Fred Sievert - God Revealed: Revisit Your Past to Enrich Your Future

IN FAITH-STIRRING EXPERIENCES

A s the chapter title suggests, the four stories that follow illustrate a few of the many events in my life when my faith was firmly established or reinforced by the palpable presence of Godin different ways, through different messengers. These were experiences where it was impossible to miss the significance of what was happening when it was happening. If you have had similar experiences, it is not likely you have forgotten them. But perhaps there is still more to learn from them by remembering.

I encourage you to read, remember, and reflect on how your life has been, or could have been, changed by those times when what was happening was incontrovertibly important. Realizations, even years later, may in fact be the key that unlocks the door to future enrichment.

At the age of twelve, I was a spiritual lightweight with heavy questions: Is God real? If He is, does He exist now or only in the past? Does God know who I am? Is He really watching over my every move? Will He answer my prayers? When people say God has spoken to them, are they lying or delusional? Does God really speak audibly, and if so, why can't I hear Him? And the list went on.

What little I had learned about God came from extended family, friends, and limited reading of the Bible. The fragments of the God story I'd gathered from these sources, as well as from differing Christian faith traditions and Jewish friends, did not present an intelligible or cohesive description of God; instead they elicited further questions.

It was a quiet, peaceful afternoon during my summer vacation from school in 1960. As an adolescent without a job, I found the summers provided ample time for baseball and thoughtful contemplation with little stress. My parents were working; my brother was down the street playing with friends; I was alone in a perfectly silent home. Lying on my bed with nothing to distract or interrupt me, my thoughts inevitably turned to the well-worn paths of my religious questioning.

What exactly would a world without beginning or end be? If God was eternalexisting before any physical matter or substance existedwho would be in this forever-world, even after the universe was no longer extant? I wasn't concerned about how all living things were created or how this created universe would ultimately end, but rather why humans were the superior intelligence and yet so inferior to God.

My mind was totally occupied with the possibility of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God. I was not attempting to induce a mystical state, nor did I have any expectation of meeting God. I was simply engaged in deep contemplation over the questions and curiosities that consumed my young mind. While in this meditative state, however, I felt totally at peaceremoved from the confines and constraints of my body. I could almost describe it as an out-of-body experience, although that description seems inadequate. I felt weightless, as if I were suspended above the floor of my room. I felt nothing but physical warmth, peace, quietude, painlessness, and great joy.

But these surreal sensations were dwarfed by something else: a very vivid connection with the Divine. No physical vision of God, no verbal communication, but an awareness of His presence that was unlike any I had ever felt before or have felt since. Enveloped and embraced by a bright warm light, I was filled with comfort and indescribable love. It was not unlike the comfort I often felt as a child just being in the presence of my parents, even when there was no physical embrace or verbal communication. Similarly, the pure, unconditional love I felt that day on my bedof Divine parent for childwas reassuring and undeniable.