Hope in Therapy

          Some months ago I was led into a deep e-discourse about heaven and hell with a bright young woman named Hope from Hope Lounge.   I found her to be so refreshingly honest and searching that I’d invite her into Therapy and share her with you.

 

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Pistol Pete:  When did you start blogging and what motivated you to do so?

Hope:   Probably somewhere around 2005 I started some small blogging. It wasn’t anything fascinating or anything, I just liked to be able to look back and see my thoughts as the days went by. I started off basically it just being a journal (basically my only motivation), and slowly…as I learned more about blogging I have tried to elevate myself into actually attempting to get some, if any, publicity or making people want to maybe slightly want to read my blog.

 

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Pistol:  Name three of your favorite movies.

Hope:  OH! Wow…thats tough. I’m such a movie person.

     1) The Lion King is definitely my all time favorite movie.
     2) Tommy Boy: There is no way I can not laugh in it….absolutely hilarious. Chris Farley was the man.
     3) August Rush? I dunno…thats a tough one. August Rush I personally thought was a great movie,    but that’s probably just showing a bit of my nerdy band side.

 

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PP:  You say you love music - who are some of your favorite artists/performers?”

Hope:  That’s such a broad question, I could sit here for hours. My favorite composer is Frank Tichelli. His best piece (in my opinion) is of course An American Elegy. If you haven’t heard it and you like orchestra type stuff, check it out. I am definitely a huge Eric Clapton, The Beatles, Shinedown, Rascal Flatts, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen fan… I’ll stop right there with that though.

 

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Pistol:  You call yourself “An Agnostic Seeker”.  What do you mean by that?

Hope:  It’s actually pretty simple. I don’t know if there is a God or not (Agnostic) but I am constantly seeking to figure out/decide whether or not there is one or not. Honestly, the more and more I ponder it the more and more confused I get. There are a lot of things that really and truly support both sides…I’m just basically a deer in headlights on whether or not I really and truly feel there is a god or not. But the term “Agnostic Seeker” in of itself is really simple and not as complex as some might think.

 

 

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Pistol:  I really enjoyed your post - “A Prayer, A Movie, and a Thought“.  Can you describe what happened and how this impacted your view of God.

Hope:  Well Pistol, it started off with a prayer. My boyfriend, John, has been really trying to get me to believe in God lately and so he had me pray with him because he could see that all of my thoughts were so jumbled around…that I was clearly confused. So in short, he held me tight and prayed for me because by no means was I going to pray for myself. And after that prayer…I’d always had this “weird” feeling about me. It really made me feel odd and I wasn’t sure how to respond to it. So, I didn’t.

     Next came the movie. John and I went and saw the movie Expelled and found it fairly intriguing.

 

 

     I don’t think the purpose of the movie by any means was to convince people of the fact that there may be an Intelligent Designer…but it surely made me go down that thought process. It really just seemed to click in my head that it only made sense for there to have been something that originally created (intelligently designed) the original form of life. No, no…I don’t mean in the Biblical sense where God created everything in 6 days, but I mean the original cell, or energy that began the process of evolution. It only makes sense…I mean, where else could that have came from?

     But then of course the question comes into place: Well…then…where did god/that creator come from? And well, I don’t have an answer to that question, which of course, has brought me back to the same ‘ol confusion as before.

Pistol:  What do you now imagine God to be?

Hope:   That’s a tough question. I don’t know if I really think you can have personal connections with god. To me, if he does exist, it would seem that it/he is merely a “thing” (I mean, what do you call god?) that somehow created us.  Clearly, I am still very confused.

 

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Pistol:  You’ve written some about prayer and its impact on you.  How does prayer affect you?  What do you see as the purpose of prayer?

Hope:  Prayer is a rough area for me. As I said before, I’m not sure you can have a personal relation, discussion, etc. with god. Every time that I am engaged in prayer, I will admit, it makes me feel weird…and that term “weird” is very broad because I can’t find a word to describe what I feel when engaged in a prayer.  When I do pray, I’m usually trying to comfort myself in some way. Almost as if I’m talking to myself telling myself that everything will be ok.

Pistol:  Well, Hope, I really appreciate your thoughtful responses.  I’m going to pray that God lead you along your special path, that you come to know the Way to abundant life - forever.

 

 

meet some other friends in Therapy….

“Laurie Kendrick (and God) Come to Therapy”

“A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy in Therapy”

“Longing for a Holiday in Therapy”

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