We’re getting ready to move. It could be next month, or it might be next spring.
Mary has been going through piles of stuff that’s collected over the last two decades. She’s done a great job of winnowing down the clutter that grows over a lifetime of saving things, thinking that there might be a better use for them.
Some of what she pulled out over the weekend came from that period in our lives when we were God People. That was more than 30 years ago.
We actually moved halfway across the country to congregate with other God People at a place where we were supposed to learn new things about this God. The leader man sold us on his place by telling us one time that he knew more about God than anyone else.
The God place in Indiana
It took me awhile, but I figured out that God People rarely knew anymore about God than I did. When I read the same books they studied, most of the time, I didn’t get the same meaning from the words that they did. When I told them, they said that I wasn’t supposed to talk that way about God. When asked why, they said the leader man wouldn’t like it.
One Sunday, while sitting in the building where the leader man used to yell at us about God, I decided that I was done being part of this group of God People. He wanted more of what little money we had at the time. We moved a few miles away. Mark was actually very young at the time.
Over the past three decades, I’ve reached a verdict that many God People are similar. They believe that God speaks directly to them. When I try to hear His voice, all I end up with is static, or better, silence.
Whenever I’ve asked God People why they aren’t the different and separate people that the Bible seems to intimate that they should be, they tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or, that they aren’t supposed to be. They can have all the same things that I have, do all the same things that non-God People do, but because they know the right order of words to say, they’re somehow special in God’s eyes. I don’t know about this.
Last week, a group of God People nearby asked one of the people running for president to visit their God building. Lots of people came to hear him speak. Their leader man opened the event with lots of God talk, even praying for his chosen candidate. Funny thing, but he reminded me an awful lot of the leader man that got me to drive a U-Haul across the country back in 1983.
Candidate man at the God building.
I wondered if the possible future president man was going to say something about God. Maybe he knew something about God that I didn’t. I mean, why would he be invited to a God building if he wasn’t going to speak some God talk? He didn’t.
Instead, it was more of the same old lies and half-truths that he’s been peddling for months on the campaign trial. Like that the murder rate is higher than it’s been in 45 years. I guess that God People don’t have any problem with lies when they’re coming from one of their own—a half-baked reality figure that they want to lead them when they’re not at their God building. It will be him, not God, that makes America great again.
Actually, the candidate man did talk about God at the very end. He mentioned that he will bring us together as “one people, under one God, saluting one American flag.” He also used God’s name to “bless Maine.”
The God People cheered very loudly at the end.