Bob’s Journey

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

When I was thirty, I was an atheist. A God who would create a world in which suffering and destruction is so prevalent would be a defective God. That there could be a place of eternal damnation was insane. So, I rejected it all. It seemed like the only intellectually honest position to take. The day I reached that place I rejoiced and called in friends to celebrate. I declared myself to be free of all of it. I was no longer a Christian. I was an atheist, or at least an agnostic. To believe in God I needed experiential evidence of His existence, and I did not have any.

I didn’t realize it at the time but I had reached a position completely in line with ACIM which said that if God had created a world like the one we have, He would indeed have been cruel. I had decided not that He was cruel but that He didn=t exist. But ACIM goes on to say that God did not create this world. ACIM was not available then, but I would not have accepted it even if it had been because I was not ready. I wanted experience. Eventually it came but it took me about eleven years to understand what it meant. The account of how that happened is given below. It was very emotional so poetry seemed the best vehicle of expression. The poems were written forty to fifty years ago and were helpful at the time.

All of us have stories about how we got to be where we are now. Mine is no more important than anyone else’s. However, hearing other people’s stories is sometimes helpful, and therefore mine is given here. It is centered on an unlikely friendship with a young female student who lived with us for two or three years and was possible only through the support of my first wife, Sydney Childers. The friendship was a catalyst for powerful transmissions of non-physical, loving energy which I felt within my being. They had an immediate and profound effect. Before that happened, I did not feel I was lovable. I feared death and I did not believe in God. Afterwards, I felt I was lovable, I did not fear death and I knew there was a God. Over the last thirty years none of that has hanged.