Believing in God versus Experiencing God

Since Charlie Kirk’s death, I’ve noticed something I’ve sensed for decades: the division between people is expanding, and the difference in beliefs is widening. In recent years—and especially in these last few days—that divide feels sharper than ever. It seems there is a great battle being waged between those who claim to “know the truth” about God and Jesus, and those who insist they are wrong. Both sides defend their positions with conviction, but often without personal experience.

This makes me wonder: where do people’s beliefs actually come from? Are they shaped by direct experience of God, or are they second-hand—passed down through teachings, books, or traditions? If you trace it back far enough, much of what people believe today has been handed down for thousands of years.

For decades, I searched for truth in dogma, fear, and second-hand accounts. What I eventually discovered, however, came not through another teaching but through experiencing God and Jesus directly. Only then did I realize that much of what I had been taught during the first fifty years of my life was shaped by fear, guilt, and shame—tools designed to keep me tied to someone else’s understanding of God. I was often warned not to seek my own truth, told I’d be deceived by “the devil” or the “wrong light,” and urged to rely only on those considered “in the know” about the Bible.

But when I finally experienced God for myself, I encountered something profoundly different: pure love, peace, stillness, awe, and inner guidance. These moments cannot be explained away. Once you’ve tasted them, you no longer depend solely on what others say or what is written in books.

Even so, I don’t claim my experience should be anyone else’s truth. What I came to realize is this: there is only one truth, and it lives within each of us. We don’t find it by searching outside ourselves. Books and teachings can inspire or point us in a direction, but truth is revealed only when we open ourselves to that inner connection with God.

This is why I often ask:

• How can we expect someone to choose love over hatred if hatred is what they’ve mostly known?

• How can they accept themselves and extend love to others if they’ve never felt acceptance from those around them?

• And how can anyone truly experience God if they’ve only been taught to fear God, rather than being encouraged to connect with God for themselves?

  
  

Information can stir curiosity, but it cannot replace the transformation of personal experience. It’s like being told all your life about unconditional love—you can imagine it, but until you feel it, embraced fully despite your flaws, you don’t know it. Experiencing God works the same way.

Too many are told about a God who judges, punishes, and excludes—a God who requires a go-between before you can even approach your Source. But when people experience God directly, they discover something far greater: God is not distant but ever-present, not conditional but unconditional Love. They realize they are not “apart from” but “a part of” God. That awareness shifts everything. Beliefs soften, love replaces judgment, and harming another becomes unthinkable—because it would feel like harming God directly.

Through direct experience, we come to know God as Love itself, living within us. And in that knowing, we learn to love ourselves, extend that love to others, and return it to God. This is how the separation between people begins to heal—not through debate or division, but through each of us finding our truth in direct connection with the Source of our being.

And in experiencing God within, we rediscover not only ourselves—but each other.