To my children and their children after them and any who choose to consider my beliefs worthwhile as an exploration on your journey to discover God as you grow to understand Him.

Shaun McNicholas

February 2021

As academia and science expand and grow in its explanation of the observable world, I am attempting in these pages to explain my own understanding of “The creator of our universe” as my own views and opinions have grown and expanded. In matters of philosophy, science and history, I am an unschooled student of everything I express in these pages. I have no formal education, no professorial influence, no institutional authority or opinions. My theories of things stem from my own research over the years of my life, books I have chosen to read only to further expand my own understanding of the universe in which I live. I have no loyalties to any institution or religious body. No one is paying for my words or opinions. I do not write these things down for profit or praise, but only to offer my own opinion. I am not starting a Church or Movement and if any do begin to practice these concepts and somehow attach my name in some form to that organizational structure this document will serve as a testament to the world that it was never my intention to be lifted up or honored in such a way. If you are reading these words, I only offer my thoughts and opinions as an unschooled ordinary man and ask that you spend time studying and learning on your own directly from the scriptures and honor your own conscience.

I can no more enlighten anyone on understanding our creator than a caveman speaking some unknown language could explain to you how to create a marketing campaign for your new self-driving vehicle. The very concept of one human explaining to another human God’s will, or God’s nature is in itself an oxymoron. God or Yahweh or Jehovah is beyond our ability to comprehend let alone explain to another human being. This is not an attempt to explain “I AM” but only to document the way I see and interact and understand that which cannot be explained and yet communes with me daily through as many different languages and methods as there are people. This is how I came to my relationship with Him, and how I continue to grow in my ability to communicate with Him first and then how that relationship has expanded grown and changed over the years as my personal community has expanded. I choose to express my understanding of God using a male pronoun because it’s how I was raised and a father figure best expresses most of my relationship with Him, however my relationship with God is also like that of a son with his mother, a man with his best friend and at times even as a lover filled with an inexpressible passion and desire to be close, intimate and intertwined.

As a child, growing up in America in the 20^th century, I was raised to understand the need for community and church. I learned that if I wanted to know more about God then I should ask the people in that institution who He was and what He wanted. Over the last 40+ years I have studied and experienced many different things and it occurs to me as I am older and able to reflect on life that most of the stories we tell, like to read and re-tell are full of this great epic battle between good “God” and evil “Satan”, the “I AM” and “The Great Deceiver” or the “Ruler of this world”. Good and evil in most of our great epic stories are these ever-winding stories that tell the adventures of one person firmly convinced in his “goodness” against another fully convinced in their equally strong “goodness” or “correctness”. One side of the epic battle is doing what they are convinced is the best course of action for their own people or family, while the other side is also doing what they believe to be the best course of action for their own people. Whether you consider one individual right or wrong depends largely on whether or not you agree they have the right to their existence, or their occupation of a space or territory that intertwines with your own. Over the last few months, I’ve been meditating on the very beginning of our Judeo-Christian story and wrestling with that very concept “right” and “wrong” and the telling of the story of Adam and Eve and the original sin. The temptation as described in Genesis is that Satan or The Deceiver tempts Eve with consuming a fruit that is going to enlighten her mind and make her like God knowing “Good” and “Evil”. It’s the same temptation we all face while we transition from child to adult. We see the sin or imperfection in our parents and all the adults around us and begin to feel that we have to break away from them and find our own way in the world. While we go through this process, we are faced with an innumerable number of decisions about what is “right” and what is “wrong” as it relates to our relationship with the world. That original temptation is the very root of all of our struggles as human beings. It’s the reason that God warned that it would bring about our own death. If you consume knowledge, and then apply that knowledge, assuming that you are the moral and ethical authority “knowing right from wrong” based on your vast knowledge and wisdom, then you will inevitably create death within yourself and those around you because our physical bodies do not contain the capacity to truly understand what is right and wrong any more than we can comprehend eternity. We only think we do because we’ve consumed the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil as it relates to our own behavior. However, we’ve been deceived into thinking we know enough to know before a decision is made which is right and which is wrong, we believe because of the deception that we are now like God and capable of predictive planning. This never works and even less so as society grows and expands because we can’t predict the decisions and behaviors of all the other people around us, and yet we still think we can do this very thing. Our ability to analyze the past and make “better” more informed decisions about the future outcomes of our plans gives us an arrogance and we project our own experience onto all the people around us thinking that everyone has the same level of education intellectually spiritually and morally that we do.

I have been married to my wife for 26 years and I am 52 years old, so 50% of my life has been sleeping with and eating with and suffering through life with this same woman who I call my partner and best friend. Yet I cannot tell you what she is going to do in any given situation. I don’t know her any better than I know myself. I can guess how she will react to some things; I can tell you what foods she will or won’t like and I can tell you the types of movies she will like or not. But when it comes to the heart, I really don’t know my wife well enough to predict her reactions to many of the situations in the world. I definitely couldn’t explain to you why she likes one purse or pair of shoes more than another, those things are beyond my ability to understand and predict. I am often completely wrong in my assumptions especially when it comes to things that cause great emotional responses. Don’t get me wrong, I am just a little bit better at predicting her feelings about things and what she might or might not like, but only just a little, I am still surprised on an extremely regular basis that her feelings and reactions are so different from what I would have expected. I often think that because we’ve been living in such close proximity to each other that all the things that I listen to and learn about are the same things that she has learned because I’ve shared some brief summary of what I’ve learned with her. So, I am shocked when I learn that she has some strong opinion about some political issue or news story when I have done my own research and debunked the myths or learned a more complete truth about the issue and have formed a completely different opinion, or I have some strong opinion and she has done the same and knows a more complete truth than I do. And we live in the same house.

Most controversial issues in society are about this very issue. Someone has to be right which means that the other person is wrong. The biblical story goes on to begin to develop this understanding and it’s complexities by telling us the story of Cain and Abel. If you read the story most people interpret the issue that Cain is upset about as being a favorable or non-favorable response from God as it relates to the sacrifices that these two men present to God. But is it really? I believe that the issue isn’t the sacrifice or God’s acceptance of either but in the way that each person interprets God’s response and how it makes them feel about themselves, and then what they do with those feelings. Cain, instead of looking at his own reaction and trying to understand himself and why he feels the way he does, makes the assumption about which response from God is right and which is wrong. He then assumes that he has been rejected and becomes full of emotion, instead of trying to change himself to get the response he needs for himself, he removes his brother because he assigns his emotional discomfort to the presence of his brother. Cain relying on his own knowledge of good and evil assigns evil to the reaction as it relates to his sacrifice, he believes he knows God’s heart and his arrogance in that assumption leads him to the conclusion that God does not approve of the gift and therefore does not approve of him personally, and even worse regards his brother as the better or more desirable person. You can see the truth of this view in God’s response when he confronts Cain about his feelings “…sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” God is telling Cain to deal with the root of his own feelings and desires, God doesn’t need anything, it is we who have needs. There was nothing more or less right or wrong in the sacrifices or how God reacted to them, but in the expectations and the assignment of right and wrong, more or less, greater or lesser that the brothers individually assigned to the sacrifices and their expectations or desires from God’s response. We do this same thing all of our lives in our pursuit of success and happiness. We have some expectation of what it means to be in God’s favor, and we spend our lives pursuing that elusive response from society that is going to tell us that we’ve done the right thing, we’ve achieved that perfect response. However, our pursuit for this is a pointless and unattainable thing that will never be satisfied, we will always want something more or better or different, because we can’t even articulate it completely for ourselves. We are looking for external responses from outside of ourselves rather than just accepting and being satisfied with what we are given. We are looking for the simple thing that Jesus receives while in his physical body “this is my Son in whom I am well pleased”. This is communicated to us all day every day as God continues to allow you to be alive and he trusts you with the mind, intellect, senses and resources that he has loaned to you, those things should be enough, meeting your daily needs should be enough, recognition and appreciation from those whose lives you have impacted should be enough, but none of it ever is. It’s the same reason why in a church setting we are always looking for an invitation to the preacher’s house; at work you are always desiring a favorable meeting with the boss or his boss or the owner of the company. None of it is ever enough. We are always looking for something closer to those words from God “well done my good and faithful servant, with you I am well pleased.” But only if it comes from God himself.

My own struggle with acceptance and success has had me on a rollercoaster of emotional highs and lows all of my life in my pursuit of trying to understand why I am here. Why did God make me, what is my purpose, and how do I know that I am fulfilling that purpose? I have what is commonly referred to as a melancholy personality, always focused on what should have been done better, never fully satisfied with the outcome or results from anything I’ve ever done or achieved. I mask this behind a desire for excellence or a pursuit for perfection, but I have had to learn through painful experiences that I am already perfect in God’s eyes and will never be perfect in my own or in the eyes of those around me, even my own mother. God knitted me together and placed me where and when I am, he gave me the breath in my lungs and the senses to interact with the world, and he blessed my mind and soul to understand and comprehend everything that I do. My only job is to love completely those God placed in my path and sacrifice my life in pursuit of freeing them just as Jesus freed the people God placed in His path. I am to communicate my own relationship with God using the skills and abilities that I have in my possession and honor God with the fruit of that pursuit. Nothing more and nothing less. Jesus tells us the simplicity of this mindset in many of his parables most notably the parable of the talents. We are to invest ourselves in an effort to increase the fruit that is produced by our talents or the investment God made in us. Not all of us are preachers and teachers, not all of us have the attractive skills, some of us are here just to sweep the floors. Like Cain and Able one talent and one recognition is not better or more favorable than another. Only our expectations are different. God does not love any person or their role more than any other, it is only our own feelings and expectations that differ.

This is why I began writing and studying the content on this site. It was during a communion service more than 25 years ago that someone shared the scripture about Jesus opening Isaiah and pointing to himself in the scriptures. He then says to everyone in the room “today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” and I thought to myself what if God actually communicated to each person in the world in this same manner? What if everyone has a series of scriptures that they could point to that would outline their own life and what it was God was expecting them to do with this life they’ve been given.

For the past 20 years or so I have been on a personal journey in an attempt to identify and articulate my own role and try to understand why I am personally not satisfied with the outcome of my life. I have some expectation in my mind about what I am supposed to be doing with my life and what I am currently doing doesn’t satisfy that desire, and additionally I am unable to fully articulate what it is that I want. So beginning about 20 years ago I started searching through the scriptures looking for that identity that I saw Jesus had about himself when he was able to unroll the scroll of Isaiah and point to a prophesy about himself and say to others “today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” I found that identity for myself in Bezalel the master craftsman and teacher and began to articulate my understanding of this role to others; however it has never completely satisfied my longing for acceptance. I continue to strive to understand what I am supposed to be doing in this role. I am looking for my own personal satisfaction in fulfilling my duty to the question “why am I here?”. I believe that it is my purpose to somehow fulfill the completion of some version of the tent or sanctuary and I also believe that once I find that path or doorway, I will know it. So, for now I continue to study and perfect my skills and at some point, a Moses will appear in my life and task me with the construction process for the tent or sanctuary or some modern version of it. And yet even as I write the words, I can tell you that this has happened, time and time again in every ministry and every group that I am or have been a part of. I am constantly asked to be the master craftsman in the room, it’s just not God’s booming voice in the clouds that I hear, it’s just a man who has a need, it’s not the leader of the movement, or the president of the organization, or the governor, or the mayor. Honestly even if it was any of those people, I would always be just ok with that for a moment. I would immediately need to go on to the next level, it wasn’t absolutely perfect. It would always need to be more.

The content I've written here are experiences, lessons and insights on my own journey; an expression of the concepts that have driven me throughout my life to be open to new things, to accept responsibilities and roles even when sometimes it seems unreasonable. It is my hope that reading these pages will help you to understand God as I understand Him, and my relationship to the church family to which I belong even when sometimes it may seem unreasonable. I hope you will find inspiration to find your own identity and purpose and pursue a relationship with God that surpasses my own. God has been the greatest love and pursuit in my life, the sources of both the greatest joys and deepest heartaches. Like any marriage I have often found it difficult to understand God or to explain to God what I want and need and the same is true with the family of believers I choose to align myself with and worship with. I very often don’t want or need the inconvenient interruption of other human beings and would prefer to just be alone with my thoughts or sitting in silence appreciating God’s creation. There are times that I've allowed this pleasure, however God entrusted me with a great amount of both talents and resources and I have a burning desire to share my relationship with him openly with others, especially to those who continue to be enslaved by their own passions and desires. He sent His Son here to articulate freedom for the prisoners and I pray that the words I write and share with you here will inspire you into a life close to Him and growing in your understanding of Him and ultimately give you a truer and more complete freedom to embrace yourself and pursue a better understanding of who God made you to be.