 40 years of it -- has felt. It has felt like...well, here I go.
It is
exactly like buying some gadget at WalMart. You're all excited. You've heard from soooooooo many people how THIS is exactly what you need. And you take it out of the box and you try it and...nothing happens.
So you take the Gadget back to WalMart and complain that it doesn't work. But instead of refunding your money and going into the back room to call the supplier and yell for shipping a bad product, they give YOU the fishy eye and ask, "Did you try this? And did you do that? How about this?"
And you give off the answers but there are more and more questions fired at you; fired to make the statement that it's not the Gadget that doesn't work;
you are the one who did something wrong.
Finally you just go home. And you think and think and think about what
you did wrong. You just can't figure out what that could have been. Then you see another commercial on TV. This time it's threatening: "Here are people who didn't use the Gadget. They will suffer forever for it. They should have made the Gadget work...but *they* were defective. Or maybe they just weren't sincere in trying to make it work."
You're totally ashamed and you believe you're the only one for whom The Gadget doesn't produce the incredible results that the neverending repetitive infomercials have insisted it would, so you don't ask family and friends about this. They all seem to be doing just fine with The Gadget. They claim that it works WONDERS for them. So you crawl home and take out your Gadget
again. And push every button and follow every instruction and still nothing happens. Nothing at all. You put it away in a closet but you do take it out whenever other people seem to be showing their own Gadgets off, like during holidays or family get-togethers, and you pretend your Gadget is working just like you assume theirs are working but all the while you're really starting at a blank screen...wondering if anybody else could possibly feel the way you do.
Even though the Gadget never ever works, you still take it out in secret once in a while -- not just to show off and pretend, but to try...yet again...to make it work. Maybe if you meditate first it will all come to you. Maybe if you clean all the gears. Maybe if you talk to the Gadget. Maybe if you just carry it with you everywhere. Absolutely everywhere.
But still nothing.
And then one day when you get up the nerve to tell someone you trust about all this...he or she tells you the Gadget isn't working because you're not sincere enough about making it work. You're just playing around. But don't worry: the Gadget *will* jump into some kind of action...the punishing kind. It won't answer you when you talk to it, when you ask it for help, when you praise it, when you bow before it, when you press every single button and lift every single lever, BUT it will, one day, when you least expect it, throw you into a fiery pit forever to scream in pain for not having had faith in it.
You decide you'll start fresh and you won't ask ANYTHING of your Gadget. Nothing at all. All you want is to understand it. That's all. So each and every night for endless long nights you kindly thank the Gadget for being there and tell it that you want to know it and that's it. And you wait. And wait. And wait.
Dumb as a rock, the Gadget just sits there and stares blankly back at you, just the way it does when you rail at it, beg it, try to engage it in something lighthearted, spill your guts out to it, hold it close to your heart trying to convince yourself you feel ANY warmth emanating from it. At all.
I think I'm done with my Gadget. My Gadget has done a lot of things: it's made me cry. It's made me feel alone. It's made me feel like I'm just not "getting it". It's kept me from doing things that might make me happy. It's terrorized my days and my nights with fearful imagery. What hasn't it done? Comforted me or made me happy. At all. I'm sorry. I don't believe in my Gadget any more. I don't even want my money back from WalMart. I'm happy enough just to let go of its weight on my back, and really live my life, at last. I can't say that there's no such thing as a Gadget, period. Perhaps there is...for some people.
I've seen people claim to use their Gadgets for the most frivolous things: "I prayed to my Gadget that my little Tommy would get the lead in the school play and he did!" but I can tell you that I pressed the "To make your daddy come back, press this button. To keep your mother from bringing home men who touch you, lift the lever and recite the following. To have your son be healthy and not intellectually disabled, do this and that" buttons, levers and gadgets over and over again and, well...nothin'. Sorry. The Gadget works great for some people, or they believe it does. So I'll tell you. Even if the Gadget DOES exist AND works for some, I roundly REJECT anything that could listen to a tiny child weep and scream for help and do nothing, yet sit in on a "prayer circle" to ensure that Jennifer and Betty come through their rhinoplasties just fine. That type of Gadget is not for me...even if it does exist.
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. I can still here them 45 years on......."Look you there bach....there goes the evil one!!" 
