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I wish I could say something clever or amazing or faith-inspiring happens to me every day, but the fact of the matter is, it doesn’t. Sometimes life is just… life. Paying bills, seeing friends or family, schlepping kids places (if we have them), worrying about our weight, eating Girl Scout cookies for breakfast with our coffee, watching a good movie or enjoying a good meal, enduring the bad ones. God (or Good) is tangled up in all of it, ever present and available, often totally and terribly forgotten. 

I could call on Good (or God) 10,000 percent more than I do. I tend to do what most of us do. I tend to pray only when I sense danger or trouble, and since I believe Good (or God) is a benevolent energy akin to the abundance that fosters all growth, life, success, or prosperity, I have the great luxury of believing that God (or Good) is not like a resentful Grandpa who is withholding if I don’t keep in touch. If I pray, I get results, I just have to remember to pray. 

There may be some cynics out there that are thinking well, that sounds a little too easy or isn’t that convenient? That is exactly the point. This entire blog is about the path of least resistance to connect people to some semblance of faith. Starting simple, starting easy, starting generously is the name of the game. Don’t ask me how it works. It just does. My only ask is: Don’t knock it ’til you try it. 

Lately I have felt inspired to just check-in and pray some gratitude back into the stratosphere. I have heard that gratitude and appreciation does wonders for the human outlook and constitution. Because of my faith, I am an increasingly positive, resilient person, so I don’t feel like I am praying about the things I am grateful for to increase my own well-being; I just genuinely feel grateful and appreciative. I like my life, I trust in Good (or God) that the future is bright, I have seen Goodly (or Godly) works in my life, and I just feel strongly inclined to give thanks.

The funny thing is, I can pray for help with a problem, receive that help almost instantaneously, and then fail to put two and two together for hours, days, or weeks. Just yesterday, I was in a spat with my significant other, and it was loading up to be a doozy, but I found a quiet place and prayed for assistance. Lo-and-behold, we found a way to mend fences quickly and relatively painlessly. I am very grateful for the assistance, but I am only just now recalling (more than 18 hours later) that I even asked for it. 

My version of Good (or God) expects no thanks for the assistance it provides. I had to take the penance, the structure, the symbolism, the anthropomorphism out of my relationship with faith. As a seeker, I have had a lot of trouble expecting God to look or act or even communicate like a human when humanity is constantly making questionable choices.

No offense to the approximately 2.38 billion Christians out there, but the Ten Commandments reads a little bit like “Thou shalt not be human” to me, and that smacks a little bit too much of a judgmental, highly verbose God who punishes others (i.e., sounds human). If readers here want to explore Christianity as a furtherance of their faith, by all means. I know that form of faith has done wonders for many and there are many wonderful Christians across the globe. This writing is only meant to open the door a crack to faith in the simplest, but also broadest sense of the term. How you proceed beyond that is up to you. 

My experiment is simpler on purpose. I am only about seeking faith in Good, which I also call God. The two are one and the same to me. They shall not be twain. If you, Dear Reader, find it important to specify it further, by all means. The only way I could connect with having faith, which is a fundamentally positive place to be in life, a fundamentally positive outlook, a fundamentally optimistic and hopeful vision of the future, I had to strip it down to just believing in Good and from there I felt allowed to believe in God.   

This is a long way of saying that life is busy, messy, hectic. God (or Good) can and does get forgotten about on occasion, but we won’t be punished for it. That being said, one important way to stay in touch with the best things in life is to show appreciation or gratitude. So, even if we don’t need help, we can even say thank you as an excuse to keep in touch. 

And now that I think about it, this probably applies to our humans, too.