Out of Darkness into Light
(Anonymous)
Urantia Thoughts
In 1942 on Sullivans Island, a barrier island eight miles east of Charleston South Carolina I was born into a family of modest means, and set about living life as a Catholic at a time when religious tolerance was pretty much non-existent. Those were scary times. Nuns in secretive conversations with priests dressed in black. A bar set so unbelievably high that salivation was never an option. Controlled behavior and a promise of purgatory or hell fires at the end of life were offered as a best possible scenario.
Sixty six years later, I am living in Texas, married to one of the most caring and compassionate women on the planet, a gift to me from God, to be sure. We have two sons, three grandchildren and have weathered good times and bad.
In 1959 at seventeen years of age, I joined the United States Air Force, set off to California and left the beaches of South Carolina and the Church in my rear view mirror. What began as a quest for freedom, somehow turned into a sometimes hellish adventure of searching for life’s meaning and God. The lure of the hippie generation, booze and drugs clouded my judgment and I spent too many years searching outside of myself for peace, never realizing that the answer to my questions were always inside of me, every step of the way.
In nineteen sixty-something I found the Urantia Book in a bookstore in Dallas, Texas. I had heard of this two-thousand page mind stretching explanation of God, the universes, the life and times of Jesus Christ and man’s relation to it all. Once I got beyond the guilt of reading something that didn’t glorify the Catholic Church and it’s teachings, I experienced a peace that truly surpasses all understanding.
It had been a long and lonely journey trying to make sense out of a world filled with hate, anger, greed and lust. And I had spent decades groveling in the middle of it all, wallowing in a pit of despair, defeated in attitude, believing all the while, that if there were a God, he would surely strike me down, the very minute I asked for his forgiveness. I should have listened to that small voice inside of me. There I was, too afraid to pray, to confused to understand that all I needed for salvation was a faint flicker of faith. Furthermore, I had no clue that inside me there lived a fragment of the eternal Father and, He loved me because I was special, unique in creation, and would not be duplicated in all of eternity.
We worship in a Christian Bible Church in a suburb of Dallas. I am a faithful participant in a weekly service that imparts a powerful word and teaching to several hundred weekly. My life is enriched by the teaching of the Urantia Book which, while not a part of our Church’s theology, fills my daily meditation and study as I continue to understand God’s plan for me as an individual. I am a Son of God, I am at peace. I will be with him in eternity.
