Hello and welcome to Dawnings. I’m your host, Dawn Stillwell, and I am so glad that you decided to take a listen to this podcast today. Today I wanna talk about my walk with God. Everybody has their own journey with or without God, and , we all have our path in this life. And I’m not here to tell anybody how to do it because I think we need to discover that for ourselves.

But I do wanna share a bit of my story and hopefully you might find some inspiration in it, or it might cause you to think, do some really critical thinking. I don’t think we do enough of that as a society. So, if I can spur you to do a little bit of that, it’s all good. As you might have read in my bio, I am an ordained minister.

I don’t have a church or anything like that, but being an ordained minister was a goal of mine from the time I gave my life to God when I was 29. And from that time, well, for the first 12 years of that, I was a zealot for God. I just wanted to soak up everything that I could learn about God.

I did daily devotions. I was active in church, whether it was doing Bible studies or being part of the worship team at church. And this happened from church to church. As I moved around, I was always noticed and the next thing you know, I’m doing music ministry in the church and, available to do other things.

Because I was in ministry I got to rub elbows with the leaders in the church and with traveling ministers and things like that. In my own life I had a pure devotion to God and wanted to live the type of life that was pleasing to God. That was my goal, to be pleasing to God, and I noticed that as I got to know these people that were leaders in the churches and whatever, they didn’t always live the kind of life that I was living and they would say one thing in the pulpit, but maybe live something different in their lives away from church or, they’d come across one way in the pulpit and then, turn around and negate what they had just spoken about just in talking to them. Or I saw them treat some people better than others. It was like there was a fair bit of hypocrisy and I didn’t like it. It’s like, isn’t everybody as serious about God as I am? And it turns out, no, they’re not, and that’s okay. Everybody’s got their own path. I’ve learned a lot since that time, but it was causing me grief.

Because I was trying to walk as uprightly as I could, and then I’m seeing these other people that are looked up to in leadership and they’re not, how come they get to be leaders if they’re not perfect? I guess that’s the word I’m looking for. Or at least striving to beperfect. So, you know, I was judging them, but the thing is, I didn’t understand how could you not be so in love with God that you’d want to do anything you could to be pleasing to Him. That was my thought process at the time, and I’m thinking maybe I have spent the last 12 years of my life, have I wasted it?

Like, am I not getting it? Why do I have to be so good when they don’t have to be good? How come? I feel like I’m trying to live up to a standard that I see other people who are leaders, are not aspiring to meet. So in my frustration, I cried out to God. I said, I wanna know the truth here, even if I have to relearn everything I’ve learned, even if I have to give it up and learn something new, I was willing to do that. I said, I just want the truth and God listens when you say stuff like that. So it wasn’t long after that that Conversations with God, book one found its way into my hands and I began reading that book

I had a lot of angry outbursts towards God while I was reading it, and it was because I was reading about a God that was nothing but unconditional love, and it was spelled out what unconditional love is. It wasn’t a case of God loves you unconditionally, but if you don’t choose him, well off to the hellfire you go. It wasn’t like that.

The God presented in this book was not a God that was angry, and I’d always struggled with that because in reading the Bible, we’ve got, we’ve got angry God in the Old Testament. He’s angry. He needs sacrifices and, he’s, you know, feeling all smitey and whatever over here.

And then you go into the New Testament where God is love, God is unconditional love and he’s so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so he could reconcile mankind to himself and I could never make the Old Testament and the New Testament shake hands, it’s just like, God seems pretty moody here -’cause he’s ticked over here and he’s chill over here.

I’m a deep thinker and a questioner, so I did have issues with that. So anyways, back to the Conversations with God. I’m reading about a God that is just nothing but love and He gave us free will, and I mean, true free will, you can serve him or not. You can love him or not. He will still love you. And there is no damnation.

And my heart wanted to believe in this God ’cause I had a sense this this was the God that I had experienced the day I gave my life to God; this is the God that made sense to me ’cause I couldn’t understand why, how is the devil as powerful as God? Why is there this huge fight between good and evil?

I mean, if God made the devil, why didn’t he just, zap, you’re gone? You’re not pleasing me and, If we were born imperfect and full of sin, why didn’t God just wipe us out and start over again? Or how could anything on this earth not be the will of God? And if He didn’t like it, (like he’s God), if he didn’t like what was happening, why didn’t he stop it?

Well, Conversations with God, it addresses all of that in a way that makes sense. And I’m reading this and I’m like, I’m sorry, this is too good to be true. And then, the teachings I had, it’s like, you know the devil put this book out here. It must be and isn’t that funny? Because you hear something that’s too good to be true about God and you immediately attribute it to the devil trying to trip you up.

That’s kind of messed up thinking. But anyway…

I was scared to believe in the God of this book, even though it made the most sense to me, because obviously I didn’t wanna make a mistake. I mean, people fight wars or have fought wars over, which truth is right. We had the Crusades a few hundred years ago. We’ve got, Christian denomination pitted against Christian denominations and no, we have the one, we serve the one true God, no, we serve the one true God, no. You know, my theology is better than your theology kind of deal. And I was just like, how do you get it right? And I just decided, you know what? I have put so much time and effort into this and this book just blew it all out of the water. It was an answer to prayer and I just, I just said, I’m done.

I’m done. And I walked away from God

It wasn’t permanent, but it was for a few years and am I’m like, I can’t not serve a God. I can’t not have God in my life. So let’s go shopping for a new God, a new religion really. And I studied other religions. I studied Buddhism and I studied Wicca. And I actually kinda leaned into the Wiccan religion for a while.

You’re gonna say, oh, Wicca is, I mean, aren’t they witches? Some of them call themselves witches, but even though I leaned into it, it never felt right. It just didn’t feel right. Some of the teachings are good, you know – harm none. That’s good advice. . Anyway, I’m not gonna dwell there, but I had a whole library of books, on wicca and spells and things like that, and that wasn’t cutting it for me.

After I took that tangent, I came back to the Conversations with God books. And I got them on audiobook because I can listen to them all doing other things that don’t take my mind. And with that gap between my church going days and this point in my life, that had been about seven years, I was able to come back to Conversations with God and listen to it with an open heart.

And if you’ve not read these books or listened to these books, I do recommend them because I do think they hold a truth that we’re not getting sitting in our churches, that God is bigger than we gave Him credit for. That God is unconditional love, and I mean true unconditional love, not, unconditional ass long as you do what He wants you to do: His love is unconditional. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or what you’re doing or who you’re doing. God loves you and He’s okay with you. We don’t have to please him. He gave us free will. We can do as we please and that’s a big thing because so many churches preach free will. God gave you free will, but he wants you to do this.

QWell, if he wanted me to do this, then why did he give me free will? Why didn’t he just make us all robots that that do his bidding and His will?

It made me into a much happier person and one that can be my authentic self because there is no condemnation for me. It doesn’t matter what I do. I’m not condemned and we are made in the image and likeness of God. And the Bible even says, you are gods.

And I want you to ponder that. If God created you out of love, in His likeness and image, so you’re like God, but smaller, He is limitless and you are limitless. We’re not taught this, and so we don’t believe it, but I believe we can all live a life without limits in joy and peace and in love.

That’s the God that I know, and this is going to be hard for some people to accept, and some of you are going to listen to this and say, I’m not never listening to her again, and that’s okay.

I’m going to touch on this in other podcasts, but basically I believe in a God who doesn’t condemn and there is no damnation for us no matter what you’ve done, no matter what you’re doing, whether you serve Him or whether you don’t. I believe we are all children of God, whether you believe it or not, and you’ve come from God and you will go back to God when your life here is done.

And if there’s nothing but love for you and acceptance for you, no matter who you are, that is a gift I think everyone should give themselves. God doesn’t have a problem with you and you shouldn’t have a problem with you. So go and live your life as big as you want, doing what you want and God’s not gonna hate you for it and he’s not gonna judge you for it. And that goes against so much of what you have possibly been taught in church.

But I also feel that…. Oh, this could be a really long podcast. If we got into that, just consider it. Just consider it. Pick up the book or the audio book and let it challenge you. You don’t have to take you pastor’s word for who God is and what He wants. That’s for you to discover on your own path. That is for you to find out for yourself.

Religion is a set of rules. Spirituality is your experience, and I am giving you permission to follow your own experience, to believe in your own experience. And if your experience is different than what Pastor said it should be, or what the Bible said it should be, you are gonna believe them and gaslight yourself? Or believe in your own experience.

Well, this has been a little disjointed today, but I’m gonna cut it off there for now and next week we will touch on this again. This is Dawn Stillwell. Wishing you a great day. Thanks for tuning in. Ciao for now, peeps!