a spiritual encounter

I had an amazing poignant revelatory encounter with God the other night. It wasn't that glamorous actually, but it felt really good because it represented an instance where I surrendered to God, really listened, and really got a satisfying, significant, hopefully life-changing answer.

I was in a Sunday night worship meeting here at the Betor guesthouse for missionaries. I had been especially struggling the last few days with something, what was it, emotional discord maybe, I don't know It was like emotional unrest, Something was not happy, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I had been conscious of this unrest for a number of days. Anyway, I was letting the music and the emotional expression of the worshipers take me to approach that dark spot. It's always been a dark spot for me as long as I can remember, always, its the dark spot. Any conscious attempt to investigate the dark spot leaves me shrouded in darkness, I become confused and disoriented and frustrated and lost and hopelessly uncertain. It is my dark spot and through-out the years I have dealt with it differently. Actually I don't think I really became aware of the dark spot until maybe high school or junior high or earlier. It was definitely was of those youth worship nights where the intent is to stir up a passion for Jesus in the youth, they get you all riled up and pumped up and play the music and shout about repentance and sacrifice and fire, lots of fire, fired up. Anyway, for me, that's when I first became aware of the dark spot, it manifested itself to me as resistance to the passion and abandon that my youth leaders were trying to encourage in me. Initially my ego protected this dark spot with its pride, covering up my paralyzing, though barely recognized fear. Eventually my ego was hacked to pieces by the persistent, persuasive rhetoric of my youth leader's call to become "undignified" and be on fire for God, and all I had left to protect me from that dark spot was pure, irrational fear. I adopted the popular label "Fear of Man" and it became my arch nemesis all through-out high school and into college. There were a few breakthroughs in which this dark spot in me was pierced and the sacred inner emotions were released for one terrible and blissful minute, but these episodes were few and far between and usually looked upon as emotional breakdowns.

Anyway I was looking at this dark spot and asking God, 'please help me I don't know what this is or why its here or where it came from,' and I was kinda of thinking it was the painbody that Echhart Tolle describes in his books, but I was sure in that moment, that this dark spot had been with me for my entire life, even though I wasn't aware of it when I was much younger, and I got the sense that this dark spot was a womb of some sort. Now I've always been very skeptical about all this womb talk in modern psychology and people having memories from in the womb etc...
So I'm thinking, 'ok, a womb, so... like, did something happen to me when I was in my mothers womb...' but God's like 'no, look, you've never come out of your womb. That dark spot is just you hiding in the comfort of darkness and ignorance from the outside world. You've lived the great majority of your life with your life force cuddled up into that little ball.' And basically the whole point was that I have never really lived. It was a huge *click* for me. I had kind of known all this stuff the whole time, but for the first time I made a connection, connecting the dark presence inside of me with my life blood, my passion. All these implications began to unfold before me. For the first time I gained an understanding about this presence that I had always considered an affliction, but actually was just me, neglected by myself. and with that understanding I gained access to a consciousness and an energy that before I had to provoke with emotional, egoic appeals to religion and honor and identity etc... With this access I didn't need to urge or prodd or perform or anything of the sort, all I had to do was enter into it, let it be, let this force of consciousness and energy absorb me and rise up in me naturally from the source, the way it naturally wanted to, and I didn't have to choose to trust it or choose to let go because it was all so natural the choice was obvious, all I had to do was keep the ego out of the way as it tried to interpret, and edit and understand and predict and preform and be like "ok ok, I get it now, I see how it works, I've got the formula, I'll take it from here" But it wasn't a battle with the ego, it was just an awareness that I was trying to take charge, that there was a habitual tendency acting up in me to be in control, but I was aware, and I simply changed my focus back to the powerful presence rising inside of me, and I stayed open to it as it surged and stirred inside of me, and as I became familiar with this energy I eventually became privy to creative outlets and means of expressing this energy, of manifesting this internal presence in a physical, external form. For me in that moment it wasn't even anything spectacular or new, I simply stood, and sang with the music, and moved my hands, all rather traditional really, but for the first time, it wasn't so much a willed action as a present one. It was like a kind of confidence, not one that you must cling to to get you through a trial, but one that carries you into the natural flow of the universe.