The Night on the Bathroom Floor
Dave Aldrich from Virginia posted the following recently on the Heavenletter Spiritual Community Forum under a topic called Fellow Godwriters Check In:
“Since learning to Godwrite, it seems like the more I am able to let go, the more powerful and immediate the answer. Letting go seems to be the same as “getting out of the way”. So I am doing my best to just get out of the way and allow this Divine Locomotive Who will not be stopped to just charge down the page with my pen in my hand trying desperately to keep up!
“I once heard that Jakob Lorber (July 22, 1800–August 24, 1864) was called “God’s Scribe.” Herr Lorber said he was sleeping, and Jesus told him to get up and write. Lorber wrote for the next twenty-four years, hardly pausing to rest. Little did I know that someday Gloria and the Godwriting workshop would help me to be a little like one of my personal heroes.”
Thanks, Dave. I never knew about Jakob Lorber. I did know about Catherine of Siena from an earlier century or two. Bernie Siegel told me about her. Dave, will you post a few lines of Jakob Lorber’s Godwriting?
I also know there are an incredible number of people now who are doing what we call Godwriting, and many were doing it long before there were books on it and Godwriting workshops, for it is in divine order that we listen to God. It’s great that Godwriting is really catching on.
Jacqueline just loaned me a delightful book called Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It reads like a blog, informal and fun. It also goes very deep.
This author suddenly started hearing from God when she was devastated going through her divorce.
I hope I’m not breaching any copyright laws by including Elizabeth Gilbert’s words here:
Of course, I’ve had a lot of time to formulate my opinions about divinity since that night on the bathroom floor when I spoke to God directly for the first time…I was interested in saving my life. I had reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair, and it occurred to me that sometimes people in this state approach God for help. I think I’d read that in a book somewhere.
What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: “Hello, God, how are you? I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you.”
That’s right – I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, “I’ve always been a big fan of your work…”
“I’m sorry to bother you so late at night,” I continued. “But I’m in serious trouble. And I’m sorry I haven’t ever spoken directly to you before, but I do hope I have always expressed ample gratitude for all the blessings that you’ve given me in my life.”
This thought caused me to sob even harder. God waited me out. I pulled myself together enough to go on: “I am not an expert at praying, as you know. But can you please help me? I am in desperate need of help. I don’t know what to do. I need an answer. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do…”
And so the prayer narrowed itself down to that simple entreaty — Please tell me what to do – repeated again and again. I don’t know how many times I begged. I only know that I begged like someone who was pleading for her life. And the crying went on forever.
Until, quite abruptly, it stopped.
Quite abruptly, I found that I was not crying anymore. I’d stopped crying, in fact, in mid-sob. My misery had been completely vacuumed out of me. I lifted my forehead off the floor and sat up in surprise, wondering if I would see now some Great Being who had taken my weeping away. But nobody was there. I was just alone. But not really alone, either I was surrounded by something I can only describe as a little pocket of silence – a silence so rare that I didn’t want to exhale, for fear of scaring it off…
Then I heard a voice. Please don’t be alarmed—it was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston voice, nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my backyard. It was really my own voice, speaking from within my own self. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate.This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only always experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in the voice, as it gave the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?
The voice said, “Go back to bed, Liz.”
Isn’t that just wonderful?
Just for the record, hearing from God does not have to start in despair. But who cares how it starts? Just that it starts.
Let me know if you would like to know about how Elizabeth Gilbert started Godwriting.
Godwriting is a blog by Gloria Wendroff and is about Gloria's daily life as the Godwriter of the Heavenletters project that is having a profound effect on the lives of people around the world.
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