God's true character

2 years ago, I started exploring. I just had to. Sometimes, your spiritual and religious beliefs aren't enough, and you've got to learn more or find more. I'll confess I didn't feel like it within the church. So rigid, so follow this path, and this path only. So, I just started reading books that people suggested to me. One of the first I read, was by Wayne Dyer called the Power of Intention. Recommended to me by both a good LDS friend and my lesbian massage therapist. I figured I couldn't lose on that one.

The book is good, and powerful, but I'm not going to recite all the concepts here. What struck me was Dyer's chapter on understanding God's true character. For some reason, it just wasn't the church's official God, it was the God I felt at night when I said my prayers as a boy. He talks about God being infinite, kind, loving, beautiful, having a reverence for life, being hapy, generous and more. He teaches we are individualized expressions of God, with differences. As I read, I felt it. Its the same thing you feel when seeking to escape the pull of negative energy like anger, hate, etc.

Other books I've read have really led me to a conviction that the Church's definition, and the scriptural definition of God just isn't quite accurate. Partial, but not the full thing, and sometimes including some concepts I just can't believe in.

Something I thought you'd find interesting: (from an interview)


Loree: Speaking of meme shifts, you mentioned that you recently married Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. What did performing the ceremony mean to you, and what kind of minister did you become to marry them?
Wayne: I don't even know what kind of minister I am. I went on the Internet. I think it cost twenty dollars, and I had to fill something out. And then my publisher helped set it up.
It's just another hoop you have to jump through. What difference does it make who marries you, and why does it have to be a person with a religious affiliation? I'm now licensed in 47 states!
Loree: Another career path for you?
Wayne: It could be! Seriously, I've had a lot of people already write and ask me if I'll do it for them. I'm not interested in doing that, but the marriage was very momentous–talk about a meme shift! We're talking about a legal marriage between women in the state of California.
I wrote a beautiful letter as my gift to them when I performed the ceremony. I said this is not just a ceremony to celebrate two people falling in love, loving each other, and being married, but it's a galvanizing moment. It's something for everybody who ever lived with those kinds of thoughts and feelings inside of them. Even as young girls, they probably couldn't even have imagined that they would one day have the same rights as everybody else, which had been limited not on the basis of what choices they made but just on how they were created. That was a ceremony for all of the people who lived in shame, who lived lives of quiet desperation, who lived in the closet, and who now have role models of people who have done this.
They're voting on the legality of this kind of marriage in many states, and I don't know what in the world they think they're voting on. Victor Hugo said you can stop an invasion of armies, but you can never stop an invasion of ideas. There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. It wasn't until 1920, four years after my mother was born–and she's still alive and healthy–that women were given the right to vote. Now it's hard even to imagine that for the greater part of the history of our country fifty percent of the population was not allowed to vote.
The same thing is true for same-sex marriages. It was always a stigma to be homosexual. In every school you knew who the gay guys or girls were. People ridiculed them, and they lived in the shadows. They don't have to live in the shadows anymore.