My Search for God

By: Diana Sumner, Author of Hiking the Mountain with Flip-Flops

Rumi once said, “I looked in temples, churches and mosques. But I found the Divine within my heart”. How true this is.

I was brought up in a traditional religious family. We practiced this religion every Sunday and I somehow learned within its’ brick and mortar walls that God was vengeful, condemning and full of wrath. I also believed that this God lived somewhere in the sky and therefore, was completely inaccesible. A few months ago, I wrote a post for Society Voice recounting the sexual trauma I endured as a child. I had absorbed the messages from my abusers that I was unloved, a nuisance and completely unworthy. If you add this belief to the idea that God is condemning, you have the perfect recipe for a complete spiritual breakdown. Tragically, I had this breakdown when I was only nineteen.

In my book, Hiking the Mountain in Flip-Flops, I describe the events which led to this soul murdering event

     I have just come home from my part time job. It is summer and it is warm in the house. The windows are open. I am sitting in my dad’s green chair nonchalantly flipping through the Bible. I randomly come across a verse in the Old Testament that says something about perverse sexual acts and how anyone who engages in them is to be condemned to the fires of hell for eternity. 

     Suddenly, memories start to surface. I remember in vivid detail the sexual abuse from my uncle and what I thought were my abnormal (and now know through therapy were totally normal) sexual responses to it. I am horrified. I am petrified. In that moment, in that instant, my life is forever altered. NOTHING will ever be the same.

     I am too young and I don’t yet have all the facts. I don’t have the knowledge and understanding of what has happened in my life up to this point. And because I don’t yet possess this knowledge, I traumatize myself. I cause what is known as a secondary trauma to occur.

   This trauma is far worse than what happened in my childhood.

   I go to bed on this night a completely and totally changed person than the person I was when I woke that morning. In an instant I have convicted myself. Done. Over. I Am Bad.

     For years, a black dot has been festering in me from all the abuse, the neglect, abandonment, and misperception of God. Now this black dot has completely solidified. I believe with everything in me that I am the worst person on the planet.

     And I truly believe I am going to hell (Hiking the Mountain in Flip Flops, page 80)

For decades I lived with this belief and it drove my need to be perfect in all that I did. Somehow, I got it in my head that if I could be perfect, this “God” would forgive me and love me again. Tortured isn’t a word strong enough to describe what the younger me endured.

Fast forward. Get married. Have kids. Yet the shame still lingered.

I turned to alcohol for it obliterated the pain, the shame I felt every single day of my life. It wasn’t long before I had to face the fact that my alcohol dependence was completely out of control. I sought help in a 12 step program and it was suggested that I find a “higher power” if I wanted to stay sober. A higher power that will be able to help me with my pain, with my guilt and everything I thought I had done. But my God at the time was inaccessible because I felt unworthy, so broken. But it was in this beautiful brokenness that I begin my search for a God of my understanding. And this search has afforded me the opportunity to smash my old idea of that punishing God.