I’ve often jokingly said to others that I’m the poster girl for ‘What not to do’ on the quest for Divine Love.

I certainly lived in rebellion for a long time after I met AJ again, and I’ve made more than my fair share of mistakes along the way. Most of these I’ve spoken about publicly, at seminars and on video recordings. I’ve never been proud of my troubles and unlovingness, but I’ve always felt passionately that, if my sharing could help someone else avoid the mistakes I’d made, then I wanted to speak up about it.

I’ve told most of you my deepest shames and biggest errors. It hasn’t always been easy but my feeling that it was important pulled me through.

That is why lately, I’ve felt strange and somewhat mystified as I’ve sat to write about my personal experiences with the Great Experiment. I find myself shaky, and emotional, and at a loss for words.

Its strange because this time – the news is all good.

God is showing me so many things through prayer.

……  I …..

There I go again, all teary and lost for adjectives to tell you how amazing this journey is turning out to be.

At first I thought my troubles with writing were because I don’t think its quite possible to put the power and beauty of God into words. Which is of course true.

But that didn’t really explain the difficulty, since the things I want to share are not so much about God but the personal changes I’ve experienced though engaging the Great Experiment in its simplicity and with sincerity.

So I’ve been praying about the problem and have come to the following, humbling recognitions:

– I’m embarrassed by my hope, my faith and my passion for God.

I’ve found a deep well of judgement bearing down on the childlike feelings in my heart for God and His Love. So much so that it seems to have the power to stop some words dead in my mouth, or on a keyboard.

Basically, I’m so passionate about the beauty and possibility that a relationship with God offers every single one of us that I’m afraid of being judged as childish and naive. So I skip ahead and judge myself.

– The thought of sounding all sweetness, light and no substance, also bothers me.

This realisation led me to immediately pray the fervent prayer:

‘Please never let me explain things in terms that people can’t understand, in airy fairy language or using vague sentiments. Let me always be real, and clear and practical.’

No sooner had I prayed my desperate prayer, than I remembered about a zillion times when, through a lack of confidence or in a state of nervousness (read: sheer terror) or simply because I just didn’t get the lesson at hand myself, I’ve done exactly that. That is, I’ve been vague, spoken in half sentences and danced around the truth with the wistful hope that people will read between the lines and miraculously extrapolate what I mean.

Not to mention the times when I’ve been all caught up in what I like to call my ‘poetry of pain’ injury. The poetry out of pain injury is somewhat embarrassing to me, and has its roots far, far back in my family line. It looks a lot like ‘valiantly suffering for a cause’ and/ or ‘living in the drama of the hardship’ rather than just having a good old-fashioned cry about it and moving on. It’s about romanticizing sadness and metaphorically making very bad Shakespearean ‘poetry’ out of the pain. At those times I’ve actually displayed the path and the truth about emotions just completely wrong.

So bummer for me (and you who tried to understand what on earth I was on about at those times). I’m trying to mend my ways.

– But most of all I’ve found that I’m afraid of people trying to punish me for my joy.

Holy Toledo, did that one come out of left field. Definitely an emotion that deserves some more attention from me. As yet, its still very raw and mysterious.

I tell you – this Great Experiment is the gift that keeps on giving. Engaging it and then attempting to tell you about it, has opened me up to so many emotions.

I’m learning awesome things, and I’m receiving Divine Love.

For the first time in five years I feel at peace with my life.

(There you go – I got some of that out).

Anyway, the real reason I’m writing today is to introduce to you the next in our series of discussions of Padgett Messages that fits into our Great Experiment series.

The message we discuss is from Solomon, and its my favourite. In fact, I was so moved by this message and our discussion that we had to stop tape twice so that I could go and have a sob in Lena & Igor’s loo. Seriously.

However, since I seem to have prattled on so much about my own injured stuff in this post, and I don’t want to mar the beautiful tone of the actual message and video discussion, I’ve decided to post the video links in a separate post.

I know that might seem crazy but Solomon needs his own space.

Check out his simple yet awesome message, in full, in the next post.