God is just a word

God saved me many times.
God also let me drown many times.
I was "all in" for most of my life. If something great happened it was all God. If something bad happened it was all me. But after a while I started to think about it. How come?
As a rational adult I had to look at God and decide...am I in or am I out?

I am all about holding beings accountable, especially myself, and if God's love for me got me through alcoholic parents and cancer then one has to ask if God's hatred for me was responsible for alcoholic patents and cancer. I mean,  that IS how things work. You don't get to just take credit for all the good and blame the bad on someone else...or do you?

Definition of God?  God is good.
And the Devil, what about him? Devil is bad.

I have to say I never believed in the Devil or Hell thanks to my mom. She told me God would never let that happen and she didn't care what it said in the Bible! She always said, "There is good in this world, Tina. But you have to look for it."

This coming from a women raised in the depression, by an alcoholic dad and a sickly mother whom my mom had to take care of until she died when my mom was in her 20s. She came home from her high school graduation, that no one attended by the way, to an ambulance in their driveway. She dropped her diploma and jumped in. She told me that was one of the best days of her life. Go figure.

But the no devil or hell comment always stuck, a seed of doubt. That seed is what has led me to my faith and the definition of that faith today. And it only took 50 years.

That definition is I have faith in myself.
God is just a word.
A word with a definition, like all words.

I let many things define me in my life.  I defined myself as a Christian who was saved from  being a victim and from all of the definitions society had placed on me. Then I met my soulmate and became a wife and soon after a mother and acted according to those definitions. Besides knowing I was a writer my whole life but not acting on it because that was not included in the other definitions of who I was supposed to be by definition, I was constantly defining myself by an action. I became a wife so I was a wife. I became a mother so I was a mother. I became a Christian so I was a Christian. I became a victim so I was a victim.

I became a cancer survivor so I was a cancer survivor...no. I became a cancer survivor because a brilliant doctor saved my sorry ass. Dr. Frank Snyder saved me so was I now Dr. Frank Snyder?

I began to research, rethink, reevaluate, restructure, reDEFINE.

When you get to a place in your life when a moment in time no longer defines you, you can move on.

So, I don't believe in God, the white bearded man, anymore. I believe in myself and my ability to make good decisions, to be kind, to love everyone, to listen for the whispers in the universe that try to guide me through this life. I believe I will make mistakes and should hold myself accountable and make amends for them when I need to. I believe that not everyone is in the same place as I am and I need to honor that. I need to not be prejudice about Christianity by lumping all Christians into the same definition because definitions should be fluid and all human beings should be accepting of one another in their journey here.

God is just a word and like mom or grandma or Christian it should not define a person or entity.

God has lasted so long in our culture, whether it be the Christian deity or mother earth or "The Force" , because as fluid as the definition is NOT to some people, it is something we all need in our life. A thing to hold onto that rests in our souls. God is just a word so don't be afraid to use that word to define the part of you that holds you together in times of sorrow, or gives you strength in challenging times or just gives you peace on a warm summer night as you look at the sky. The definition is yours, it is fluid, it will change over time as you grow. The word God for you will ebb and flow like the sea but if you are mindful the word God and your definition of that word should bring you peace.