For a while, in 2019, I was really close to God. Close enough to hear them whenever I wanted (God always talks, it's the listening that I have a problem with). This one day, I was cycling, and I reached out to God. It's like adjusting a radio dial inside your mind. The more you do it, the easier it gets, the less you do it, the harder it gets. Right now it's very hard again. But in 2019, I could do it while cycling. So I rushed my bike trough traffic, and I thought: Hey God, what do you want to talk about?
And God answered: about your weight.
My heart sank. I was weighing more than 160 kg. I was constantly told by society, both friends and strangers, that my weight was my biggest problem. Was God going to chime into that choir? I know, I thought – not to God, just to myself- I know I have a problem. But I am trying to change, okay? I had signed up for weight loss surgery – something God was rather indifferent about, they had let me know earlier that to them it was the same weather I got it or not. So what did God have to say? Were they going to scold me for getting this big? Would they urge me to try even harder?
Here it comes, I thought, and I reached out to God with fear: Okay, what do you have to say about my weight?
and God responded:
I am proud of you.
What? Can you say that again?
And God repeated:
I am proud of you.
I was beaming all day. I was beaming all week. 2 years later, I'm still beaming. Did God really say that?
Why not ask them? And so I did. Many, many times that day, I repeated the same questions:
God, was that really you? God, are you really proud of me? God, did I hear you correctly?
And God would say: yes, yes, yes. They didn't get tired of my questions. They would just answer. At some point they even started laughing. I'd start laughing. It's silly, to ask the same thing over and over again when you're not a toddler. But God didn't mind. God realised I needed affirmation, because their message was so.. unexpected.
I listened to God about a hundred times. I have a journal where I write down some of their words. Many times I'm skeptical of the process. I can't proof that the voice in my head is actually God, and not me, playing tricks on me. Every message they ever gave me I doubted and refused to fully belief. All messages but one.
I would never, in my wildest dreams, have told myself God was proud of me. I thought God was just tolerating me because of the whole Jesus thing. I was just tolerating me because of the whole Jesus thing. If my subconcious would have faked a God-message, it would have said the opposite. I would have never believed it if it said God was proud of me.
And paradoxically, that's why I believe it. The one message I never doubted is the one I got on my bicycle in 2019:
God is proud of me.