http://journalofanautist.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-relationship-with-god.html

This is a particularly important article by Michael for those of us who had the
privilege to use FC and talk to them about these spiritual and religious
matters...of which we learned were very important to them. In reading what
other facilitators have learned over the years there's an amazing consistency to
what the auties say on these matters but of course within the religious
traditions they are a part of. Even then there's great independence and
insights.

Tom

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

My Relationship With God

My life began before my birth. My life is with a purpose, a small piece in a
much larger puzzle. My life is not my life to live. Your life is not yours to
live. All that is, all that is to come is known by God. Free will is therefore a
false perception. God has already accounted for our choices in structuring his
plan. Therefore, all action, good and bad, furthers God’s plan. All serve God,
whether they know it or not, whether they want to or not. To think of one’s
life is one’s own is a farce of man’s creation.

Our relationship with God is the only true free will we have. I can choose to
love, or hate, or be ignorant of my service to him. It is his love of
relationship that caused him to send his son. My relationship with God starts
with this understanding. To see the bigger picture makes sense of the smaller
anomaly that is me. I am every man’s question –If God is perfection why
create me, a disabled? If God loves me, why must I suffer?

God’s perfection is as to the larger plan not the individual pieces. It may
even require suffering as a bond to one another. It is each other’s suffering
that we respond to in God-like fashion: the fire victim you donate clothes to,
the disabled you volunteer time with, and the sick you pray for. Examples are
all around you. It is our opportunity to love as God; the altruistic act as
God’s love. In suffering, in our kindred failings, we form the
interconnections between us. We are bonded by our needs. It is our weaknesses
that are our strength – the purpose for community over the individual.

If, as an individual, you needed nothing from others would you still seek them
out? God does. It is his pure act of love to want a relationship with us. It is
our response that offers free will. It is the only act that is truly our own. As
to the rest, we are actors on a stage, reading lines of script written long
before our birth.

Free will is only as to this life. In the after life all serve God, all revere
God. Even Satan bends on knee before him. People misunderstand. We reason from
false assumptions. Man’s perception explains a three dimensional situation as
a point. It misses entire planes of knowledge. Satan is of God’s creation. He
too serves God’s larger plan.

Darkness is necessary to the light. Counterpoints exist for mutual benefit. They
are complimentary not opposed; like big and little, one helps define the other.
The opposite of both big and little is none. The opposite of many things is
none.

We practice false relationships all the time. We form connections in our mind
which hide the real connections of things. The drunk on the street corner may
exist for the purpose of a single act several times removed. The sleeping bag
that warms him made with altruistic love serves a love purpose; the meal at
shelter volunteer served serves it too. That drunk may serve God in ways others
can not. Yet people see only the drunk, not his higher purpose. Who are we to
judge another? Where purpose can be defined in the happening of a second or
little incidental acts of life how is it possible to know the truly important
among us. Like chaos theory, it is the beating of the butterfly wing that may
hold the answer to our future. And while all action is accounted for, it is
God’s accounting, not man’s.

I would not presume to judge the value of another. I would not presume
invaluable my own existence. At minimum, I am the drunk, a channel for
altruistic action. It is a noble purpose as are all our purposes. To understand
this is to be at peace with the world. To understand this is to be at peace with
myself with all my imperfections. To understand this is to be at peace with God.