So I have been thinking a lot today about the journey God has taken me on over the last year or more. Although I have touched on my faith journey briefly, I feel like today it might be appropriate to talk about it more in depth.
I started my most recent journey back to God, or connecting with God, through C.S. Lewis. It was shortly after I had finished writing Wonder Woman for DC Comics and I had pitched to basically everyone I knew and no one had responded. There was a point at which a part of me asked “Why are you waiting for someone to give you permission to do what it is you want to do?” It was at that moment that I decided to write Rose. I knew that I had loved the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe series and I felt that I wanted to write something along those same lines; something that subtly nodded toward God and my beliefs. It was that feeling, that idea, that prompted me to go to my local book store and purchase almost everything they had, that had been written by C.S. Lewis. I knew enough then to know that he was a religious scholar, but up until that point I had never actually read any of his religious writings. I started with an anthology that began with Mere Christianity, then I moved on to The Problem with Pain, The Weight of Glory, The Four Loves, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. With every thing I read, I felt as if I gained a clearer understanding of what a real, thoughtful Christianity or belief in God could be like. C.S. Lewis writes in a way that is sophisticated enough that you need to pay attention, but emotional enough that your heart really understands what he is saying (or at least mine did). By this point I was almost a year into reading, my faith journey, and writing Rose (trying to incorporate some of those ideas about love).
That spring I watched my then eight-year old come up from Sunday school and tell me for the umpteenth time how much he hated coming to church. (At some point early that spring we had decided to start attending church more regularly.) Looking at my sad child, in God’s house mad me angry. Coming to church and learning about God shouldn’t make him feel like this. I was sitting in my pew, stewing about the quality of our Sunday school, when a voice, literally as clear as a bell, spoke in my head and said “If you don’t like it, do something about it.” I knew at that moment, that God was calling me. The only question that remained to be answered…would I accept the call?
I’m going to interrupt this story to really clearly point out, or emphasis, something that was happening, something that God was doing in my life. He was tapping me on the shoulder in a way that I could accept and understand. He introduced me to a Christian scholar that spoke to my heart, he directed me to write a story with a heroine loosely based upon his son’s sacrificial love and then he called me to work in his church. God was preparing me; getting me ready, slowly, and carefully, waiting until I was ready and then calling me each time, to step up and make another commitment to him.
Skip forward a couple of months, Lent was quickly approaching and my church was offering a Lenten bible study. I decided to try it out. And I want to be very clear here – I absolutely believe that this was another way in which God called me, because the Lenten bible study was on the books of John. Now I don’t know how much you have read of John’s writings, but I honestly don’t believe that there is a book or writer in the bible that speaks more clearly and specifically about God and Jesus and his love for mankind. For the very first time in my life, I recall reading the bible and feeling like it made complete and total sense. I could clearly understand exactly what the message was that was given to me.
Now let me be honest. I have tried reading the bible on many occasions. I’ve started at Genesis. I’ve started at Matthew. I’ve tried starting where I last left off, but I have never tried starting where God directed me. It was around this time that I also discovered the Netflix program A.D. Kingdom and Empire. This is a series of shows that basically tries to reenact the biblical stories of Acts. Do you see where I’m going here? God had made a move in my life and the more I responded to him, the more he fed me in a way that developed my belief and my understanding of him and his love and message. I’m not sure that I have enough room to speak to all of the other ways in which he was moving in my life and my career. But I was starting to get the point. God was calling me. It was time for me to get to know him, to understand him and his work and his purpose for me on a deeper level.
If you are still with me, thank you. I know this is a lot. And let me tell you, not once since then have I looked back. Every day in my life I feel his presence. I feel him speaking to me in a very real way and I pray every single day that I do his will. I started this blog because I genuinely wish for every single person to have the opportunity to know and feel God’s love the way I have experienced it recently. I have lived without God. I have lived letting him into my life on my terms and now, I am living my life on his terms. Let me tell you, of those options, I choose his terms every single day. God is so good and he loves us so much. We just have to open our hearts to him and let him in.
I am so fulling committed to God because he has shown me over the course of this past year and more that he is fully committed to me. He has chased me down and, now that I have found him, now that I have truly found him, I never want to let him go. So today, when I pray, I am praying for everyone who reads this blog to feel and experience God’s love the way I do. I pray for you to open your self and your heart so that you can hear God speaking in your life. Once you experience the never-ending, overwhelming, reckless love of God, you won’t want to let go either.
God bless,
Meredith
finchmeredith1 