In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

The above sentence is from
Genesis 1, and when I read this—and I have read this more times than I can remember—I think deeply about God hovering over the waters. I like to think the Spirit as a formless, unseen collection of particles we know as energy. And that God in this form is not in one location, but everywhere at once.

He does not see with eyes like you and I do, or feel sensations with the texture sensing apparatus we know as skin. He doesn’t smell, taste or feel the array of emotions as we do; rather He connects through an understanding—and the word understanding barely touches the surface of what I’m trying to describe—of all these human characteristics through us.

And then God said; Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that crept upon the earth. So, God created man in His image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created him them.

In reading this, you would think that God creating man in His image meant that God was of the image of man, a human form. But this is not so because it wasn’t until Jesus that God presented Himself as a human through the body of Jesus and so that would infer that God was always something not human. As I mentioned above, a formless, unseen collection of particles we know as energy.

There is a relationship with God we are all having whether we care to accept it. Being agnostic, atheist or a believer in God will yield you all the same. God does not accept one and discard the other because of his or her belief, but his or her belief will dictate the events that occur in that person’s life.

I am going to begin this journey by discovering the effects of relationships and what they have in common with God and how relationships can help us to see our lives with greater clarity just by taking notice to what each relationship creates in you as being part of that relationship.

Growing up in a family filled with women whose men had one foot in the relationship and one foot out, opened up the greater aspect of God as the man of the house. In poor communities, many people rely on the notion of God because to believe that something bigger than you is going to take the misery and poverty away, lessens the pain reality leaves behind.

Because my grandmother and aunts clung so tightly to Christianity, people with shortcomings didn’t add up, but yet their shortcomings did because they were in favor with God, or so they believed. And so at a young age, I allowed God to come into my heart and dwell there forever, and over the years He and I have had an understanding that has changed and grown as I have shed years and left them behind me. God has been the one I look to whenever I made mistakes, mistakes that left me feeling guilty. He has grounded in me the ability to forgive and to apologize. He has never made me feel I was better than anyone else, but He has reminded me of how great I am and so I feel that if I do all He asks of me and that He is dwelling inside of me, then I too must be like God as God is like me.

I don’t attend church on a regular basis, though I have been in churches from as early on as 8 or 9. I pray all the time, prayer is that conversation you’re having in your head right now so in many ways we all pray. I don’t look at God as some mysterious person living in the sky beyond, God says: “I am always with you.” Which to me means we are a pair. If my thoughts can create my world, then I am powerful. If my reality is a product of the thoughts I think, then who else other than God can do that? God is Love and if in my relationships with all people who are a part of my life whether friends, family co-worker or stranger then my relationships are enriched not because I believe in God, but because I am having a relationship with Him.