Fighting Faith

In 2017, I walked back into a church after I hadn't been into a church for essentially two and a half years. Um, and it was hard. I had made so much progress with my personal development, I felt as though everything had been dealt with. Except for the fact that whenever I walked past a church, I would get angry. 

And I knew that this anger was not okay to exist in my heart and either this anger was going to be something that was going to spoil me. It might spoil me, I'm human, it's just going to make me be a person that could never have the full happiness that I wanted because the emotion I was holding was anger and not love. I wasn't holding happiness, I had less capacity to hold happiness because I held anger. And my anger really existed because I had felt pain that I didn't want to feel. 

And I didn't understand why I had to go through this pain. And it's not the first time I felt this pain, I felt this pain when I lost my best friend, I felt this pain when I lost my uncle. I felt this pain when my body wouldn't work. And then again, most recently, I felt I was pining for intense trauma. And so I knew that at some point, you understand that there were reasons why things happened. 

But still, I didn't want to walk into a church. And I thought that I could deny the very part of me that I could deny the very part of me that had previously made me feel like I was comfortable. So I was a teenager and I was feeling very alone, I felt like I didn't have anyone. Because I had let myself in some regards spiral into this negative thinking state. 

I knew that I had God there to help me. And yet years later, I find myself incapable of going into a church, and not just incapable of it but thinking that if I go into a church, the only thing I really feel like doing is just screaming. Now this is quite an interesting thing to share because in the depths of my greatest despair. I was still praying. I was still praying to God because even though I couldn't understand, or I didn't necessarily really know whether it was going to work or not. If there was any level of hope, He was going to be it. So I'd ask. 

And I essentially decided that I would eventually go into this church. And when I went in, it was overwhelming. It was overwhelming because first of all, I recognized it was a massive choice for me to just take the steps to go inside. And the second thing was that I knew that as soon as I took the steps to go inside, healing was going to happen. And that meant more pain.

 And so I share this with you because there are a lot of people in the world who don't believe in God. And I can understand that when painful things happen to people. They don't want to believe in God. And I can see that that's a completely rational process that they go through. 

They don't understand why a higher being can exist, or a loving God can be there if horrible things happen in the world. But that point of view is really misguided. And that point of view comes from the perspective of feeling pain and I see pain, a different perception of them. You've given me this pain because you're the only one that I have any idea that exists out there in some regards. When I think about it, I think often about how people choose to come to a cultural norm. 

And some people choose not to come to encourage because it's going to be tough. And I think that often, it's probably a lot like when I had to walk into a church and I wasn't really not keen on doing it. I didn't really want to walk in because I knew that I might be asked things that I don't want to be asked that I would suddenly feel within me. Just because the nature of where you are and anyone who's ever been to. 

Special churches or even just not special churches, just any church will understand what I'm talking about, sometimes when your church is just overcome by emotions. And I knew myself that this was going to mean that as soon as I combine emotions. People possibly see me cry. See that I'm really upset. And really fighting with one I'm going into a place where I don't even know if I want to talk to the guy. And I understand that people when I think about confidence coaching, they think the same thing. They think how am I going to go to somebody who I don't know to talk to them about something, that they need help, that I need help with. 

And there's a high chance that as soon as I start talking I'm gonna lose my shoot. And I don't know what that is. I don't know if I can really handle that. So that's what was really important to share. I had a lot of progress in my journey as I was saying at the beginning of this podcast. I felt there was something that was left that I needed to sort out and it was my spirituality. I had to fix the one thing that I wanted to touch, and that was anger. 

I felt that I couldn't be angry with God because the thing that stuck in my head ever since I was a little girl was about righteous anger, righteous anger being the wrong thing. But I remember having a conversation about how you're allowed to be angry with your parents. And that guy became, and I think yeah that's fair enough, my parent, gold, for example. 

I feel like He wasn't there. I feel like He didn't help me, I feel like, if He knew what was happening in life, He could have actually helped me, He could have stopped things from happening. And he did. And that piece of steel. That makes me angry. 

And I don't feel like I can say that to him, because I'm a child. But I'm not a child, I'm an adult. And I'm allowed to voice my opinion to him and I'm allowed to tell him that I'm disappointed. And yeah, we might think that's righteous anger but guess what, having my conversation with him I'm having a relationship with Him. And this is a mistake that people often make. 

They're so focused on the type of communication that they inhibit communication. And that's not what God wants. That's not what people in relationships want, no, people that want positive relationships if we are focused on having decent quality relationships with other people we want them to feel better. 

We're not asking for a particular way of them communicating with us on what's going on. We just want them to communicate something so we can help them. And for me, I needed to know that it was okay to be angry with God, because I had been praying to Him and telling him to stop the pain, to stop the trauma that happened in my mind for hours and hours and hours on end. It's not current, and the trauma kept happening. 

So, I didn't feel like He was solving a problem there. To then walk into a church to His place so to speak and then say, I'm here, I don't know why I'm really bloody angry with you. I felt like I couldn't really do that, but when I did, I had the capacity to have a relationship with him. It's interesting because as a confidence motivator, I'm often talking to adults about why they're stuck at a certain point in time in their life. 

And I find that people are stuck at a certain point in their life because they're still a child and want to learn spirituality, in having faith, that yes we're children. But we are people. People take this word child to the nth degree. And, you know, yes, we have to obviously respect where we came from and all that kind of stuff and we respect our family and appreciate the sacrifices that have been made. Yes, we have to do that. 

But we're not meant to stay as a child, there are 40, 50 year old people I've spoken to in coaching, who cannot move on past that 7,8,9 year old boy or girl and events that happened with their parents, because they still feel like they owe their actual parents on Earth. The necessity to live by their parents values, attitudes and beliefs. And I think that's the problem. You know, we come to, and this is why. And I might ruffle feathers here to be honest and this is why I don't come to church too often you know you see me in fleeting moments, maybe once every few years or 10 years or, you know, because while I understand the importance of being around people who get five hours of their lives every week, I think faith is far more prevalent. 

And I think that faith and religion have fundamentally different bases. Religion teaches a child to follow in their parent's footsteps. It doesn't necessarily mean that that child will ever understand why they're doing it. And so their relationship with God is hindered because they're literally reading words they don't know why they're reading them. My experience in the way that I have gone about things in my life is not like that. 

You know I'm not perfect, I will never say that I'm perfect and have never been the kind of person to ever suggest that I'm perfect, but every experience I've had that was spiritual was outside of the church. It's helping people, it's talking to people. I've had schoolchildren talk to me about things in teaching, I've had people I've never met before in my life, across the world in different countries talk to me about God and I never thought that they would even know who Jesus is, for example, I've had people who are Muslims and want to know about God.

And I've met a lot of people who have taught, I've also conversely taught in schools where kids just become Catholics, or just become Anglicans because that's what their dads do. And I think it's important that you think carefully about why this is the case. I honestly thought because of what I had read, but not actually understood that I couldn't be angry with God. And I couldn't say to him, why is this going on, why did you leave me when I needed to do the most. 

And this is exactly how events happened in the Bible. How many times did events like this happen in the Bible, and yet people struggle with it all the time? Talking to a coach or talking to somebody else can be incredibly daunting because you know that what comes next is - I'm going to lose my shit, I'm going to be sad. I'm gonna lay down my emotions. But just do it, lose it. Let go. Let it out. 

And remember when somebody needs to do that, to shut up. And I'm not saying that to be disrespectful I'm saying that to just educate you in the fact that when you talk, you stop the other person's emotions from pouring out, and it stops the connection, so stop talking. Listen, hug someone that you're coaching, never tell a client what to do. Even when a coach gives two different ideas to a client or suggests two different things, they still ask them which one is the best way, they won't tell them what to do because every person has to decide that for themselves. 

So a coach can decide, a person can decide they're going to keep talking to this coach, that they're going to stop and that's completely up to them. But the progress will also be up to them. And that was the same for me, I could choose to go to this church and then as soon as I felt emotion walk out, or I could choose to stay. That was my choice. 

I could choose to then have a conversation with someone who taught me that I can be angry. Or I could simply leave angry and not continue having a relationship with goal. And as a result of that, I would have only been seven eighths of the way through my personal development that I need to actually become completely authentic and loving myself because spirituality is an extension of ourselves. 

And so it's important to remember that if we feel like there's one more step to go, we've haven't gone from it yet, then we probably know what it is. We probably know what that one extra step is to go for us to be fully healed. I knew for me, it was going into a church, even though it made me incredibly angry to do so. Once I did that I had an opportunity to be healed,

I had an opportunity to be here because I let my emotions out, because I learned that I could be angry. And once I got rid of the anger, then peace could come in that, happiness could come in, I actually had a capacity to see what I could learn from the situation. And fascinatingly enough I learned that our God didn't appear the way I wanted him to be. 

He had actually helped me before I'd even gone through my event and I can't explain how, but he had. It helped me by helping other people in voluntary places before I had even encountered what I was going to encounter. He prepared me. He prepared me to see what life could be like if I didn't go through every single stage of healing. And he gave me a glimpse about how stuck life could be or how free it can be. 

So I can make a decision. So while people might think, you know, you'd left me on my own, because we're all praying a loving God doesn't do that, I don't think people are perceiving things the right way. The only way I can perceive the fact that I met people that helped me gain a perspective that I needed before I even knew I needed it was that, because I had a relationship or not even because I had a relationship is because God was looking out for me. 

And I think he would do that, and I think he does do that for people who haven't even met him yet. You haven't even had a relationship with him. My part was then to recognize that, to thank him for that, and then to recognize that there is evil out there. And we will experience it, and we will be impacted by it. And it's important we don't get confused about who is responsible for different things. 

And my anger may have been misplaced. But I wasn't wrong to be angry. And so that's another lesson, you know, feeling anger isn't wrong, just learning about how to harness the anger, what to do with the anger. You know how to become a better person, by controlling that anger. So I really wanted to speak about that because I know that Easter is coming up soon and a lot of people sort of bah humbug. 

You know Christianity and to be honest if you buy humbug in religion, I get it. Because religion is very much ruled by it, so it doesn't leave much space for freedom. And by freedom I mean that it's not, I don't mean freedom in the sense of - you can do whatever you want and get away with it. I don't mean that at all. I mean, freedom in the sense that it doesn't give people that capacity to see what love is really like. 

Love has no bounds. And I firmly believe that there have been multiple times that people have experienced that in their own lives, things that they don't know why they even existed. Even when things seem to be incredibly painful, like in their immersive environments. And you know, mother dying with children, for example in the most horrific of circumstances. But the fact that she actually peacefully goes to sleep. Instead of waking up and having to go through life, you see that He is merciful. 

And there's ultimately a lot more to have. I think people know that Love knows no bounds. And so it's important to separate or to understand the difference between religion and between faith. Because faith in a god faith in Jesus or God or whatever is no different from having faith in karma, or having faith in something that's unseen. And it's really misguided for people to think otherwise. You know there's very few people that I have, in fact, I've never met a person who doesn't believe in God, but also doesn't believe in karma that also doesn't believe in horoscopes who doesn't believe in what goes around comes around, because I don't call it karma. 

Who doesn't believe in reincarnation, who doesn't believe in some kind of spiritualness. So people do know that love always wins. But we need to choose to see it and so if religion is not your thing, then fair enough, but faith and religion are very different. People take leaps of faith, every day in their lives. Religion restricts those leaps of faith. 

So it's important to decide where you're at with things. I couldn't care less whether somebody was Catholic, Anglican, Protestant or whatever if they were in my church or in my household or whatever, if we wanted to have wine and bread together they could definitely have it. Because what religious section they're from is absolutely insignificant. And I think that's an important message that needs to be remembered by people throughout the world.