Puffy cloud beards and other stuff

My friends and I were having some beers the other day, and started talking about God.

What would God look like if you were to put aside religions, differences, races, gender, and just described what the "feeling" looked like. What YOUR feeling looked like.

The feeling when it is just YOU and YOUR GOD. It is definitely personal for each individual I think. No One can ever tell you who He looks like because they aren't supposed to. You have to feel it and know it for yourself.

Does he look like your Grandfather? Your Grandmother? Jesus? Santa Claus? Nature? Denzel Washington? A purple elephant?
I have no clue! I only know what mine looks like.

Big and strong, wide faced, piercing eyes of a color nonexistent to this world, and a CLOUD as a beard.
He covers the whole sky. Like I always call Him, "the big man in the sky".

To me, God is pure love, but he still looks down on me when I screw up, shaking his head, saying, "YOUUUU KNOOOOW BETTER LEEEESLIEEEE".
It's like a Father's love for a child. But with the capacity to not feel anger or to reach down and pop me across the head when I say a bad word or put my elbows on the table.

He doesn't have the feelings we have, He has something greater, that we could never comprehend. Never measure.
Never describe.

As humans, we want to be able to measure it, to know for sure. We want to prove it to be true through something concrete, because sometimes feelings just aren't enough, especially if you have never felt Him/Her/It.

But that is where faith comes in. Faith grows from those one on one moments with your God, whomever it may be. I can guarantee everyone has felt it, they just didn't know what it was, or what to do with it.
Maybe religion gets in the way, and then it just becomes scary, because you feel there are some sort of rules to follow if you were to have REALLY felt God.
Nope.
You really felt Him.


I also had a conversation last week with another friend about our "God moments". Although there was no beer involved in this one.

Those simple moments in your life where a light bulb goes off and you feel something greater.
Or even the supernatural moments that you know no one would ever believe unless they felt it for themselves.

Those are "God moments".

Alot of mine have come out of trials in my life where I felt God's presence because I asked for it.
Where I felt so lost or angry that I could no longer turn to things of this world to make me happy.
I would find a quiet moment and say, "WHERE ARE YOU!" 
Sometimes it took minutes, sometimes days.

But the feeling still came, because I listened for it. I waited for it. I NEEDED it, to move forward.
He wants you to need Him.

When I was young, my sister got into a horrible wreck. She died twice.

Her small truck was totalled from going underneath the back of an 18 wheeler parked on the side of the interstate. When they found her, her head was resting on the back bumper of the truck she crashed into.
But it wasn't her time yet.
The paramedics brought her back to life.
Her face was able to be rebuilt using a senior portrait. And now she is as beautiful as ever.

But it was a very hard time for my family. My Mom was dealing with it the best she could with my Dad being gone on jobs for months at a time.  I had to go stay with my Aunt so Mom could be up at the hospital everyday.

Two weeks later, I was able to come home from my Aunts house to see my sister in the hospital.

I had not known much, being only 11 at the time, so I was scared to walk into her room. Scared of what I might see.
My body was shaking.

As I walked in alone, I saw her in the bed.
Mouth wired shut. Tubes and wires all around. It wasn't my Sissy.

What do I say?

 It only took me looking into her eyes to see HER, as one tear fell down her face.

In that moment I felt God for the first time. I had my first "God Moment".
Now it was in His younger years, so he had more of a "cloud goatee", but it was definitely God.

Like something just shined over me and made me warm, made me safe, made me calm.
I felt LOVE.  Yes, love from my sister, but also love from somewhere different to me. And I knew that everything was going to be OK.


When I was 20 years old, I was sitting in my room, in the Army barracks.
It was a Friday night and I knew in my heart that my husband at the time was not where he said he was. I had known something was going on for awhile but the proof wasn't there. And it was literally driving me insane.  This particular night I seemed to have reached the end of my rope.

I sat there... lost, hurt, confused. ALONE.

Hours and hours went by.
Horrible thoughts were running through my head.

I wanted to hop in my car and go find him, but I couldn't, because I was pulling a MEDEVAC refueling duty and they were flying a mission.

So I sat. And sat. For hours.

"Where are you God!"
"Why is this happening Damnit!"

I calmed myself, waiting for an answer. Waiting for Him to slap me upside the head.

Then once again, I felt the warmth. The security. The SAME feeling.

I felt like I was in that machine on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory where they are floating, but if I opened my eyes, I would fall? Ok, that was a little strange. But really, that's what came to mind.
Aaaaand, NOW I have the oompa loompa song in my head. Crap!

Anyway, those are only 2 of many, many, many times in my life that I felt that greater feeling.

Like a butterfly in the right place, at the right time. Refer to this blog entry... http://gatesfamily.blogspot.com/2012/03/life-she-lived.html

I have a lot of God Moments in Nature.

In homeless people.

Those moments of innocence in my children's faces, when they aren't getting on my nerves.

And the innocence of their words, that show God's pure love. When they aren't getting on my nerves.

A bible verse that knows EXACTLY what I need to hear, when I just open to a random page.

A book.

A TV show.

A conversation with a stranger at the grocery store.

A conversation with a friend.

You will find your God moments everywhere.

Look for them. Listen for them. Own them.

Because they are YOURS.
Cloud Beard and all.

Puppy for President!

                                                                                                                                                                

 

 

 

 

My name is Leslie. And I sleep with a stuffed animal.

THERE! I said it!

Ahh, SOOO freeing.

Nah, I really don't care. It's all good.

So I've had my "Puppy" since I was 3 years old. He was a replacement for the one that I left on the back of my Mom's car before she drove off to run her errands for the day. That was a devastating day in the life of little Leslie. I still remember it clearly. Basically, I left it on the back of my mom's car, and, uh, she drove off. Yeah. Pretty deep story.

But alas, I had my replacement puppy, and all was good.

He is my velveteen rabbit. And yes, he has come ALIVE.

For the last 31 years he has gone everywhere with me. Sleepovers, vacations, my many moves, hurricane evacuations. I even hid him during boot camp.

I CANNOT live without my Puppy. I would NOT know how.

If you look at him, you can see my dependence on him written all over his poor little body.
First off, it looks like he has the mange.

Then his pitiful eyes. A dog chewed one eye off when I was little, then another dog got his other one later in life. I cut some new eyes out of felt, then used a glue gun to glue on some of those googly ones.  It freaked me out because he kept staring at me.
So I ripped them off and now he is left with shiny glue dots.
This makes him looked possessed.

His left arm is much skinnier than his right because I like to smell it. Which means my brain is full of stuffing now.

His nose is crooked because I have sewn it back on so many times.

If you hold him up the light you can see straight through his abdomen to the other side of the room. That stuffing is probably also in my brain.


So why the dependence on him? No clue. But any theories are appreciated.
And "I have issues" is too vague. Because we already know this.

So where am I going with this?
I don't know yet.
Be patient.

The other day, I LOST PUPPY! And I thought I was going to have a mental break-down!

Brian was asleep and I frantically woke him up shaking him. "Wake up! I can't find Puppy!"
He looked over at me with his CPAP attached to his face, and said something in his Darth Vader voice. I just about ripped the mask off of his face in fear that I had lost puppy FOREVER!
"Help me look for him! Oh my God, I think I left him at the hotel!"

Brian slowly, I repeat, SLOWLY, gets up, pulling back the sheets, making an effort to care.
This is a routine when I can't find him at night, because I can't sleep well without my puppy.
But what Brian didn't understand was that I had REALLY lost him this time!

I was pulling my suitcase apart, pulling the room apart, like I was fiending.
I was shaking... heart pounding. I felt like I had left my own child at the hotel room.
I had abandoned my puppy.
I started to cry.

Brian fell back asleep at this point.

But I realized, I am ADDICTED to my stuffed animal.
It is a healthy addiction compared to other choices I have made, but no doubt, I don't feel like I could live without the dumb dog.


Ah, I knew this would go somewhere...

ADDICTION.

Yes, now I'm gonna get deeper. Because I know people who suffer from this horrible disease. Plus I watch intervention like it is attached to my face.

Whether it be drugs, alcohol, food, exercise, gambling, pornography, sex, acceptance from others...
It what some people feel they NEED to survive from day to day.
It helps them to cope with the situations in there lives without actually digging deeper to find the source of the pain, and then eliminating it.

Finding that pain is not an easy thing to do though. It requires re-living what hurt you in the first place.
Although for some people, I think it is just a chemical imbalance, and self medicating is the only thing that helps them "feel normal".

Life is full of bullshit. But the truth is, the way we react to the bullshit, lies within ourselves.

We can't spend life blaming others for why we are the way we are. Even if we do sniff stuffing.

We have a choice to whether or not we take unhealthy situations in our lives and let them make us more unhealthy, OR if we use them to grow from.

I think, no, I KNOW, we are meant to go though rough times. If we didn't, we wouldn't have a story. And our story is what makes us OWN ourselves. It is what sets up apart from others. Makes us UNIQUE.
Even the bad stuff.

Actually, I think the bad stuff is better than the good, as far as growth.

This is a quote from a book I'm reading...

"It is said that a person that has nothing left to lose becomes the most powerful person on earth. It is only through dying that we can truly live."

Sometimes you have to reach the bottom to end up being the best you can be in the long run.
It shows that people do love you enough to throw you a rope, and it shows that you are worth it to yourself to get better.

And in my uniqueness, I was able to go from having no idea where talking about my Puppy would take me, to talking about addiction.
Why? I don't know. I think the big man in the sky takes me to those places.
Obviously someone needed to hear it.

I am effin crazy, right?!... Don't answer that.
But hell, I love me.
And couldn't have said that a year ago.

Oh, and I found my Puppy. He was tucked away in the little pocket of my suitcase. Looking up at me with those possessive eyes of his. One little tear coming down. Because he knows I care.

My brain my be full of stuffing, but I do care. I love people (unless they really annoy me).
But I needed someone to hear this.
Whoever you are.

Because I have been there.
And you can't love others until you love yourself.