As a child, I remember sitting in the church of my childhood trying to make sense of what I was hearing. It was difficult for me to understand that a loving merciful God would keep you out of heaven if for some reason you had not heard of His son.
Of course, the church I was raised in was a fundamentalist church. My family embraced these doctrinal beliefs, so I experienced the shole gamut of Sunday school. Sunday church service, Wednesday night prayer service, and daily home devotions. I was even sent off to summer Bible camp for several summers.
Now, don’t get me wrong, my parents were loving, nurturing adults that were only following what they thought was the best path for raising an inquisitive young boy in the correct way.
All through my childhood days and then into teen age years and on into the young adult years, this confusion continued. Other questions began to surface. Things like: “how can there be only one way or path?” “What is sin and what makes it so important?” “What makes me guilty?” “How come somebody does well and somebody else doesn’t?” “What makes it difficult for science and religion to agree” and on and on.
I soon realized the answers I was searching for did not exist in the philosophical environment that I was raised in. There had to be more and there had to be some answers to my questions that would make sense. As I began searching, I became aware of the idea of mental conditioning. We accept beliefs because we grow up with them, and never even question whether they are true for us or not. Sort of like Christopher Columbus setting off to sail around the world when everyone knew the world was flat and he was a fool who would just sail off the world as everyone knew it.
During all this time, I graduated from college, completed a two-year tour of duty in the United States Navy reserve on a ship out of Norfolk, Va., took a job with a firm in the Philadelphia, Pa. area and finally met and in 1969 married the love of my life.
Madelyn and I raised two daughters and moved from the Philadelphia area to Orlando, Florida, and then to Jacksonville, Florida and then to Montgomery, Alabama as I rose through corporate structure and changed companies to finally reach the position of General Manager of a five-state division of a midsize company. By this time, still asking the same questions about life, without answers, I became pretty much what I call a friendly agnostic. In other words, I didn’t know if God existed and it really didn’t matter to me at that point.
In Montgomery, Alabama, Madelyn and I were introduced to our first councilors and the idea they taught about positive thinking, goal setting, and living life from a purpose driven strategy. I can still remember riding in a car from Montgomery, Alabama to attend a meeting. My associate at the time played a cassette tape in the car as we drove. It was Dr. Catherine Ponder, a prosperity teacher. The ideas I heard for the first time on that cassette opened me up to some of the answers I had been looking for many years. This experience began my lifelong search for practical strategies that could make life work for myself and my family.
Shortly after this life-changing event, my wonderful job in the corporate world as General Manager of a five-state area came to an end. The company I was working for was sold to another entity and my role as General Manager was merged with another position in the acquiring company and I was given a “Golden Parachute” or terminated nicely with a three-month salary guarantee.
What a shock. Life changed dramatically for us. We moved to Mobile, Alabama, and then Atlanta, Georgia, and then on to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then to Plano, Texas. We also spent some time in Spokane, Washington and then moved back to Orlando, Florida. All of these moves were basically looking for the Gold at the end of the rainbow. We had varying degrees of success and failure in each location and made the move to the next location when things didn’t work out as we expected.
During all of this time I kept expanding my study of what I now understood as a Spiritual Awareness in life. I finally realized that my childhood understanding of God and the mysteries of the Universe were conditioned into my psyche from a perspective of religion which came from man made doctrine. From study, prayer and meditation, I began to realize that there is a higher awareness that we can know from our own inner self. That higher awareness is available to us now in our everyday life and not just in the sweet by and by.
One of the things that helped me the most in my new awareness was finding a more realistic translation of the Holy Bible. This new translation helped me with a better understanding of what Jesus was really teaching us. What I didn’t know was that Jesus and his followers grew up in an area of the world that spoke Aramaic as their everyday language. Aramaic is an ancient language that predates Hebrew, Greek, Latin and other languages in the Holy Land.
It is still spoken in its original form in three or four isolated tribal areas in the mountains of Turkey. It is a rich language full of metaphors and idioms that must be also used in translations to bring forth the original meaning of the words. Evidently, the translators of the King James version of the original English Bible were not aware of the nuances from the Aramaic language and used the verbatim meanings of the words (during the 14th and 15th centuries) instead of the actual meanings from the idioms that Jesus used in his every day conversations using the language that was spoken at the time. Just to give you an example of a current idiom, can you imagine someone translating “I am hot under the collar” or “I am in a pickle” or I am behind the eight ball” 2000 years from now and giving it the proper understanding.
The first use of an idiom from that time totally reframed my understanding of Christian teachings. The phrase “ye must be born again” was an idiom meaning “you must change your thinking” or “you must change the way you look at things” or “you must look at this from a Spiritual focus and not a physical focus”.
What I finally realized was that scholars and theologians made up stories to fit the words as they saw them and understood them and then created a Doctrine to fit those beliefs. And here we are today, using somebody’s personal interpretation of words used 2,000 years ago as absolute fact because it has been repeated over and over again until it has become an unchallenged part of our very day life in our Christian culture.
I found out there was a man, Dr. George Llamsa, who grew up in one of the isolated tribes that still spoke the original Aramaic. Dr. Llamsa worked his way through the education system and eventually graduated with his PhD from Oxford University in England.
He then set out to translate the Holy Bible from the Peshitta texts (Aramaic) and integrated this translation with the King James Version. Dr. Llamsa either changed the original translation to get closer to the original meaning of the text or he used footnotes to clarify the actual meaning from Aramaic. This translation is available today and is known as the Llamsa Translation of the Bible. Since these translation foibles have become more public, there are now other researchers that have studied Aramaic and are bringing their findings into print and even audio recordings of how the sayings of Jesus would have sounded in this original language. Needless to say, this new translation helped me put together a different picture of what Jesus was telling folks 2,000 years ago. The first use of an idiom from that time totally reframed my understanding of Christian teachings.
Another truth in Luke 17:21 says “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you”. I am still opening up to the idea that within me is the direct connection to Spirit and that is what Jesus was teaching his followers 2000 year ago. So now I understand that within me and you is that place that we can commune with God. We just have to know how to make that connection.
During all this time, my search took me on many paths. I studied the writing of Parmahansa Yogananda, learned to meditate and read the books of Joel Goldsmith and his interpretation of Jesus’ teachings. I took courses in Neural Linguistic Programming (NLP) and learned about the mind. My study of NLP lead me to certification as a Master NLP Practitioner.
I am still opening up to the idea that within me is the direct connection to Spirit and that is what Jesus was teaching his followers 2000 years ago. So now I understand with me and you is that place that we can commune with God.
The story continues, because during this time of search and study, I was a contract professional speaker with several organizations doing one day seminars on subjects such as goal setting, management skills, strategic planning, and communication skills to the corporate, government and non-profit communities throughout the USA and internationally. I was on the road three to four days a week for several years while my wonderful wife, Madelyn, raised our daughters and kept the home fires burning well.
During this time, I was blessed to speak to groups in every state in the USA and most English-speaking countries of the world including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. This exposure to many different cultures and ideas of the world also enhanced my search for the Spiritual answers I was looking for.
In 1988, after three years of formal study, I was ordained as a minister. This education exposed me to the Bible interpretation that I spoke of earlier and the deep understand of the teachings of our Master Teacher, Jesus the Christ. I then took over part time minister role at Flow of The Spirit Ministries and continued speaking engagements in the USA only.
In 2014, after 15 years in North Texas, I accepted a position as minister in an Austin, Texas area church, the Unity Spiritual Center of Pflugerville, Texas. Unity has a spiritual outlook that creates actual, practical outcomes in life by applying the principles taught by Jesus in a simple straight forward language 2000 years ago.
After 10 years as a minister of this wonderful group of souls, I have retired to Glendale, Arizona. During the 10 years in Pflugerville, I became a student of “A Course of Love”. (Published by Take Heart Publications) “A Course of Love” embodies the concepts I have found in my search and supplies the strategies and spiritual understanding needed in today’s chaotic world.
I am now led by Spirit to share those ideas with a larger audience using the internet to find likeminded people. People like me that are questioning and knowing there is more to life. They know the answers that are getting from folks around them do not ring with the truth they are hearing in their hearts.
The answers lie in a journey that might take some time to assimilate. It will also require some adjustment to your thinking along the way.
Once again Paul says in Romans 12:2 “Be you transferred by the renewing of your mind,” which says it all.
The modern understanding by science of the findings in Epigenetics opens the wonderful teachings of Jesus that tell us we are the change we are looking for.
