I’m in that place where it’s hard to think about a novel much less write or edit one. Between book submissions, taking care of Mom, and nurturing our dachshund through four months of surgeries (she’s doing well now) my creativity is nil. It’s not writer’s block or any such silliness. Emotional and physical stress have temporarily sucked the life out of me. That happens sometimes. Usually during the summer months when it’s too hot to enjoy the long walks that keep me emotionally grounded.

Right now, I take Mir for short walks in the morning and at night supplemented with outside potty breaks throughout the day. That’s a poor substitute for long prayer walks surrounded by nature. That’s my God time when I talk to my Father about random thoughts, praise Him for the life I live now, and thank Him for the lessons I’ve learned over the past few years. Right now, I’m eagerly anticipating next month when temperatures drop enough in Florida to start walking again. Hopefully, when that happens, my desire to write will return.

In the meantime, my headspace is introspective. My mind is more on my faith than on imaginary settings, situations, and characters. My next two or three posts will be more spiritual in nature. Please consider yourself forewarned that you may not want to read further posts for a while. However, if faith isn’t your thing, you still might enjoy reading about subjects you probably won’t hear in Sunday service or anywhere else for that matter. You may decide I’m totally nuts or a heretic, or you may decide there’s more to this world God created and Jesus saved than the “I’m okay, you’re okay, your sins are forgiven, so welcome to Heaven.” feel good sermons so many pastors preach today.

If you’ve read any of my past blogs where I talk about my life or my journey to believing again, the next couple of paragraphs may bore you. If you don’t know me, I took a long, painful, destructive road to get to a place where I talk with God every day because I want to, not because I’m supposed to. By talk, I don’t mean prayer although I do that every day, too. I mean casual conversations like I’d have with you. The gentle, reassuring awareness I’m in the presence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that I feel deep inside tells me that He listens.

Looking back, this isn’t a place the old me ever thought I’d be. It just didn’t fit with my perception of an angry God and an all but nonexistent Jesus. I didn’t get a relationship with my Heavenly Father at all. In fact, I would have believed you were crazy if you told me intimacy with God was even possible a few years ago. However, I’ve been walking and talking with the Lord long enough now to know anyone who says that isn’t crazy. They’ve just spent long enough seeking the Lord to have the kind of deep relationship with their Creator most of us never have.

Moving on, I spent many years seriously involved with occult studies like astrology and tarot cards. Truthfully, I’ve spent more of my life co-mingling my Christian beliefs with New Age beliefs and practices than I have as a believing believer. Like many of us, I desperately searched for identity, purpose, and an end to the depression and worthlessness that plagued me for most of my life. It was a long, difficult journey filled with bad choices and damaging consequences. The downside, I spent a lot of miserable years. The upside, I’m in a good place with a solid spiritual and emotional foundation that isn’t easily shaken. While I’m still working on the purpose, my faith and my relationship with God pull me through the occasional bumps in the road.

The only reason I’ve reiterated things I’ve said in the past is to underscore the fact, while I’ve always believed in God and Jesus and considered myself “Christian” (I was not), I wasn’t raised in the Church or educated in Christian schools. I attended church sporadically the first fifteen years of my life. I spent the next thirty as a worldly believer not practicing my faith. While there were belief systems I wouldn’t touch like overt witchcraft or satanism, I skirted as close to the occultic edge as I could with my spiritual poisons of choice in my quest to understand the human condition, world history, and why we believe the things we believe. I was, and still am, driven by a deep desire to know. To understand. To pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It’s a passion that’s been a curse at times. I just didn’t know it.

I think you’re starting to get the picture I’m trying to paint. I’m a more introverted, scholarly woman. I’ve devoted most of my life to studying history with side interests in everything from medicinal herbs to forensics to art to psychology to physics and so on. In other words, you can’t study history without venturing into the overlapping fields that impact history and I’ve done that.

To my credit, I’ve always attempted to temper my understanding of the past within the context of the culture and time period I’m investigating. To keep my personal moral judgements out of it as much as humanly possible. To understand what seems horrific to me today was a part of everyday life in the Ancient Near East or Dark Age Europe. That’s part of being a serious scholar – not trying to revise history to fit some predetermined narrative – but being open to interpreting the raw information that’s really there.

I also believe in doing your due diligence and I use a lot of sources including articles/books that don’t necessarily agree with my current scholarly or religious beliefs. In other words, all of my sources aren’t Christian, they’re secular, too. I also understand new discoveries are made every day – that doesn’t include the unsubstantiated revisionist or ancient alien theory of the week – and I believe those solid, substantiated discoveries like the DNA results on the skeleton of King Richard III should be taken into consideration. Now that I’ve exhausted that rabbit trail, I’ll segue back to the subject at hand with apologies for my ramblings.

As I’ve started spending more time with God, I decided to start rereading my Bible a few months ago. It’s been a few years since I’ve done that. I made it to Leviticus before I abandoned the Old Testament and read through the New Testament instead. Once I finished the NT, I moved back to the Old Testament and realized I was reading it with a different understanding than I had before. Verses that had always seemed so harsh and violent to me, I suddenly understood in the context of the ancient cultures involved. I suddenly understood what I was reading through the eyes of a loving God who cared about his people in a way that I’d never seen before.

Yes, I know a lot about ancient history from my studies and I know what the biblical atlases, etc. say; but I’d never viewed what I was reading with the clarity I did now. If I was more “religious” and less scholarly, I don’t believe I would have understood why. But I am more scholarly, so it didn’t take me long to realize what had changed: I’d read and/or reread several books that gave me a deeper understanding of the cultures and society my faith was birthed in than I’ve ever gotten from any church sermon, encyclopedia, or biblical commentary.

While I don’t embrace every idea or belief the authors put forth in any book that I may mention, these sources have given me food for thought and ideas to pray about and dig deeper into using RELIABLE, peer reviewed sources. Any author I mention uses footnotes in their books so you can verify where they get their information. Or, at the least, they will tell you where their information comes from. While not infallible, I prefer using actual nonfiction books and scholarly magazines and articles over random sites on the internet or Wikipedia and the like in my research.

Thanks to a book I read recently and the clarity I received as a result, my understanding of so many events in the Bible clicked into place in ways they never have before. I discovered missing pieces of the puzzle that have mystified me for years. While not a plug for The Rabbi, the Secret Message, and the Identity of Messiah by Carl Gallups, this is me admitting this book made me embrace a process I’d started but hadn’t fully completed.

That process is learning to approach my faith more through the eyes of a Messianic Jew from the Second Temple Period than a modern Christian living in America. When I finished that book, I knew despite my best efforts to understand history within the context of the time and culture I’m studying, I’ve predominantly viewed my Bible through twenty-first century gentile eyes.

That’s a surprising confession for me to make since I’ve read a lot of books over the past seven or eight years that have influenced me to have a more “supernatural” world view than most American Christians do. Dr. Michael Heiser’s Supernatural and his Reversing Hermon are two easy to read books that helped strengthen my faith and opened my eyes to the cultural context of the Bible. His The Unseen Realm is both more scholarly, and much harder to read along with his books Angels and Demons. I own all of these books and I can honestly say they’ve helped me understand my Bible better.

However, just reading Supernatural and Reversing Hermon opened my eyes so much and they are my picks for anyone who doesn’t want to wade through his more complex scholarly works. Again, while I don’t agree with everything Dr. Heiser says in every book and that’s how it should be when we examine the evidence and think for ourselves, I’m not the expert in his fields. He is. The bottom line is I respect his research and what he has to say. If I had to sum up Dr. Heiser’s most impactful point, it’s the reality that we can’t believe what we don’t understand, and we can’t fully understand the Bible if we only see it through modern eyes. I don’t remember if those are Dr. Heiser’s exact words, but they are definitely my takeaway from what he has to say so he gets the credit for those words and that idea, not me.

I’ll leave you with that thought.

Until next time,

Calla