It’s no secret that I was raised Southern Baptist, and am still in Recovery. My daddy is a pastor, and my mom, the perfect rural Alabama pastor’s wife told me just yesterday that the reason bad stuff happens to me and mine is because I’m depending on the moon and the stars instead of on God. Le sigh…

I make no secret of my spirituality to them. I don’t attempt to “convert” them, but neither am I in the broom closet. But I know that they think that it is just a matter of time until I come back to their path and start teaching Sunday School again.

Anyhoo, this being rural Alabama, there are “Get Saved Now, Get Right or Get Left” road signs every 10 or 15 feet.  I usually read them, and let them go over me like water off a duck’s back.  But today I saw one that stuck in my craw. Oddly, there shouldn’t have been anything about it to bother me. All it said was “Give Your  Troubles to the Lord”. That’s actually pretty innocuous. Why did it bother me? The phrase “the Lord”.

It was an epiphany. When I pray, I do not pray to the Lord and Lady. I can’t use those titles.  I’m really not trying to be argumentative, or “oh, I am such a victim of my raising”, but for so long, “the Lord” meant that guy who was going to send me to hell if I wasn’t perfect.

When I first started my pagan path, I came up with my own names for the duality of the deity. I won’t tell  you their names, because it’s personal, but I will say that I can not call them Lord and Lady, and that they (he, she, it, them we) are loving and accepting and much more a web of connection to all, than something “out there”, separate from myself and others.