The Face of God

The Face of God
November 5, 2015

I think it is finally time to talk about the spiritual side of this journey. . .  

Earlier this year, I wrote about how triathlon had helped me sense God's presence:

April 27th: Blessings.  In a strange way, triathlon has renewed my relationship with God in an extremely significant way.  In the beginning, it felt losing weight was my doing.  But somewhere, this became something that was not my doing.  I began to sense that I am a passenger on a journey that God has set before me.  My son who is studying to be a pastor was the first person to point this out to me.  Then, out of the complete blue, my coach said in an email, “God loves you, just the way you are.”  I haven’t figured out why, out of all the overweight people in the world, I have been blessed with this journey.  I know there is some reason and I am listening.  In my Episcopal / Catholic upbringing, we don’t shout, “Praise the Lord.”  But, I often say quietly, “I know this is you, Lord. Thank you,” and I strive to listen to what He is saying to me.

So let's go back a little further.  

I was raised as an Episcopal with a mother who was raised as a Christian Scientist and at one time wanted to be a missionary.  She was a Sunday school teacher at our Episcopal church so I'm assuming that her faith was important to her.  In college, I was very spiritual but didn't attend church.  When I met my husband, he took me to a Catholic mass and I will never forget feeling such a magnificent light being back in church.  Many of the Catholic prayers and hymns were the same as the Episcopal's.  Before we married, I attended religious education classes.  I asked the priest if I could be Catholic if I didn't believe that God should be feared and I wasn't so big on praying to Mary.  He said that was ok and at age 25, I joined the Catholic church, began attending mass every Sunday, and was a lector for a year or two.

But for the past several years, a very smart friend of mine challenged the existence of God in our discussions.  He had a logical, scientific explanation for everything that I pointed out about God and my faith.  I remember one time saying to him, "See that coke can?  It exists, right?  How do you know that it exists?  You can see it.  You can feel it.  That is how it is for me with God.  I can sense His existence.  He just is."  

This time in my life made me think about how perhaps there are other ways of "knowing" that something exists, other languages besides science.  I started thinking about how beauty is a language that conveys things that science cannot convey.  Sunrises, paintings and especially music.  I love to let the music at church wash over me.  It feels like God has wrapped his warmth around me.  During these constant discussions about the existence of God when my beliefs were reexplained through the eyes of an atheist,  I never stopped believing and never stopped going to church, but my relationship with God became smaller and smaller and smaller.  I stopped praying.

Then one day, I witnesses the atheist be less than kind to another person and I said "Enough."  I wanted to stand up and started shopping for a piece of jewelry that I could wear to show others and remind myself that I was Christian.  I shopped for several months before I found the courage to wear a sign of my faith.  The sign was a small cross in diamonds that was almost (but not quite) hidden inside a very, very small gold disk.  It was a cross I thought I could wear without being too blatant.  It was for me to wear as my reminder of my faith. . . and a very small start to my standing up for myself and what I believed.

Later (when I had lost about 80 pounds), I started to have a sense that my weight loss was something that was being done TO me rather than BY me.  It was kind of exciting but also a little scary.  Why was God doing this?  I assumed that I was supposed to do something big with this gift that I was receiving.  I asked in prayer for God to help me see what I was being called to do, and the response I kept sensing was, "This is just for you."

That of course, taught me about God's blessings.  With the help of my son who is studying to be a pastor and surprisingly, my tri coach, I learned that God is infinitely kind.  

Then one day at church, a new young priest shared a story during his sermon about how God courts people with blessings just like a boy courts a girl during courtship.  That just made sense to me.  God was courting me.

I also think that God's blessings were always there but I just couldn't see them because I hadn't been open to God.

Maybe these blessings are just for me.  But maybe I was also meant to use those blessings to help others.  I hope so.  That would be really cool.  :-)

The Face of God

In addition to the weight loss, I started having people show up in my life at just the right moment to help me with my triathlon journey.  I've written about several of those people.  And just this week, two others showed up that I will write about following this post. 

A few months ago, my husband and I had lunch with a friend of ours and his wife.  Our friend is a deacon in the Catholic church.  His wife is a church secretary.  I told them about my triathlon journey and how I feel that God has been courting me.  I described how I had a strong sense in the beginning that my weight loss was something that was being done TO me rather than BY me.  And I described all the people who were in my life at just the right moment with just the right word.  I called those people "angels."

I had been reading and thinking about angels and had the sense that the over-the-top kind people that were appearing my life at just the right moment weren't really angels, at least not in the Biblical sense.  But who were they?  As we were leaving our friends' house, our deacon friend said to me, "Keep seeing the face of God in others."  That was it!  God shows his face in many ways including the kindness of others.  That just felt right.

Never-ending Journey

If you are reading this, it is probably clear that I'm still figuring things out.  And my sense is that no one ever really figures this stuff out.  Fundamentalists argue about different translations and interpretations of the Bible.  Different Christian denominations argue about how you get to heaven and whether or not there is a hell.  Maybe that's why one part of the trinity is the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit allows each of us to find God and His answers within ourselves.