My discomfot had come from a division between two understandings of God. One was the deeply profound descriptions of God as the Ground of all Being. The other was the felt experience of a God who has been actively transforming me inwardly and in my behaviour since then whenever I have co-operated with this God.

Kelsey’s book helped me see that what has moved me and kept me going as a Christian has been this deep belief that God speaks to us, interacts with us and has a stance towards us which is frequently described as Love. God loves us and acts towards us in the wonderful metaphor Jesus gave us of a deeply loving parent.

Juan Carlos illustrated this best as when you might know a lot about a certain member of the opposite sex compared to what you know of her/him when you have fallen in love with them.

The shift that is coming over me is in this area. I no longer want to focus on the relatively easy task of describing and talking about God. Instead I want to get much better at inviting people to consider where this loving God wants to touch your life and my life personally. I want to talk about a God who transforms me and and others as well as the situations we find ourselves in.

One way God speaks to us is through our dreams. Their are dozens of passages in the bible describing God doing this. It is not God who has stopped speaking in outr dreams it is that we have forgotten how to listen.

As we tell the story of our experiences of Faith we find out what we
believe.

For instance the experience of ‘Conversion’ is our particular story of that
word. For me it was a mystical experience in the early ’70s when I committed my
life to Jesus. This life changing experience has been helped by the term ‘born
again’. I was mystically introduced to a consciousness of God’s Spiritual Realm
in a moment. One minute I was vaguely aware of ‘spiritual realities’ the next I
was experiencing them first hand as life changing reality. I have never doubted
the life changing quality of that experience.

Others I know seem to understand ‘conversion’ as a position where they used
to not believe certain spiritual precepts and conversion has allowed them to
accept those precepts as true. For them it was far more of an intellectual
experience than a mystical one.

Still others discovered that their experience of Faith provided spiritual
energy to change their view of how they would act or believe about others. It
has enabled them to see that God is at work in social justice change and they
are called to do so as well.

Still others have experiences of changes in the value of liturgical
awareness. Liturgy was meaningless to them before and now it has deep meaning as
expressions of worship.

Interestingly all these descriptions have become very real for me over the
years of an evolving and growing Faith.

The danger for me, and I imagine for others, is to avoid trying to convince
everyone they have to believe the way I do.

My experience is rich and beautiful but it places no obligation on you. It is
offered as a possibility of something deeply important. But I fully accept that
you may have other spiritual needs that can be met differently. I know, very
deeply, that there are many expression of God. Please tell me about the
important ones to you?