Have you ever asked yourself why you want to read the Bible to learn about God? I mean really ask and layer the questions until you find nothing left but the truth. Likewise, have you ever asked yourself why you want to read a book about mens behavior patterns, about serial killers, about pyschology or any other study that aims to unravel for you knowledge about humans? Why do you want to know this knowledge?
In the book of Genesis from the Bible we read a story that speaks of how a perfect world could turn into a curse. God made everything and it was perfect. Then God made a man and he was perfect. Then God invented love when he took a piece of the man’s bones and used that to create a woman who would be the man’s companion. And then God told them that everything would perfect and there are no rules – they can do whatever they want except one thing. They can’t eat from a tree of knowledge.
Now we know that knowledge is not a literal food. To ingest a thing that has the power to “open their eyes to see things differently” we are required to feed our minds, not our bellies. And it seems that we as a species crave this very thing. We want to learn and ingest as much knowledge as we possibly can. In fact, we’re forced to do this in the United States. If a child isn’t sent to school to learn then the parents can face criminal charges. Why is that? Why do we live in systems that don’t give us the choice of whether we want to learn knowledge and why does this system dictate what we are required to learn?
By this very conditioning we are introduced to the value of knowledge as the pinnacle of all things we want and need in this life. The highest earners who get to live in mansions and drive fancy cars are the ones who learn the most knowledge and achieve great accolades in academics. You have to have a degree – this system tells us. And the pathways to those highest levels of success typically fall in the categories of the sciences of human knowledge, (doctors for example) or the category of system sciences. A person who learns to practice the laws of this land such as a lawyer or a person who learns the highly manipulative sciences of business and marketing to build empires by use of these laws laced with pyshcological methods of human conditioning can become quite successful. What are the benefits of this path? Well, successful people are considered more attractive to the opposite sex. So in this system, success can buy you love. Likewise successful people have the means to accumulate material things; houses, toys, travel experiences and even beauty. Don’t like your physical appearance? There’s a surgery for that.
The system we live in is completely and utterly designed around this one thing: the tree of knowledge. It’s the answer to all your dreams come true. When you ingest knowledge you can become like the gods; seeing all things and knowing all things and having the power to manipulate your reality on this planet to suit all of your heart’s desires.
To step away from the system long enough to see this world and its patterns from the shoes of an observer is to see the stories of ancient texts, greek mythology and even the good vs evil storylines from every Disney picture you grew up watching thrown on a story board with clarity that shakes one to her core. “Ahah!” It’s liberating and its soul shaking and its then quite terrifying on the other side of seeing what you can never unsee. This doorway that’s opened leads then to a place of self reflection that travels through every crack and crevice of one’s past, present and future to ask the same question of each discovery. “Why?”
So I go back to my original question. Why did I pick up a Bible and want to learn about the book the people call “God’s word?”
It began by a type of force. A woman visited my doorstep day after day claiming that she was sent to me by God and she wasn’t leaving until I allowed her to complete her assignment. She said God told her to teach me scriptures and pray with her. I was in need at the time and desperate for answers. My son was recently diagnosed with a condition without a cure and I couldn’t find the doctors or science experts that had the answer to this problem. Perhaps that’s why I finally opened the door and agreed to her preposterous claim.
I read the scriptures and I prayed with her nightly and nothing happened. The magical pixie dust didn’t fall from the sky and change my circumstances. There was no evidence of her claims that “there is power in the word of God.” Then one night I confronted her about a troubling thought that I had inside. “Why would God tell you to come here and teach me something? Can’t God just tell me himself if he wants me to know something?” I told her I wasn’t buying the whole hierarchy thing she was selling me about God’s kindgom and the fact that she called herself a prophet and an apostle disturbed me to the core. She answered, “You should ask God for a dream.” So I did. I prayed that night and said, “God if you want to show me something I ask you to give me a dream tonight.” To my surprise, I had a very vivid and remarkable 3 part dream. I was bewildered. And to this day about this thing I still am.
Fast forward a few days or weeks, (I’m not sure of the exact timing), I felt another troubling rumble in my deepest crevices of inner secrets raging to the surface. This time I was forced to face issues in a relationship I’d been in for most of my life. I didn’t know why I felt the way I felt exactly or what was prompting the overload of rivers of tears that suddenly and without my permission broke past the dam of self-control I’d spent decades building. But it did. It broke loose. The pent of lies of a thing busted out of hiding and demanded that I look at it. I didn’t know why or what to do with this new information. So I looked up scripture and read words from another who told me that my situation was not Godly. I was horrified. So I prayed. In a puddle of my own tears through the night until the sun came up in the morning I prayed.
It’s scary to think that such a seed could mark the beginning of a type of prison that would eventually rule my every thought about myself, others and the world around me. You see that book of knowledge called the Bible that was introduced to me by this doorstep woman became the letter that I consulted above and beyond consulting with myself. I found a way to bypass my own feelings and emotions to instead step in line with a rulebook that could grant me the way without needing to experience the way for myself. I thought I could bypass making mistakes, falling into traps of hurtful relationships, escape pitfalls and walk instead along the path of what is called “righteousness”.
With the rulebook in my hand I became the judge of everything. I was walking-talking encyclopedia of all things and had the scripture memorized in my little brain that immediately threw every word, every experience and every action perceived in my view as “good” or “bad” and “right” or “wrong”.
Yes I had learned the book of knowlege of good and evil. Yes I became the judge. I became like the gods.
After the characters in the story of the Garden of Eden ate from the tree of knowledge and good and evil, the story says their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked and therefore they hid from God because they were scared. The thing about knowing good and evil, (having your eyes opened to see as a god) is that you now have a template embedded in the brain that judges outwardly first at what you perceive and then processes back to the source of the thought and judges inwardly. This is the realm where hypocrisy is digested back to the eye of the beholder. It’s quite terrifying because the process is a never ending loop. We look out at others and see the evil. Then the information that seems powerful in the mind returns to us and requires that we eat what the same fruit we feed to the world. That marvelous thought goes down into our heart then is filtered down into our bellies and there becomes quite bitter and troublesome.
When Adam was confronted by God he immediately turned to the woman with his new set of “god-powered” eyes and said to God, “This is all her fault. This woman that you gave to me did this. She is a a bad, disobedient sinner.” Of course that word “sin” wasn’t yet introduced in the testaments but much later humans became colorful with their terms that issued swords of blame. Who was Adam actually blaming? Where did that woman come from? She was cut from his very cloth of creation. She was bone of his bone figurately and literally. So when Adam looked outside with his eyes and took this knowledge that he’d been given when he ingested the fruit of good and evil he saw her standing there and called her “bad”. For but a moment, his words of supreme judgement felt liberating. He could take all the fear and darkness off of his own shoulders and project it at the woman. It’s not his fault. He’s free. He’s clean. He’s faultless and he is once again good before God. Fast forward to the time a thought travels from the mind down to the heart for processing and inward to the belly where it must then be digested and the true nature of “good and evil” is realized. But at that point it’s too late to take back the word. He’s already pierced her heart. He’s already caused the separation. He’s already imputed the curse into the land that was once perfect and lovely.
What’s in one is in the whole. And it’s always been that way and there’s nothing anyone can say or do or learn or achieve that can change this root truth of the existence of the human species. We are a mutation of the same spark and all carrying the same cellular structure of a body that we can’t remove ourselves from no matter how hard we try to break free from the one. When we curse another we are cursing the very fibers of our own being. When we blame another we are asking God to pay fury to the very particle of life that causes our own heart to beat. When we see good and evil and make ourselves a judge we teach ourselves to hate everything that was gifted to us from the beginning to the end.
Love is the only cure. Love is the only thing we should ever wish to learn and in the shaking of my own being that seeks to unravel each moment of epiphany that comes my way on a daily basis I see the mirror that’s presented to me in all things, all people, all emotions that are felt by others and expressed back to me over and over again as I realize that I can’t run from any of it.
Last night as I prayed with a woman over her son named Liam I didn’t feel convicted in my heart of why I was doing this thing. I was curious as to why she was placed in my path but unsure of the actions I took. I wondered if I really cared about her situation or if I was just going through the motions because I have learned that we should give compassion and prayer to those who are hurting.
This morning when I woke up I realized that his name is the middle name of my love. And I don’t know the ways of God to connect two men born in October from different parts of the country together (both from England ironically), but the information was trying to tell me something.
What I hear in the spirit right now is that I should love him anyway. I should love him when he’s silent. I should love him when he’s not making sense. I should love him when he hurts and says things that cause me to want to run far away from him. I should stop thinking about what it all means and trying to find the “evil” plots behind his actions and instead just pray for him. Pray for what I don’t see and don’t know.
Looking back, everytime I thought he was doing something sketchy or having a love affair with another woman I later learned that he was instead facing a very trying time. In January of 2025 when he disappeared for 3 months I was so hurt and confused. He just blocked me out of nowhere. He stopped talking to me and put my phone number on his no call list so that I couldn’t text or call to even ask what I had done to cause him to exile me from his life. I learned months later that his mother had passed into Heaven. It had nothing to do with me. Now I don’t excuse the fact that his actions were wrong and hurtful towards me. He shouldn’t have projected his pain on me in that way and thrown me into a silent treatment because he was hurting. I didn’t do anything wrong to deserve that. However, like Adam, he seems to have a tendency to blame the woman in big ways or small ways when the weight of his own emotions are causing him pain. Had I known what he was gong through I’d not have been angry and upset with him. I’d not have been thinking all kinds of crazy things from sun up to sun down for months unending. I’d have instead been praying for him without ceasing. I’d have been begging the Father to send him help, healing and comfort. I’d have been sending his way only love and well wishes.
But why have I become the judge of when and under what circumstances a person is worthy of love and well wishes? Do I get to look at one’s behavior and pick and choose who should receive comfort, healing and wellness? What if God treated me this way? What if God only decided to help me when I was acting the way he wanted me to act. Well, I’d imagine that would probably mean that God would never pay me any mind. I would be constantly hurting and no amount of prayers would ever open the windows of Heaven for God’s love to come in and heal me.
So when he runs and hides because he feels naked. When he covers himself because he’s afraid of love – that piercing love that sees us and all of our good and evil and loves us anyway, I hope to remember that he is part of me still. To send love and healing and prayers over him is to send love and healing and prayers over myself.
Something very beautiful just happened inside of me as I typed this last passage. I closed my eyes for a moment and took several deep breathes and I saw the double lines that I keep seeing lately. It’s a vision of two lines spaced apart that run horizontal. My inner voice focused on him and spoke within my deep breathes a whisper, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” And as I did this, I saw in my mind’s eye the lines merge into one.
For awhile now I’ve heard the Holy Spirit say to me when I’m writing, “Read between the lines.” And then last week on one occasion I felt the voice of Jesus say to me, “I am in between the lines.” It was puzzling to me what Jesus meant by this. As I looked at the notebook paper that held my many words, stained with the smearing of ink from my tears mixing with pain, I thought to myself, “But there’s nothing between the lines. There is only empty space.”
In this moment I understand if I can only grasp this understanding for a moment. There is love between the lines. The empty space that stands in between each thought from the next, each point of contact, each conversation and each period of separation – the moment of pause in the story that stands between the past, present and future and the connecting point to each line etched with ink is love. There is love in my memories, love in my moment of now and love in the hopes I hold for what happens next. When I’m disappointed its covered in love. When I’m angry it’s covered in love. When I’m hopeful, excited or even anxious in the fears of what will come of this love it’s substance is never changing in one area – the space between.
God is in this story because love is the connecting force that lives between the lines. That is why he never goes away. Whether we are talking or silent and whether we are near or far from eachother. Whatever I’m feeling about him or speaking about him – it’s all a part of the drama that causes me to run then come back and then do it all over again because I can’t break away from a story that’s unfinished in the name of love.
Today I pray that my love grows and flourishes into something more beautiful than it’s ever before been. I pray that I can see him as a part of me (really a part of me) and give him grace and space by the spirit of Love and to hug us both together in a bubble of God’s love energetically. I don’t have to miss him or feel sad when I know that he’s never gone from my heart. He lives there always and I’m grateful that I love something so much.
I regret the laws of the Bible in my mind that caused me to judge him because he sins differently than me. I don’t ever want to make him feel judged again. I love him. I believe he deserves to be loved with the type of fire and intensity that I feel for him and I trust that God will show him the power of that in his own timing. Love can heal. Love can transform. Love can create what knowledge never could and never will. God is love. I pray today that the love I’ve been surpressing catches fire and burns so bright nothing can ever again steal its glow or quench its flame.
I feel like we should have a business that sells “love oil”… lol.
