The fog is following the creek this morning. Coming off the water like steam. I made some stew last night, and it smells so good this morning.

I’m thinking about all the opportunities still in front of me. Sometimes I’m pissed I didn’t start what I’m doing until almost 30. I wish I had had kids young, like really young, and then they’d be, I don’t know, 12 now, and we could all be doing cool stuff together. I’m wheezing too much, too, and I have to do a lot of work today.

Love all life

You have to love all of life. All parts of it. That’s the work. The work is to take the hardest parts of life, the challenges, the hardship, and be like, I love this. Because in loving it, it makes you stronger, better, shapes your character, brings you closer to God, and to the version of you that is mature, that can take on even more.

And it’s not like I’m scooping poop and I’m just overjoyed. No. You might hate scooping poop, but the posture of loving it is that you still do it without complaining. Where you find pride in it and fulfillment and do it anyway. So how can we think about all the poop scoping moments of our life like that?

God gives you the opportunities to do it too. He gives you 14 years of psychological and emotional hardship because those are the challenges of the modern age. He gives you trauma, not because you’re a bad person, but because you get to rise. Some people never rise. They complain through the poop scooping that I deserve better. Or that they’re above some types of work. They never truly take the opportunities for what they are.

Concepts of God

And why is that?

Well, my running theory is that the God we have in our head is essential for how we live our lives and how we understand how to approach life.

Everyone has an idea of God in their head. Why? Because you’re human, because we have this thing called God, and therefore, you will make an image of that God in your life, whether you’re conscious of it or not.

When someone says “chair” you have something that shows up. When someone says “flower”, you get an image, even though there are millions of flowers in the world, you choose one of them over the others, and you see that and hold that as the concept of flower. God is the same way.

Try it:

1. When you say the word ‘God’, what images comes to mind? Try writing that image down, or drawing it if you can.

2. What does God look like, feel like, sound like, wear?

Atheist’s concept of God is that there isn’t one. That there is no God, or even that they are God.

Christian’s have a variety of how they might see God. They at least have God as something other than themselves, unlike Atheists, but that God can be punishing, can be benevolent, rageful, or merciful. It might be a God cloaked in white or a God more ephemeral. Everyone has a primary concept of who and what God is, and that forms the basis of how we think about ourselves and the world.

This is something therapists won’t touch. I don’t know why. I guess they’re supposed to be secular or something. But I bet money that if you uncovered how the individual conceptualizes God and therefore what kind of God they live with in their head, you would get to the roots of their trauma VERY fast. And in a lot of cases, I guess you could just look at the person's biological father and get a lot, but I don’t believe that gives you the full picture, or the full potential for healing. At least it didn’t for me.

A God who punishes

The God I lived with for YEARS was a punishing God. Was a God that would yell at me. It was a God who needed to discipline me.

And in a lot of ways, I got that young, and so the things that happened, like being disciplined in school or in trouble with the law, solidified the belief that God doesn’t love me unless I’m perfect. Unless I follow the rules. That God’s love and therefore my ease in the world would not come unless I could be a ‘good girl’.

And let me tell you, I was rarely ever really a good girl. Because what actually happened was I said, you won’t make me follow your rules (whatever those rules are) and I rebelled. I wanted autonomy. But what’s really going on is not me fighting any external force. It’s just this constant internal battle that can eat you alive. A lot of us live with this kind of thing in one way or another.

It’s still, in a lot of ways, a core source of my anxiety. Because the anxiety seems to come from nowhere, we have to look at what deep part of our belief system it is bubbling up from.

The image of God sits deep in us, whether we realize it or not. 

Sometimes it’s inherited outright through teaching, and sometimes it’s lodged in us unconsciously, absorbed from culture.

Either way, the punishing God, like I have, has a way of breeding anxiety. If God is imagined first as judge, then every thought, every impulse, every desire feels like it’s under surveillance. You never quite get to rest. You never feel fully safe. Your worth becomes conditional—tied to obedience, performance, and perfection—so you live in a loop of striving, never enough, always waiting for the hammer to fall.

Or the pressure of a moment to do something right is so much (even if its not), that the anxiety takes over.

It didn’t help that I was also raised in a household where punishment wasn’t necessarily very strong, but yelling and fighting were frequent. I’m used to being yelled at a lot. My father yelled, constantly. I will never have a man in my life who yells at me like my father did.

And the man in my life today, my handsome, incredible boyfriend, doesn’t. He’s a patient man. I wouldn’t have him in my life if he weren’t.

I got a taste of that yesterday. My boyfriend taught me how to drive stick. I did just okay. I need more practice. But did he yell at me once when I stalled his sports car? No. My dad would have been belidgerant.

That kind of internal framework, which other people might hold as well, keeps the nervous system braced. You become hypervigilant, scanning for sin in yourself, doubting your desires, splitting into a “good” self and a “bad” self. Even natural, human impulses feel dangerous, like landmines that might set off wrath. The end result is existential insecurity: the sense that your very being is precarious, that life itself is suspect, and that God is more punisher than protector.

When that picture of God lives in us, living with an ultimate authority that is imagined not as loving, but as waiting to condemn, it leaves anxiety as the default setting—because if love itself can turn against you, what in the world can you trust?

Try it:

1. What’s something you’re beating yourself up about right now? Struggling with or conflicted about? What’s the part of your life that’s bringing you any anxiety or depression? Write it down.

2. Then ask yourself, what do I have to believe about myself for this to be a conflict?

3. Then try, who do I have to believe God is for this to be a conflict?

Changing our image of God

And so, what do we do with that? With this God-image that keeps us in fear, that makes us brace for punishment, that leaves us anxious by default?

Well, we have to change it. Not by throwing God away, but by letting God be bigger, truer, more loving than the one we inherited. By getting back to a concept of God that puts our life in order and balance.

We have to see God not as the one holding the hammer, but as the one holding your becoming. The true Father: benevolent, forgiving. Where actions have reactions and there is cause and effect, but not judgment or harshness.

Because if the work is to love all of life, then God has to be the God who loves all of life too. The one who doesn’t split us into good and bad selves but says, all of it belongs when you’re on the journey to grow towards love. That’s a God who embraces you when you fail. He still wants you to follow the Order of Love, but He doesn’t spank you. He holds you and says, what could you do better next time? And guess what, he never stops doing that either. His capacity for compassion is endless. It’s just who He is. Unlike what we see with people, where goodwill stops at some point.

And so we can hold a concept of God that is one who gives us hardship not to condemn us but to mature us, to make us stronger, softer, wiser, more able to hold the weight of love. That God says, get up, keep going.

When your God becomes the God who is love—love that includes discipline, yes, but never rejection, never abandonment—then you finally get to rest. And it doesn’t mean you keep doing the thing that is harming you or others or whatever. It’s not a hall pass for sin (although you’re welcome to live your life like that and see how healthy and happy an individual you become).

But to get to practice what life is really about: finding a way to loving it all. Because in that love, when you follow that as your guiding light, the light for life, you are becoming who you were always meant to be.

Love,
Val

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