(Auto-generated)Welcome back. It is the 25th episode of the Laughing Matters podcast, which may not mean a lot to you, but that means a lot to me.
So happy 25th episode, everybody.
You know, what's funny is I actually planned to talk about this before I realized this was the 25th episode.
So that's kind of cool to me.
And the thing I wanted to talk to you guys about was that I realized recently that I've done a lot of talking about God,
specifically a non-specific God, in a general sense of.
And I haven't really talked much about specifics of other religions.
You know, I was going to talk about heaven.
I haven't really talked about many of the prophets and talked about Christ.
I would quote him more to illustrate another avenue of thought on what he had said based off of something that I had found.
And I don't think I'm going to ease you guys into it.
I don't think I want to hang back on that in the in the time of this recording.
I've made a split second decision to not do that.
Each person's journey and their decisions are exactly that.
They are their journey, their decisions.
It has to be their relationship with them.
It has to be their belief in him.
And so they've got to come to that.
That's not something I mean, with some people, I guess it is something, but I can't I can't do that.
That might be nice if I could just believe something, but no, I have to understand it first.
So that's a journey that can't be told.
It can only be found, but I wanted to share with you mine.
So in my journey, I come to an understanding that I needed to choose my prophet.
I needed my human connection to this world.
And I I elected to pick Jesus Christ because his big asks mirrored what I found to be true.
And he's the one whose messages resonated the most with me.
You know, he asked the two big ones which were lined up with my two big ones, you know,
belief, faith in and loving of God and treating your fellow man well.
And it seems all over the place.
But why am I sitting here in front of you at 428 a.m.
looking ragged and strung out tired?
Well, tonight, when I thought about Jesus, which sadly really does not happen as much
as it should, I heard the words, will you already did the big one?
You believed in God.
The rest is so much easier than that.
And God was absolutely right.
You know, I had a really, really tough time arriving at a belief in God throughout like
my entire life.
My biggest hurdle when it came to believe back when I was much, much younger, that would
have to be understanding.
It's the way I'm wired.
You know, I have a harder time than most because if I don't understand it being an autistic
man, that's one of the requirements for integration.
If I'm going to believe something, then I need to be able to understand what I believe.
I was seven to nine years old.
I was brought up in Catholicism.
It was kind of this hang on tight because here's all this stuff that happened BC and
you know, here's all this stuff that happened in the first 98 years of AD.
My brain was collapsing and the whole, you know, this is my body, this is my blood communion.
That didn't help.
There were a lot of rituals of worship in the Catholic Church that were never explained
to me or never explained in a way that I understood them.
You know, I partook in them.
I was there, which I kind of figured counted for something, you know, because I wasn't
completely into them the way that the priests were, you know, some of the congregation
were, they just didn't hold special other than, you know, being the things that I'd
seen my whole life.
They had a nostalgia to them, but they just didn't do it for me, I guess.
I don't know how to describe it.
I didn't understand them.
So they weren't, there wasn't a big connection to them.
That isn't to say that they don't have greater meanings behind them.
I just assumed I was never let in on what those great meanings were.
Ages 10 to 12, I started really trying to think critically about God, you know, trying
to make that connection through asking questions, you know, and make that connection between
the figure that I kept hearing about but never met and the world that I was living in made
up of my, you know, made up my entire frame of reference.
And I tried to reconcile what I didn't understand with what I thought I did.
At age seven, I was just trying to absorb what was being told to me at a rapid fire
pace and from about 10 on, I had questions.
I didn't always know what those questions were, but I knew that they were there.
I could feel them.
I wanted to ask them.
I just didn't quite know how or to whom because I didn't feel the same way that so many of
my congregation did about God and Jesus.
So, you know, number one, the first people that you would think do to go to about questions
about it that, you know, that I'd known for most of my life are out the door because I
don't relate.
I didn't relate to it.
It wasn't where I was finding God.
Prior to my own search, my belief had been told to me and not found.
It was only really there because it was installed in me by somebody else.
I didn't grow it myself.
It was a clothing that I wore, not my skin.
And even then, I seemed to understand on some subconscious level that if I wanted to believe,
I needed to feel it so that I could start to understand it.
At my core, there was something that knew that there was something, but that's where
it's certainty ended.
So I'll skip ahead in the story of a few years and speak to what I've come to understand
about Jesus.
I've never really talked about him on the show outside of quoting him a few times.
I think that has a lot to do with the desire for what I'm talking about, not to be seen
as having any kind of specific religious sect that it's tied to, as these concepts that
I found are non-religion specific.
And far too many people are used to immediately jettisoning info and turning away from the
speaker the moment that Jesus is mentioned.
So please take what I have to say here unaffiliated from honestly anybody out there.
It's just take it as it is.
If it resonates within you, then it resonates because truth resonates.
We know this.
I don't have to convince you.
I just need to tell you about it.
So that's what I'm going to do.
Yes, I believe that he was a man that pretty much did what the stories of the New Testament
told about him doing, leaving, of course, a margin of error for the possibility that
maybe one or two words were misquoted, not quoted exactly correct, because it was for
several of them.
It was several years before it got written down.
And I'm sure their understandings of what he said changed in growing into the information
and because they're constantly learning.
Once you have the truth pulled back for you, can't help but learn from there.
There's too much new stuff that it reveals.
And I could totally see one remembering him saying it one way.
We're human.
We've already proven the guy walks in and robs somebody with a banana and there's an
ape that I don't remember the experiment exactly.
But we've all heard about the experiment where they show them something crazy happening and
then nobody notices that this other thing happened because everybody was focused on
this one thing.
So I leave that margin of possibility open because we're human and we make mistakes.
But I also believe for most intents and purposes that Jesus was a halfway point, like a conduit,
a tunnel between two planes of existence, that which has form and that which doesn't.
Halfway to God, halfway to man.
He's the walking guide rope through an arctic blizzard.
He's the only guy at the party who knows where the bigger, much better after party is.
He's got one foot in the afterlife and one foot on earth like a ship captain straddling
between the dock and a schooner so that the passengers don't fall in while boarding.
Anyways, that's what my understanding of Jesus is today.
And I have to say that outside of, you know, choosing a prophet, choosing to follow someone,
I believe that it was an important decision because I didn't quite have Jesus figured
out to the point where I would be even comfortable just out now believing in him.
And that had lay in that position for many, many years until the day that I had my moment
of finally turning my eye to God and making my decision.
It happened on the day that I concluded that no matter how long I studied physics or the
natural sciences, I was only going to find evidence, you know, always enough to support
but never enough to prove the existence of a creator slash designer of our reality.
I was never going to know for certain.
And that happens to be pretty much the main requirement for faith.
So I took a deep breath, I said, okay, here we go. And I craned my neck like somebody
that's about to call a parent that they've actively avoided for years.
And I looked up and I said, I think I get it now.
God, I'm going to believe in you.
And it was the strangest thing my mind immediately snapped to every selfish act I had ever committed
against anyone.
Like every shitty thing that I'd ever done emotionally to anyone.
I wasn't thinking of them individually.
They weren't flashing through my mind like I was entering death.
I just felt the weight of all of that guilt at once.
And I showed God that I saw and I genuinely apologized for it.
I was on the verge of crying.
I was probably crying.
I was telling God how sorry I was that I'd chosen self-serving decisions without giving
any thought to what it was doing to others.
Because I had found the concepts at this point.
Like I understood they're all Him.
We're all Him.
I've been doing this to the whole.
We've been doing this to the whole.
All of us.
I had been previously educated on what the best next step in exactly this situation was.
Even though I wasn't super connected to the way that I had been told, I had been told
what I was supposed to do here.
So I gave it a try.
The first time in my life I genuinely asked for forgiveness.
And as I asked with my voice filled with genuine sorrow for all of these things, I suddenly
felt directed to a question.
And it wasn't something that was necessarily said to me, but I felt the words course through
me.
Which of the prophets would I follow?
I had recently been studying passages in the New Testament, making note that several statements
made by Jesus took on way deeper meanings when the concepts that I'd find were applied
to them.
The concepts that I wrote my book, podcast, and show about, of course.
And it brought me much closer than I had ever felt to Jesus, a man that I had never met.
But I'd heard about all my life.
I'd never had any beef with Jesus.
In fact, I think I pretty much always believed that He was more than a man for most of my
life anyways.
I just didn't always think that the people speaking of Him and acting in His name were
always the best spokespeople.
So I dropped all of that and I said to God, I will take a leap of faith and believe that
Jesus was the Son of God.
And that in some way that I can never hope to understand while I'm alive, that He died
for our sins and that He was a way to return to God, to heaven, once this is all over for
me.
A moment after I uttered those words, though, I felt the oddest sensation.
It was as if this large drop of oil had landed on the very top of my head and began to spread
out over my scalp and moved evenly.
The cessation it was leaving behind was like that crazy pins and needles feeling that you
get when your limb falls asleep.
It was like that, but it was deeper, but more pleasant.
You know, it was just a strong, not that, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no feeling, but something
you really want to lean into.
It made its way down my face and my neck, and it was evenly flowing down and outward
until I was covered from head to toe, every inch of me made of buzzing nerve endings.
And I stood there and as that feeling began to recede just ever so slowly, I suddenly
became aware of something else.
You see, for about three weeks, I had felt this panic push forward to write what I had
for the book.
I took an extended leave of absence from my work, and I was up for days at a time trying
to write down and riddle out what I could.
And I missed quite a few meals.
Probably can't tell.
I've made up for it.
Often, I would pass out for like 45 minutes or so and wake back up and then start back
into it.
And by the time I told God that I would take that leap of faith and believing in Him and
Jesus, I was significantly weak and weary and swaying quite a lot while standing.
But my head during this entire marathon was clear as a belt.
It's the strangest thing.
I felt exhausted, but I could think clearly at any point.
And as that pins and needles feeling faded, suddenly my body was clear as a belt too.
It felt like my body had undergone some kind of drastic reversion.
I felt as if my physical body was new, fresh out of the package, as if all those years
of putting tears in my muscle fibers and bursting capillaries and getting knee injuries and
just they all vanished.
And my issues that had had all my life with my knees were gone.
And all of that wear down that I put my mind and body and emotional core through and all
that weariness that had mounted from too much work and stress and way too little rest.
Like it had never been there to begin with.
I tried to put it into words for you, but as those of you that have experienced an intense
moment with God, words can't ever do it.
It's like my old friend Jay Seals once confided in me.
He told me that in his experience, miracles and moments in God's presence are only miracles
and moments in God's presence to those that they happen to.
They can never be properly told or emotionally conveyed.
They are beyond words.
You alone were in the vantage point to understand exactly why that was a miracle.
So on that note, I can only pass along what has happened in my life.
What I came to understand and how I came to understand it and hope that it resonates within
you when you hear it.
Because finding the concepts and finally believing in God finally led me to real consistent happiness
and contentment for the first time in my life.
I finally felt full and I finally felt like I was really living for the first time.
And I felt a bit dismayed that I never realized how much I was missing out on before all of
this.
How good that genuine laugh is.
So at the end of the day, when it comes to picking a profit, don't ask me.
Ask Him.
No matter what you choose to follow, follow that kindness and that strengthening of bond,
that generosity of time, energy and focus.
And yes, that includes your money as you sell your time, energy and focus to others for
that.
I don't know which profit is the right profit for you.
I don't know if Christ is the only way to get to God.
I only know which profit is the right one for me because not a single one of us knows
for certain.
Only He knows.
So ask Him.