Step Two

This was another hard step to make because I felt betrayed by God. Having been abuse by my mother and uncle and moliested by the babysitter and finally abused by the nunes at school, there was very little room for faith. I believed in a Higher Power but it was certainly not the one that everyone around me seemed to belive in.

Their God seemed to get a nut off on watching kids get beaten and that was supposed to be a loving God. I was raised Catholic and to me that meant that guilt ruled my life and that everything was either illegal, immoral or fattening. I had a very hard time with the whole God concept and what it meant to me. The things Iw as being taught in my catacism classes did not make sense to me. That was because the things they said were supposed to be doing were not the things people around me were doing.

I grew up in a very intersting time and place and I saw things that to this day I do not understand why I had to see them. I grew up around people that survived the rampage of the Nazi death camps. I was for hand the damage to the soul of the racism of the riots of the late 60's. I could not make the separation between what was going on in Vietnam and my own neighborhood at that time.

Death and violence seemed to be everywhere and I watch people turn on each other and understood how dark we could be to each other. Yet I found some comfort in a Higher power that could create the beauty of a rose and the sweet taste of a freshly picked ripe black cherry. The Higher Power I identified with was more along the lines of the one the Native Americans followed. I would read about their God and how loving and nurturing he was.

I struggled for a long time to come to understand that my understanding of my Higher Power would change with time and grow as I did. They call it a spiritual awakening when you come to believe in a Higher Power. Foe some it is sudden and for others it is gradual. For me he had to kill me to get me to see the light and I was still stubborn about it. I explored many religions trying to make sense out the senseless.

The hardest part was the concept that my Higher Power could restore me to sanity. I had to first come to the understanding that I was insane to begin with. Than there is the matter of trusting him to make me sane. Being able to trust God after all I had been through in his name was not going to be easy. Everytime I heard those words, "God loves you" made my skin crawl and made me recoil in fear. You see the beattings I took as a kid by the nunes and the adukts that were supposed to love me were always proceeded by, "I am going to show you how much God love you".

To me God's love meant being abused by someone. How can you tust someone that wants to see you abused? It took years of trying to be able to give him parts of my life just to see what he was going to do with it. It would be a lifetimes work to learn to trust God to return me from the nightmare I lived in his name. Slowly I have learn to trust a Higher Power of my understanding. I will never trust the God they talk about in church because I associate him with the abuse that I suffered through ut my life.

God to me lives in my heart and not in any building. People I have learned do the most horrible things to each other in God's name. They believe that he will reward them for that as well. How can a God of unconditional love be proud of a mother that beats her kids or a nune that beats the word of God into you? Have a great day all and God Bless, I love you all.