So I wrote a booklet and it will be released as an eBook on Amazon for $0.99 in a few days. The following is the description as submitted to Amazon. Of course I want it to spread like wildfire, but it will not even make a spark unless the reader shares it with others. if the following entices you, please purchase from Amazon when it is released, and if you see fit, please share with your circle of friends. Thank you for your consideration 🙂

Did our Creator intend to have His creation fight and fight as to which group of His creation ‘really’ knows Him best? Or which group is His and how all other groups are doomed? Let’s focus on Christianity in this book. People fight over what this verse of the Bible means and what that verse denotes. Empires, like Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Catholic and many others, are built on a verse here and a verse there. For if indeed this verse is God’s word and God’s word must be true, then who can stop people here and people there from building their empires based on the ‘word of God’. Each one of these empires points their finger at the others to show how incorrect these other empires are. But if you ask any of them, “Isn’t God all about LOVE, isn’t God all about UNITY, isn’t God all about PEACE, isn’t God all about JOY?” Every one of them will say, “But of course He is.” Then how come the ONE Bible has created such divisions? The answer offered in this book is that God never intended for man to create such divisions, but man over years of coercion managed to make it so in spite of God’s direction.

This book is an exploration on how humanity managed over time to convince you and me that what we have been taught is indeed God’s word, when it really is not. An exploration of what God’s nature is and how by understanding God’s nature each one of us can lead a life that is indeed full of PEACE and full of JOY, for if a person understands and communes with our Creator how can one not be filled with peace and joy.

The powers to be, over time, created a circle and within this circle we have a game called ‘use this verse’. We are all in this circle playing this game, and the rule of the game is to use verses from the Bible to justify this group’s correctness and prove the other group’s incorrectness. You and I know that the Bible can be used, oh how powerfully it can be used. This game is consuming as we are in a constant frenzy to find verses to ‘prove’ this or that. That’s the intent of the game, to keep us occupied and not question or look outside the circle. It is time to step outside of this circle and look at the totality of the roughly 31,102 verses of the Bible and see what it reveals about God’s Nature and how it applies to us. You are probably very skeptical at this point. Give it a read and decide for yourself.

Hello people that are stopping by here 🙂    I love you all but more important than that, God LOVES you in ways unimaginable, but you already know that 🙂  So what’s new? The writing is an effort to understand the Nature of God, and therefore makes the person want to leap into His arms even more, and there are thoughts and suggestions shared to achieve just that. If you would like to download, please await a message sending you an Amazon link to purchase for $0.99   I hope that you share this with others, as this is the only way for this word to spread. Thank you.

Sorry for the hiatus but I was a bit down because there are Stats as to how many people read your blog, and mine were at a record low. No need to embarrass myself with how low 🙂 Then, I thought to myself, “This is not about me, rather about documenting this discovery lest someday someone may benefit from it”. So here I am blogging again.  Note this is a continuation of the self-discovery on how to come to know God and NOT know ABOUT God. As an addict to hypocrisy, after confession comes the admission of the exact nature of my wrongs. Before I can admit them, I had to discover what these wrongs are;

We believe by Faith
Faith is a HEART matter not an intellect matter
My words express & reflect my intellect
My actions express & reflect my Faith
But in reality, it is my words that confess my faith
And it is my actions that contradict my words
But if my actions do not reflect my Faith THEN IS IT POSSIBLE
THAT MY FAITH IS IN MY MIND AND NOT IN MY HEART HENCE THE HYPOCRISY!!!??
And if my Faith is in my mind and not in my heart, then do I truly believe!?!?!?

This logic is a bit scary, isn’t it?

Brought up in church, in the Bible often and capable of stating what the Bible means here and means there, yet it is all by intellect and not by the ‘heart’ …….. a bit devastating, if I may say.

I have confessed and stated the exact nature of my wrongs, then what, give it all up? On the contrary, I needed to right my wrongs. First I needed to identify the problem;

We say it is up to God to change someone’s heart
People of God must plant the seed, in essence deliver the message
But it is pretty obvious people are not coming to God rather moving away
We blame this on the lack of witnessing, but there’s plenty witnessing going on
If not witnessing then the problem is with the message that we are delivering

The world says we are hypocrites, therefore the world will not listen to a message that the messenger does not honor, for no one wants to follow a messenger that says “Do as I say not as I Do.”

I am not harping on this issue, just simply hoping that you would admit with me that you are a hypocrite, for the first step is admission. If that does not happen, nothing changes.

May the Glory be to our Lord and Creator always and may we grow into communing with our Lord, to bonding with our Creator, to having Community with our Savior and to KNOWING God.

Through the sky illustration in the last installment, hope that it clearly shows how I (we) can believe that something does exist when at the same time I know (proven) that it does not exist. That is the power of believing; immensely more powerful than knowing. In the same manner, I believe that I am not a hypocrite while at the same time I know that I am a hypocrite. I can tell you about myself, you have to take care of you. Being a hypocrite is an addiction; extremely difficult to overcome but we all know that with determination I can quick it. But much harder than determination is admission, right?

What am I to admit? As I said, I am not a hypocrite. This goes on and on, and I will spare you the repetition, so here’s the synopsis of the broad strokes, and by the way, none of it is new. If you, the reader, so happens to see it applicable to you, then I encourage you to admit it. The fear is if I admit it, then what??             Then there will be a clear path to communing with our Lord, to bonding with our Creator, to having Community with our Savior and to KNOWING God.

• There are millions of believers, and the world around us points to us and labels us all, regardless of faith, as hypocrites. This has been going on for ages upon ages. I, a believer, say things like; they just don’t know me, if only they come and know Him, they’re the ones that will end up losing, I know where I am going, etc.
  –> Honestly, how can the world have it so wrong for so long…….? These are excuses that I tell myself so I, as an addict, can carry on my life believing that I am OK, whence I am not……..
• This one hurts, but it is the truth. Here’s a comparison of 2 situations; how I am and how I feel when I attend church gatherings of dinner or church celebrations or even Sunday services, versus how I am and how I feel when I hang out with friends in non-church associated events. Mind you these friends could be the same people that I go to church with. As for me, I feel that I am always ‘RESERVED’, for the lack of a better word, at the church associated events, I am not fully and truly myself.
  –> Maybe it is just me, but that right there is an extreme form of hypocrisy. That when I am with the people that I claim as my people as we share the same BELIEFS and cannot be myself…….!?
• For those that used to have a beer or a glass of wine in hiding while the church forbade it, or maybe still forbids it; here I am a grown man and basically hiding my glass of wine if I’d dare have it in public. Or for many it is “We’ll only drink at home and not in public.” Am I the only one that ever did/does this!? The fun part is the excuses used to justify this behavior to myself, let alone to others.
  –> If this is not hypocrisy, then what is?
• Just to show the extent of hypocrisy; how many churches in the recent years change their rules in writing to allow drinking……….!? This is the same subject that for God only knows how long the same preachers, let alone churches, have had Bible verses lined up to prove that drinking is Biblically not allowed.
  –> Is that not hypocritical…!? Now, now, I need to behave for I should stick to what I do that is hypocritical and not what the church does that is hypocritical as that is an entirely different matter.
• On Sundays between Bible study and service, I/we pray in 2 hours like 10 times at least, and how many times do I drop my head and pray during the other 166 hours of the week…!? How I talk that God is everything and how I fully and totally depend on Him in my life during these same 2 hours compared to how often I actually experience His presence during the week in between Sundays….!? And this happens week in and week out for how many years now…..!?
  –> If this does not by itself prove to me that I am an addict to hypocrisy, then what will???

Oh there are so many more examples, but no wonder the world around me considers me a hypocrite and shake their heads at me when I invite them to come and become a hypocrite with me……………….. no one likes an addict except other addicts.                          I confess that I am an addict and offer my apologies to all those that I have offended.

Till another installment, and may the Glory be to God always and forever.

So now that I know that my ‘Love God’ category is missing from my life, and also that I need to know Him and not about Him, there comes the big question; how do I accomplish that? It was clear in my mind that the answer is; I need to commune with God. But again, how do I bond with, communicate intimately with and have community with God? Here’s the dilemma; every one of us probably has experienced moments of extreme closeness to God, but they are usually moments relative to a lifetime. These occur during a revival, a camp experience, a retreat, an extreme sickness situation or other similar circumstances, again, moments relative to a lifetime. Somehow I/we have convinced ourselves that moments is all we can accomplish and we are not only satisfied with that, we believe it to be true and therefore accept it as truth in our life.

Allow me to digress for a moment; what do we believe of the ‘SKY’? Yes, the sky above us. If I ask what is the color of the sky? Blue. If I ask is the sky a real thing? Probably ‘yes of course’ is the answer. Where do we all point to or raise our hands up to and look up to when we pray? Up to the sky. Why do we do that? Simply because since we were children if we were asked where does God live? People point up to the sky. Where is heaven? People point up to the sky. Does the sky really exist? Is the sky an object or a place? Actually the sky is nothing but the expanse, the space, the void around the planet Earth. The color Blue is simply how the light scatters and thus the human eye sees blue, just as our human eye sees the colors of the rainbow, a simple scatter of light through water droplets. Blue of the sky as well as the colors of the rainbow are not real, rather a distortion of light through certain media.

So from simple common answers to children here we are as adults, educated and fully aware that the sky does not really exist, we accept the truth in our life that God is up there in space somewhere, for that is where I, not sure about you, look up and seek in my deepest hour. I seek a clear view of the sky for it feels like I can reach God better that way……..

You may be getting bored with me, but please hang in there. Remember, I am seeking for you the reader to find enough reason to try new things. Since whatever I tell you about who God is, is simply just that ‘telling you ABOUT God’, my hope that your intrigue will bring you to try some new things to experience ‘Who God is’.  Just like the sky, we have to examine how we think about things and what do we truly believe and how we reflect such beliefs in our practices.

See you at the next installment and may the glory always be to God 🙂    (Please share if you choose to)

Hoping to have illustrated the To Know vs. the To Know About in the previous installment, to continue in this endeavor is to try and scratch the surface about ‘love’, for when we commune with someone not only we get to know them but additionally it allows us to get to stay in love with them. We all know that long distance relationships; going away to serve in the armed forces or living apart dictated by employment, are the hardest relationships. Why? Because it is extremely difficult to have community with, bond with or to intimately communicate while apart…..  Our relationship with God, although He is always present, is kind of like a long distance relationship.

Love God & Love your neighbor do not only sum up the Bible and how we should live, they are actually the road map to a life of Joy, Peace and Contentment. Who does not want that, right?

In my opinion, we generally believe that we do the ‘Love God’ part well, so we focus on the Love your neighbor part. If you know me personally, or just know about me, you know that I personally work hard on the love your neighbor part, or so I think at least. So I looked at myself and asked; if I think I got the Love God part, like I’ve got it man, and the Love your neighbor part; how much more can I love my neighbor……………  then why am I still searching?

I am a logical person some of the time, OK, OK most of the time, to a fault sometimes 🙂 so here’s my logic; Love your neighbor is palpable and measurable. If I am honest with myself, the ‘Love God’ part is not measurable by itself. LOVE is expressing and not a feeling, love is how one interacts with, love is action.  In actuality when asked; “how do you express that you Love God”, my common responses are;

• Loving my neighbor is an illustration of my love to God
• I pray, read the Bible and involved in church

It is amazing how I can be convinced of something for oh so many years and hold these beliefs like a rock in my hand and use the rock as a cornerstone. Then suddenly the rock just dissipates in between my fingers like sand. Here’s why this happened, at least in my logic;

• Loving my neighbor has its own category and is an expression of loving my neighbor, so I cannot use it as a measure for my love to God category
• Not necessarily prayer, but the way I pray is primarily to ask for things from God
• Reading the Bible is a treasure indeed and essential but again it is more about my continued discovery of God
• Church involvement is like loving my neighbor, it is doing for others

These simple truths made it abundantly clear, to me, that half of the equation for a life of Joy, Peace and Contentment, the ‘love God’ part, is missing, not weak, it is just missing……  I will continue to share thru this self-discovery, and may the glory be to God always       (Please share if you choose to)

In the following installments -thanks for this word 🙂 – this following sentence will be used to link them together; to commune is to bond with, to communicate intimately with and to have community with. Since the goal is to get to know God and not get to know about God, I feel I have to kind of explain what I mean, so here’s a short story.

Stephanie is away at college and she falls in love with Rob. Now, Stephanie’s parents have not met Rob, and Stephanie keeps telling them how wonderful and great Rob is. Her parents are of course skeptical and Stephanie senses that, but she loves her parents and wants them to get excited about Rob and fall in love with him as well, so what’s Stephanie to do what to do…. Oh, I’ll share with them about Rob and that way they’ll get to know him and fall in love with him.

So Stephanie embarks on her endeavor and consistently shares with her parents about Rob, and when she’s back at home, Rob is all she talks about. She’s full of smiles, all her gestures  and the way her eyes twinkle as she speaks, tell her parents how much in love Stephanie is with Rob. This goes on for a while and on one of the visits back home, Stephanie seems distraught and she does not say one word about Rob. Over dinner one evening, her mom asks if everything is OK with Rob. Stephanie answers; “we’re doing great but it is you guys that I am frustrated with. I share with you so much about Rob and in spite of all I tell you, all I get from you both are gestures and insinuations of skepticism. Why can’t you love him the way I do?”  Oh honey, her mom says, we see how much you love him, and we’re getting to know ABOUT him thru your stories, but I am sure when we meet him and commune with him, then we’ll get to KNOW him and we will fall in love with him as much as you do.

So it is with God, we know so much ABOUT Him and these installments is a mere attempt to transform the knowing about Him to commune with Him and KNOW Him. So, bear with me as I muddle through this process for the distinction between ‘know about someone’ and ‘to know someone’ is delicate, and may the glory be to God always 🙂       (Please remember to share if you choose to)

For the past 2 years, I have struggled with some thoughts, feelings and ideas. I spent some time questioning things and trying to make sense of my beliefs and practices. I researched the Bible to the best of my abilities and I have written a small book – I call them booklets 🙂 – detailing what I have come to practice in my daily life and why. The booklet is  not ready for release yet; needs a bit of work still. It will be shared and accessible to anyone free of charge. I talk like this as if the world will flock to read it 🙂

We all know that God lives inside each one of us, so if I asked you, if you were a car, what part of the car is God? I would say God is the engine of the car. I and everyone else know that the engine is what powers the car. If the ignition fails on the first try, I and everyone else say; “please, please I need you to start now.” I and everyone else know that if the engine is not running the car will not go nowhere. We all know these facts ABOUT the car. This is where I was 2 years ago, then asked myself; “other than knowing facts like the back of my hand ABOUT God, I want to KNOW Him more than ABOUT Him. In my opinion, so many know ABOUT God and know it so well, but we lack in the ‘KNOW Him’ department. What we know about Him is that He hears our prayers. You see this at church and bible studies all the time; Any prayer requests? There are a plethora of them. Any praises? awkward silence or maybe one. So our form of communication with God, prayer, is primarily to ask for things. Is that really communing with God? How do I get to know Him? Well, how do you get to KNOW anyone? You spend time with them, and when you commune with them then you really get to know them. Well, I do regularly read the Bible, one may say. Although reading the Bible is one practice, there are additional ones to practice. I will blog on this specific subject next time. Remember, to commune is to bond with, to communicate intimately with, to have community with, with whom? With God. So you see, this is all about God, and together with Him we can make a difference in this world. Let us be people that others come to ask; why are you the way you are?

I am coming out to admit that the sole purpose of me blogging and joining facebook is to try and reach as many people as possible to share these thoughts and practices with. I am asking you, the reader, to help me reach others by sharing these blogs with others, please and thank you. If I can, I will blog more than once a week. Think of what’s to come as a diary of sorts that builds over time….. scary thought isn’t it 🙂

I, like many others, wonder where God is when I am in so much pain. Sometimes I think, if God is with me then the pain should subside, so where is HE?  This week I believe I stumbled upon the answer.

I have the opportunity to share a bit of time with a beautiful 1 year old girl that is teething. This teething seems to be very painful. She’ll reach for me to pick her up as she is crying. A few moments later she is pushing me away, as she continues to cry, to set her free. As soon as her feet touch the ground, she’s reaching up for me to pick her up again, and this process repeats. I believe that she thinks that I somehow should take away her pain. She is quickly frustrated with me when the pain remains. The pain is so bad though, she reaches for me again in the hopes maybe, just maybe I can take it away.

I, we, seem to accept physical pain as part of life, but emotional pain (which could stem from physical circumstances) is viewed as something that I should be exempt of. That’s typically when I, we, question the presence of God, for just like the little girl, I, we, think if He is here then that pain should subside.

We all know that pain, big or small, physical or emotional, is just part of life. We are not exempt of it. Our Creator is with us through it, and the level of pain will not change because of His presence but the length of pain will indeed be shortened when we embrace the pain and lean on Him through it.

So I, we, should work hard on never asking the ‘why me’ question and the ‘where are You’ question. Let us accept and embrace the pain and let us not get frustrated with our Lord and Creator rather continually lean on Him and talk with Him through it 🙂

I write these blogs in the hopes to elicit thought and to challenge existing beliefs. Not sure that my answers are correct for they are just theories, but so are many beliefs out there, they are simply just theories. By definition; Theory is an idea that is suggested or presented as possibly true but that is not known or proven to be indeed true.

Let me explain; just as the theory of evolution is taught as fact, although it is just a theory, so are many religious beliefs are taught as fact although they are just theories. Two people will have two opposing religious beliefs and a heated discussion while each believing that she/he are  100% correct, and pull this to prove it and that to justify it. At the end of the day if it was provable, then there won’t be a CONFLICT. The fact that there is CONFLICT is the simple proof that both are simply theories. We, humans, are magnificent at taking a hint about this or that, and create a provable, at least in one’s mind, a provable case. Then tons of people follow this theory and that theory as if it is a ‘true’ belief system.

For example; some people believe that hell was not populated until after Christ, or that all that died before the resurrection were not judged until after Christ. Such subjects and many more, have no clear determination in the Bible, NONE. A verse or a partial verse is picked from here or there and books are written and debates start and never end on subjects such as these.

I implore you my fellow Christians, and hope you start practicing this; let us bring these subjects up between ourselves and our leaders. Let’s discuss. If indeed as I stated here there are no CONCRETE and CLEAR evidence in the Bible, then let us proclaim that our belief in this particular ‘truth’ is unfounded and most importantly not teach our children “theories of religion” rather only the facts about God. Can we do that? If the answer is yes, I am willing and proposing that you, the reader, start sending me titles of subjects as the ones listed up here so we can have a sort of reference list of such subjects. Thank you and may you sense God’s Presence always.