TERRY MOSHER
TOP OF THE TOWN – God is losing the fight in America. A Pew Research Center survey a year ago showed a decline in Americans who describe themselves as Christians while citizens who say they are atheist, agnostic or nothing was up nine percentage points to 26. Non-Christian religions show a modest increase. In the past 20 years, Church membership has dropped 20 percent and church attendance has dropped to just 23 percent of the population. I do not attend church, though I consider myself very spiritual. Here is the way I look at God. He’s real. I have no doubt. None. It’s funny now, but my mother used to drive me to a Methodist Church (which she belonged to) for Sunday school. I rarely attended Sunday school. I would go in the church and once I saw her drive back home, I would leave and go across the street to a playground and spend my allotted hour playing on the swings or just running around (My second oldest brother admitted to me a short while ago that he too ran that scam on our mother, only he would go to a soda jerk place and spend his hour there reading comics and drinking a cherry coke; my brother’s wife has been a life-long pastor in a Methodist Church and they regularly go to church and help out where needed). I believe that before we are born here we are giving a spiritual path we need to follow in order to reach perfection, which is the goal of every one of us, and meld back into oneness with God. It takes more than one trip to this Earth to achieve perfection, if indeed we ever do. Perfection is 100 percent spiritual. We each have a soul that we carry around. It is inside of us and departs our earthly body when we depart this life. That soul is us. We come here at birth as imperfect souls. I believe I came here this time at around 60 percent of perfection (in reality I don’t really know what the percentage is, but I’m taking a guess to further illustrate). We have Free Will, which means we can get off the path laid out for us and tread water while here or take steps backward and wind up with a lesser percentage of perfection than what we started with. From my late teen years until 1989 I was off my path. You know when you are off because your unconscious speaks to you. I instantly know when I’ve done something wrong, and it could be just a small thing like saying something I shouldn’t to a person, say my wife. Conversely, I know when I’m on the path because I feel good about myself and my unconscious is silent or applauding me for something I have done that is good. I was jolted back onto my path when our granddaughter, Junior, was killed. She was just 3.5 years old and I loved her like no one before. Her sudden death led me to research the meaning of God. I knew he existed because Junior told me hours after she died this: “Don’t worry about me; I walk with the Grace of God.” I spent a year of crying off and on trying to figure this all out. I moved almost immediately to C.S. Lewis, who had grown up in the church, but as a young adult turned against it and became an atheist. He had long back-and-forth arguments with J.R.R. Tolkien, who took God’s side. Lewis thought he would win out, but it surprisingly turned out just the opposite. Lewis realized that he could not use logic to disprove God. It became apparent to him that we are born with a sense of right and wrong (subconscious) and that should not be true unless there was a God. Up to that light bulb coming on, Lewis had said he “maintained that God did not exist. I was also angry with God and was living in a whirl of contradictions.” Once I came to understand that God exists, I understood that Junior was an Angel send to straighten out the Mosher family that needed straightening. She gave her mortal life for it, but it worked. At the end of my year-long introspective I had two spiritual experiences. The first was for six days defense mechanisms that I had built up over a long period ‑ due to my mother’s death in 1953, to my father’s remarriage and move to the West Coast from New York and my sense of betrayal and rejection of the blended family that led to my Dark Years ‑ came pouring out of the top of my head and with each appearance I was told what they were for. That lasted six days and on the seventh day as I drove on to the ferry on the Bremerton side to cover a Seattle Mariners game for the Kitsap Sun I was overwhelmed with feelings of peace and love for all mankind and the colors undertook a hue I have never experience before and since. From previous readings I understood that these colors are those present in the “other side” or heaven. I prayed to God to let me have these experiences all the way to the Kingdome for the game. I rolled down the windows of the car so other people could experience what I was experiencing. Sad to say, the experience went away as I departed the ferry on the Seattle side. Years later I told an acquaintance steeped in Christianity about this and without hesitation he said, “You were in the presence of God.” Being unburden of the defense mechanisms and equipped with peace and love of God, I apologized to all my children, one by one, for my behavior prior to, what I call, a spiritual awakening. I was back on my spiritual path, and I remain there to this day. I’m not perfect, no human is. But I immediately recognize now when I do something wrong and attempt to be better. I still have a long way to go to reach perfection and it will take me more trips from the “other side” to come here and get things right so I can meld back into God. Yes, there is reincarnation. We do come here as often as it takes. We are here to experience the pain and suffering and to overcome them and move forward, one step at a time down our path. God is with us. He is within each one of us. All we have to do is listen. I don’t know what God has in store for us as a nation as we slide away from Him. All I can do is do what my subconscious feels is right and eventually become one with God.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.