When I was a little girl, I remember wondering how when we died and went to heaven God could know all the events of our lives to judge us. The product of a Jewish father and Protestant mother who did not convert nor raise my brother and I in the Jewish religion, I must have been threatened with “judgment day” a lot!
My brother and I attended a nearby Methodist church, walking there every Sunday morning for Sunday school. My parents never attended with us, not even later on when I sang in Cantata’s with the choir.
During my marriage, a neighbor convinced me to attend a Baptist church with her and I became “born again”, was baptized and began teaching a young adult Sunday school class. Soon after, I participated in small group of Charismatic Catholics who met in homes for prayer sessions. This led to my receiving the gift of tongues and I began praying in tongues in private at home. One day my abusive husband walked in on me praying and began to pick a fight. I was always easily baited into participating in these arguments. This time, I participated but busied myself collecting laundry to take downstairs and when I turned to yell one more epithet at him from the doorway, I found myself outside my body and suddenly flooded with a love for him far beyond human capacity. It lasted only an instant and I was back in my body. Instead of spewing my retort, I never said a word but turned and went downstairs. He was apparently unaware of what had just happened. That feeling of love has dimmed over the years but its intensity is still remembered as belonging to something much greater than me. It certainly was not an extension of how I felt about him at that moment.
I eventually left the Baptist church as I disagreed with some of the basic precepts on which it was founded. This was followed by years of not attending church on a regular basis, in part to appease my husband. After the divorce, I would occasionally try a church but did not connect with one that felt comfortable. My search tended to turn inward for spiritual guidance. Finally, I spent several years with Kabbalah studies. Mixed with my more traditional spiritual background, it gave me a new slant on religion and increased my gradually forming spiritual. After Kabbalah came “What the Bleep Do We Know…” and books on quantum physics by Gregg Braden, Fred Alan Wolfe, Candace Pert and others. I eventually became a member of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), an organization founded by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell to explore unexplained phenomena.
I believe we carry the creator inside of us and that our souls will go on forever but that we will inhabit many bodies to gain experience and lessons. We are never alone. This, then, is the answer to the question I asked as a young girl…God knows us and what we do because he is in all of us eternally.