The Sky Spoke

Some truths are too powerful to be translated. They have to be felt.

This morning, the sky didn’t give me something to believe in.

It reminded me of something I could feel with every fiber of my being.

Here’s a recording that doesn’t even remotely do justice to the sound of the lightning and thunder, or to what it felt like to be sitting beneath it.

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I have never been able to wrap my head around how people can put absolute faith in an unseen God through a book that has been translated, rewritten, debated, edited to fit a certain narrative and pieced back together by generations of men, yet completely dismiss the undeniable power, creativity, and presence of the living Earth.

This morning I was sitting on my sister’s porch in Texas, having a smoke and casually recording the rain. It was peaceful. Still. Then the sky decided to remind me who was really in charge.

It wasn’t subtle.

The thunder exploded with such force that I jumped out of my chair before I even realized I was moving. Every cell in my body reacted. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t analyze it. I felt it. It wasn’t an idea. It wasn’t a belief. It wasn’t words on a page trying to explain the divine.

It was the divine.

Raw. Immediate. Impossible to ignore.

That kind of presence cannot be translated, edited, voted on, or compiled by men.

And that’s why it will never make sense to me that people can call themselves followers of God while hunting animals for sport, worshipping billionaires whose wealth comes from poisoning the air, the water, and the soil, and cheering wars fought over resources humanity could have outgrown long ago if we had simply chosen a different way to live.

I don’t believe we’ve forgotten our connection to the Earth.

I believe we’ve been convinced to look everywhere except where the sacred has always been. We’ve chosen to trust the words of men more than the living world itself. Because a person who understands their relationship with the Earth is far more difficult to control than a person who believes someone else must interpret God for them.

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