Lee Harbaugh

Introduction - Why This Series?

This post is part of my series, Who Is God?, an exploration of my personal journey with the mystical and spiritual realities.

This is the TL;DR post of my life's spiritual journey. Below, I will provide a brief summary of how I got to where I am today and try to elucidate exactly what I believe today.

I will also lay out the framework for the subsequent 11 posts in this series. In these posts, I will go into much more detail about the various phases of my life and their significance in influencing me. For those who want to go deeper, this post can serve as the roadmap to which you can refer as you read the rest of the series.

I am writing this series for several reasons:

1. First, through the years I've had people ask me to write this down.
2. Second, I have people ask me rather regularly if I believe in God or if I'm a Christian. This will hopefully provide a sufficient answer.
3. Third, because my belief in God (or at times the lack thereof) has shaped so much of my life, I thought it important to give an overview of my personal spiritual history. Understanding this part of me will help explain where I'm coming from in many of my other blog posts. It will also help explain how I approach life in general.

To be clear, this is not a post or series about trying to convince you of some religious ideology. I'm not here to "convert" you to anything. The views and ideas I express here are my own, and you are free to adopt them or not. My objective is simple: provide context for why I have done many of the things I have done in my life and put into writing—as clearly as possible—what I believe.

My Spiritual Journey - a Summary

I grew up with devout parents who took me to a Southern Baptist Church regularly. At about the age of eight or nine, I "accepted Jesus as my savior" and was baptized. (Baptists use full body immersion for baptism and only do so once the individual has expressed an independent desire to be baptized.)

My earliest years as a "Christian" were rather uneventful. I began to memorize Bible verses, and I enjoyed it. But looking back, I would say it was more from an intellectual challenge standpoint than any real mystical or spiritual experience.

In middle school, I had the first of what have turned out to be many extremely vivid and even lucid dreams. In this particular dream, a man took me to another dimension and played music for me. The music was so incredibly beautiful that I intuitively knew it could not be replicated on this earth. The feelings I had while listening to the music were beyond blissful. I simply cannot describe it in words. This was the first time I had the sense that I had literally been transported somewhere as I slept. I would say this was my first true deep spiritual experience.

As I got into high school, I found great solace and pleasure in spending many hours alone with God. I learned to pray. I learned to study and memorize the Bible diligently. I learned how to be still and sometimes just listen. This is when silence first became a teacher to me. By the time I was a sophomore, it was not unusual for me to go into my closet—a rather large walk-in closet—and spend an hour or two in silence.

In college, I had several pivotal spiritual experiences. First, I saw a guy in my dorm suddenly healed of cancer. This went totally against what the Southern Baptists had taught me growing up. Those kinds of miracles were reserved for the days of Jesus and the disciples. In the modern age we just didn't see that kind of thing. And yet, here it just happened in front of my face!

Second, having initially gone to college to become a professional symphonic trombone player, I started my freshman year by playing my instrument 10-14 hours a day. I was practicing more and more, but after a little while, I was not improving. This frustrated me immensely. One day, I was sitting in a laundromat. As I was waiting for my clothes to finish, I was listening to a Michael W. Smith tape. Suddenly, as if struck by lightning, I felt an intense sensation come over me, and though I didn't literally hear a voice, I clearly heard, "You have let that trombone become your god. I am your God!" After this, I practiced much less (and improved more), and I began spending more time alone in prayer and meditation. I felt I had clearly heard a calling on my life.

Third, a couple of years later I had my first true spiritual crisis - a "dark night of the soul" moment. I was praying for hours on end regularly, but I felt empty. I felt abandoned. After nearly a year of this, I began to perceive that God didn't so much care about the amount of hours I spent "with him." He cared more about the quality of the time I spent.

Fourth, I went to Ukraine in 1993 on a short-term mission trip. While on that trip, I saw so many miracles and mystical things happen that I cannot even recount them all. This experience solidified my faith in a huge way.

Several years after college, I became a youth pastor in a Vineyard Church. During this time, young people frequently asked me fundamental questions about the Christian faith: Why do we believe Jesus is the savior of the world? Why do we need a savior? How do we know God exists? How do we know the Bible is true? On and on the questions went. In an attempt to provide more rationally sound answers to them, I decided to do some research on the history of the church and the history of the Bible. Rather quickly into this endeavor, I discovered that the church fathers couldn't agree on many of the fundamental doctrines we believed to be absolutely true. If they couldn't agree, why did I think I was so right? This experience quickly led me to becoming agnostic. After a year or so of questioning, I simply didn't know on a rational level if there was a God. In my opinion, you could flip a coin. Heads he exists, tails he doesn't.

I was openly agnostic—but never atheist—from 1999 to about 2013. At the beginning of this era, I felt as if the entire earth had been pulled out from under me. I had the sensation of being in a constant freefall. I also felt a sense of freedom - freedom from a system and framework that in hindsight had felt stifling. Over time, that sense of freedom gradually overtook my sense of freefall. In 2013, my wife Heather and I saw a counselor to work on some issues with some of our kids. In the course of our conversations, I discovered that the counselor had a very similar path to my own.

As the counselor and I talked, he asked me if I still meditated. I told him I did. Even though I didn't believe in God per se, I could still get myself into a state of deep silence and inner connection. He asked me to describe that state. I told him I couldn't describe it; it was ineffable. He asked if I would say it was profound. I told him it was indeed quite profound, and that was probably the best word to describe my experience in meditation. He then asked me, "What if that Profound IS God?"

That question nailed me. For the first time in many years, I began to consider that maybe God was real, but just not in the sense I had previously believed. I began to slowly warm up to the idea that the Profound in me is indeed God. During this time, I was also having numerous vivid dreams that felt spiritual to me. I couldn't explain them, but it seemed as if I were often being transported somewhere, just as had happened in middle school with the dream about music. And these dreams were connecting me deeper to the Profound—that wordless inner presence I encounter in meditation and now consider to be my direct experience of God.

In late 2015, I had another extraordinary dream. Since becoming open to the idea of the Profound being God, I had still been hung up intellectually on the idea that Jesus was the only way to God (a fundamental idea in the Baptist and Evangelical traditions). If I didn't believe in a literal resurrection of Christ (and I highly doubted such an event), my old faith was very clear: You could not be a Christian, and you could not have a relationship with God! For the previous two or so years, this thought haunted me. Then came this dream. In summary, God told me very clearly in the dream that it didn't matter if Jesus literally resurrected from the dead over 2000 years ago. What I had inside me was real regardless of the facts surrounding the gospel narratives of Jesus in the Bible. This was my full-on green light to move forward on the path I was already on. This was extraordinarily freeing for me.

This brings me to where I am today. I consider myself to be on a journey. I'm always learning; always exploring. I trust the Profound explicitly. Theologically, I don't believe many of the things I believed before becoming an agnostic. What I have inside me today is a very real personal experience. No one can take that from me. People may not agree with me. They may think I'm deluded. But it doesn't matter to me. I know what I have inside me because I have experienced the mystical reality of it over and over again. Do I believe in God? Yes...kind of/sort of. I don't believe in God the way I did before becoming an agnostic. I'm not so sure God is some being "out there" somewhere. I tend to think we are all partly God. I call us each God-nodes. None of us individually is God, and perhaps even collectively we don't fully comprise God. But in a sense, God is very real, and we are all part of God. So, who or what exactly is God? I simply don't know.

What label does that make me? I don't know that either. I'll let you decide....

What to Expect From this Series

I will be breaking up this story into 11 different posts:

1. Who Is God? – The Beginning of My Faith
2. Who Is God? – Awakening in Adolescence
3. Who Is God? – High School and the First Questions
4. Who Is God? – College Years and a Calling
5. Who Is God? – My First Disillusionment
6. Who Is God? – Experiencing a Living God
7. Who Is God? – Becoming a Minister
8. Who Is God? – My Crisis of Faith
9. Who Is God? – The Agnostic Years
10. Who Is God? – Discovering the Profound
11. Who Is God? – Living With the Profound Today

I don't believe this journey ever ends. As long as I'm breathing, I am learning and growing in my spiritual nature. I am constantly learning to trust the ego less and less and lean into the Profound more and more. I am a permanent work-in-progress. I hope that you will hear my story and find solace in your own journey. We all have our paths to tread....