Wondering about a higher power

My mom has been sending me letters this week. One of them touched me. This is what it said:

For years we keep ourselves in a split condition. Wit one part of our minds we looked at ourselves and said, "I do some self destructive things because I don't believe I deserve love." When we become involved with unsuitable people or abused our bodies, we said, " I am punishing myself-I am expecting to much-I neglect my own needs."
   We may see clearly how and why we get in our own way. But unless we have faith in a power greater than ourselves, we won't step aside. We won't let go. We'll do the same thing and "understand" ourselves in the same ways. We may even use our "insight" to keep ourselves stuck-to protect ourselves from the risk of change.
   Now, having had a spiritual awakening, having come to believe that a higher power can restore us, we possess a gift more powerful than the keenest insight-faith in our ability to grow and change. We are children of God. All the creative power in the universe streams through us, if we don't block it.

I've never had faith. I was raised atheist. My father thought that religion made no sense and that people who believed in God were denying rationality. He argued with people who came to our door with a Bible.

This means that I'm always dependent on myself to solve my own problems. No one is out there looking out for me.

But, if I think about it, this isn't true. My friends love me and look after me. So does my mom and my brother. And yes, even my father who I'm unimaginably angry at lately looks after me. Sometimes strangers even look after me, and there are people, like my boyfriend, who love me despite my insecurities and melt-downs. So love does exist. What if love is God? Love is a power higher than myself to sort out the universe. So, I believe in love, and I believe that it is more powerful than me and can't be easily explained by science.

What is hard for me is to think of love as Jesus or to accept the Bible as true. It seems to me to be not God's word but an imperfect imitation of it written by man. I can accept the oceans, the mountains, the sky, the rivers and forests as greater than me. As having their own energy. But I can't accept that they were created in seven days. To me, the grand canyon was created by erosion, not a giant flood. It's all of religion's inconsistencies with science that  have made it so hard for me to accept.

I know that my mother believes that she needed faith in a higher power to heal. The quote above begins to explain why. But I'm still not really sure I understand. I think I could have a relationship with a higher power that teaches me to accept life, to forgive and to feel love. But this is a creation of my own effort. A prayer isn't something that magically comes true, it is a tool for acceptance.

One thing that happened, that has made me believe that there is some power at play I don't understand is Tara. She reached out to me because she felt that she had to check in with me. Out of the many people touched by Johanna, Tara felt compelled to talk to me. We shared so much history. She understood that Johanna was abused and was able to help me understand my relationship with her well enough to stop feeling excessively guilty for the times I didn't spend with her. How would she just know to reach out to me? Why would the one person who made an effort to write to me every day be the one who understood the things about Johanna that I needed to know to feel at peace with my relationship with her? Is Johanna looking out for me? I believe that she is still there. The experiences her husband had at the medium were too unbelievable to be faked. The breed of their old dog who is now in heaven with her? Her name? Her sister's name? Her family history of abuse. How would a medium know someone's wife was abused and how could they bring that up as a random guess? She knew that Johanna's lungs and head injuries killed her in an accident. It was just too much.

So, I have my mother telling me that the way she healed was to accept a higher power. And I have my friend Johanna sending messages from the other side. If I can accept that Johanna is speaking to her husband, I think I can accept that there are things in this world that can't be explained by science. And that there is some essence to me that defies explanation. I could be accepting the medium's evidence because I so desperately want Johanna back alive, but I don't think so. I know it makes me feel better to think that she can still communicate with the world and that she sees the things we do in her honor. I think that believing that someone is out there with infinite love and compassion and forgiveness towards me might make me feel better too, Even though I can't prove it, I think I might just accept it because it's a better way to heal than all by myself. I still have no idea what a relationship with a higher power looks like, but I'm willing to try.