Blessed to Be a Witness
Seeing the world through the eyes of LOVE
“I just don’t want you to go to hell,” said the Christian boy to the agnostic boy.
All the 1990’s style desk chairs were in a circle around the edges of a classroom for a post-lecture discussion during “Christian Emphasis Week”.
I immediately started squirming in mine. The seat was hard plastic and there was a metal arm attached to it connecting the desk, which provided a surface area for our textbooks.
We, and when I say “we” I mean my mom, had to spend hundreds of dollars buying new textbooks every year so I could stay on pace with the other students at the 90% white, private, Christian college preparatory school on a one hundred ninety-four acre campus.
“If you love someone and you see them driving 100 miles per hour towards a brick wall, the loving thing to do would be to tell them they’re about to crash!” the Christian boy continued.
At the time, I identified as Christian. And as much as I was a normal high school kid wanting to fit in, my ick-meter was triggered and going off on full blast. I knew that whatever it was the Christian kid was offering the agnostic boy, it wasn’t love.
There were a lot of cool things about going to that school, like hearing Desmond Tutu and Evander Holyfield talk about their relationships with God, but there was also plenty of unconscious, groupthink with splashes of bigotry.
My mom integrated the school in the sixties and was actually student number eight. She got called the N-word every day of her schooling there.
I was the first minority legacy to graduate from that school in 2000. And even though I didn’t get called the N-word every day, the few times that I did, were a few too many.
Let’s just say those experiences left me with a bad taste in my mouth about “Christians”.
And that’s not to say all my experiences there were bad. There were several families who treated me like a member of the family and I’m still in contact with them to this day.
My own family had deep roots in the church. My great-grandfather, William Holmes Borders Sr., was pastor at Wheat Street Baptist church for 54 years and was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in Atlanta.
I was brought up studying the Bible, but there were always parts of it that felt out of alignment to me. I also couldn’t get down with the hypocrisy I saw and recoiled from the dogmatic ideology that was pushed on me.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had started to shed my identity as a Christian and was exploring other spiritual teachings.
The first book I remember really resonating with me was The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. It was very practical and there wasn’t any talk of hell, or vengeance, or anyone needing to be worshiped and appeased through sacrifice.
When I was 25, I moved out of the Bible Belt in Atlanta to the sunny shores of California. In my ten years in San Francisco, two in LA, and three in San Diego, I lived many lifetimes and traversed multiple dimensions.
My consciousness was expanded by psychedelics, yoga, telling stories on the street for a decade capturing and conveying SOULS of Society, transformative relationships, sound healing, meditation, soul-centered creative expression, healing retreats, and breathwork.
There are so many fun stories to tell about those adventures, but that’s for another time.
By the time I moved back to Atlanta in 2022 when I was 40, I was a very different person.
I had incorporated many different spiritual disciplines and ideologies into my way of life and was sharing the amalgamation of my learnings through the spiritual wellness brand, Dharma Glow.
Jesus started communicating to me on a consistent basis through my intuition and guiding me to go to certain places and explore specific things.
I read a book about my great-grandfather and learned about the grounded way he supported people to grow in the community. He worked with politicians, and other community leaders to make very tangible, practical improvements in Atlanta for the people who needed it the most. An example of his results was one of the first church-sponsored housing projects in the nation, offering affordable, clean, and safe housing for African-Americans.
Studying his work, I knew I wanted to have more of an impact on the material plane and ground the things I had experienced in astral planes.
In essence, in his reflection, I could see the blueprint for doing my part to create New Earth: a place of health, harmony, peace, and equity.
And I am literally his blood, so I feel the continuity of soul calling and am doing my best to answer it.
I started studying the Bible again and there was still so much that didn’t resonate, especially in the Old Testament. And then one day, I came across a YouTube channel called “Giving Voice to the Wisdom of the Ages”.
It’s full of rare, esoteric spiritual books read by a man named Barry, who has a deep voice that brings incredible depth and resonance to everything he reads.
As far as narration goes, I like to think of him as the “Morgan Freeman” of the spiritual world.
I listened to a lot of the books there and found sources of wisdom that were expansive without man-made distortion.
A few that especially stood out were:
A book about Jesus’ whole life (The Untold Story of Jesus) including the missing years in the Bible
a channeled work Christ Returns: Speaks His Truth
and another channeled work The Way of Mastery
With channeled works, you have to decide for yourself if you believe it comes directly from the Source it’s claiming to channel.
Truth is a feeling, after all.
How do you know if it’s true when someone tells you that they love you?
You feel it.
I feel these works when I listen to them. Christ Returns and The Way of Mastery resonate as true to me.
The former feels like a no-nonsense account of Jesus’ life and an authentic expression of love.
Remember, Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He taught love, not a religion.
Here’s a story to share about the importance of getting information directly from the source.
When I heard Paul Simon’s legendary album, Graceland, I loved it. I enjoy his more straightforward singer/songwriter music too, but on Graceland, he embraced world music and incorporated African singing via the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Songs like “Homeless” give me chills every time I listen to them. They sing in Bantu, a language spoken in certain regions of Africa.
I felt such a stir in my soul from the music that I dove into their discography and listened to countless numbers of their albums. Even though I didn’t speak Bantu, I felt like I understood every emotion and feeling.
Then one day, I listened to their “Essentials” on a streaming service and it was full of their English language songs. Even though the rich tones of their voices were still there, the soul sounded different.
Hearing them sing songs like “Amazing Grace” felt so strange.
And then I thought, who decided these were their “essential” songs?
Probably someone who spoke English as their first language.
Later when I did my 23andMe study to identify my DNA and ancestry, I found out that most of my ancestry comes from a part of Africa where they speak Bantu.
So my soul recognized its mother tongue and was magnetized to it.
But the “essentials” were created by someone who had an Anglo-Saxon background and therefore compiled things based on what was most resonant to them. It wasn’t necessarily malicious, but there certainly were things lost in translation.
I believe the same thing to be true of the Bible. Jesus, or Yeshua Ben Joseph as he was known in his native language of Aramaic, was not communicating in English. He grew up in Nazareth in Palestine.
Learning more about his roots helped me confirm that the heavy helping of the anglicized blonde-haired blue-eyed Jesus that was pushed on me, with a side of bigotry, was not in fact reality.
Although there are some beautiful principles in the Bible, there is a lot of second and third-hand information that comes along with distortion at every level.
It’s like Jesus’ teachings were taken through a game of telephone and they don’t come out as originally said or intended.
Since Christ Returns and The Way of Mastery feel very pure to me, I dove into studying them.
I’m 6 months into a 3-year journey with The Way of Mastery now. The series is a trilogy with 12 chapters in each book.
As recommended, I’ve been reading and listening to one chapter each month since 2023 started.
The first book in the series is titled The Way of the Heart.
I start many days tuning into the teaching and there’s so much wisdom, insight, and humor shared. Listening allows me to enter each day from an elevated perspective.
The rough edges of ego are getting sanded down and it’s becoming easier and easier to act from heart consciousness.
Just the other day, I was inspired to act from that higher awareness.
I went to the Patagonia store on the Beltline in Atlanta because there was a scavenger hunt going on for a Golden Ticket to an adult summer camp, Connected Camping.
I’m as big a fan of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as anyone - the Gene Wilder version; Tim Burton’s version creeped me out - so I showed up excited to find the ticket and win a spot at camp.
Hooray for positive expectations! I did find it and was feeling so excited to go!
As I was getting interviewed on IG live about how I found the ticket, I saw a woman leaving the store looking dejected. People mentioned that she had been there since 1 pm, even though the scavenger hunt didn’t start until 4:45 pm, and that she had taken work off to come to the scavenger hunt in hopes she would win the ticket.
Without thinking I said, “Oh, I’ll give it to her”.
I attribute this spontaneous heart action to the time spent listening to the messages of Christ.
I’ve experienced less “me” thinking and more “what would love do in this situation”.
The woman was really grateful and everyone around us was touched by the generosity that was flowing through me.
I asked her name and she said, “I’m Trinity”.
God definitely has a great sense of humor.
Later that day, I went to a hip-hop show at a Christian club because I saw the energy on Instagram and knew I wanted to experience it.
I had two tickets but didn’t find anyone to go with, so ended up giving away the second ticket at the door.
The woman checking people in said, “Oh that’s perfect! Someone was just here who said they bought a ticket, but couldn’t find it in their e-mail.”
She screenshot the extra ticket I had and said she would pass it along.
I went into the club and loved the vibe immediately.
I very rarely drink and they didn’t serve alcohol, so I ordered an orange juice from the bar.
I get social anxiety around big groups of people sometimes, so I was just enjoying the vibe by myself.
A few minutes in, someone came up to me and said, “Don’t I know you from Connected Camping? We were there together last year.”
We chatted it up, and even though I was there by myself, I didn’t feel alone.
I went on enjoying the show solo until a breathtakingly gorgeous, melanated queen came up to me and said, “I’m Basia, you can hang out with us.” She then introduced me to her group of friends and they were all open and nice to me.
I wanted to connect with her on IG, but the timing wasn’t right and I lost track of her before she left.
She told me what church they attend, so maybe I’ll check it out sometime. It turns out it’s a church run by a family who was close to my great-grandfather.
The next day on one of my walks, I was enjoying nature and my friend Casey - who is a co-founder of Connected Camping - sent me this text.
What a blessing.
This is the way of the heart. A way of living where you give to those in need without worrying about what you’ll receive in return.
The natural flow of the universe provides.
This is a very different way than most of us in the 20th and 21st centuries have been conditioned to live.
And walking the way of the heart is very fulfilling.
At this point in my life, my biggest goal is to be a pure expression of Christ. And I follow Jesus as an example of it being possible for a human to do that.
Jesus is my best friend and guide, but I don’t feel like everyone has to subscribe to my path or perspective.
I think that Jesus is a sun of Christ radiating his love out into the world and that Christ is the son of God.
We are not here to be “saved” by Jesus, we are here to be pure vessels for Christ energy, like he was.
We are here to choose to be the living, embodied Christ.
I received the inspiration to give away the golden ticket, but it was my choice to follow it.
And I’m glad I did, so I could be witness to all the good that followed.
I embrace my humanity and don’t expect to make every choice perfectly. But I am grateful that I know what my goal is and have clear guidance on how to live as love.
Hope this gives you some inspiration to follow your heart, find your truth, and let life shower you with blessings.
If you enjoyed this article, I’d love it if you’d share and subscribe.
Would also love to hear what resonated with you and what stories you’re interested in hearing more about.
Peace and blessings
