As a child my mother was raised Baptist. She married my father and had me at 15, her religious upbringing basically ended there. Once I was old enough to hear other children speak of God and religion, old enough to ask my mother what it all meant, she told me my religion was basically in my own hands. My choice. That she would not push her thoughts, or lack there of on to me, and that I should essentially, “shop around”!
As soon as I was old enough to start going places without my mothers full supervision, aka, aloud to go places with friends, I started doing just that! I’ve been in I don’t know how many churches. Heard I don’t know how many sermons. I’ve been Baptized, almost twice! I went to Catholic services, I went to a Synagogue, I tried Christian churches, I got to go to a Monastery in Arizona (Built into the side of a huge mountain, sold wall of windows looking out over the cliff. Most beautiful “church” I have ever been in!), I researched Islam, Hinduism, and several others. Nothing ever sat right. Nothing ever brought that spark I have seen in so many religious folks eyes. I never found faith. Never found God. Nothing ever clicked for me.
I’ve had some very “un-natural”, “unexplainable” occurrences, things that most either try to explain away or simply say you’re seeing or hearing or feeling things that aren’t there. So, I’ve always felt there was something. Something outside of my human scope of existence. Something bigger than me. I’ve also fought religion, God, any thoughts of there being something responsible for all of the bad there is. For a long time, I just didn’t think about it at all unless something strange would transpire that I couldn’t look past. In a sense, I was numb. Then my husband passed away. Completely out of the blue, no real warning.
When I tell you this I say it with awe and a humbling sense of there being a force so far beyond me I am not sure it can really be described properly. But the day he passed, it was just another normal day. He went to shower after dinner, like so many other nights. I distractedly said ok as I continued to watch tv. A little while latter I needed to go to the bathroom all of a sudden. Normally I would just hold it, let him have his peace. But this was different, I literally thought I would pee my pants if I didn’t go, “now”. The second I managed to get my butt sat down and looked up at him, about to apologize, I immediately knew something was wrong. Long story short, he wasn’t with me much longer after that. I was there as he took his last breath. Fighting for him, on the phone with 911, trying to give him CPR. All in vain of course, but he knew I was there, with him, for him.
Please, please believe me, something…something pulled me into that bathroom with him. I was meant to be there with him. So he wasn’t alone and he knew I loved him. As unbelievably traumatic as it was, how I still can’t get the image out of my head, I would never, ever give it back. I would repeat it a thousand times if I had to.
My point to all of this, I still don’t know what “it” is. But it opened up a door in me that I can’t shut. Then I found the craft, through a completely unexpected and chance meeting with a crazy, eccentric, exuberant woman who saw in me something I had been ignoring for a very long time and she helped me start moving forward. Since these two major happenings in my life I have been trying to define what God is to me. I eventually started learning about a few different Deities here and there, but not until recently did I really plunge in to single one. I was recently told, by whom I do not recall, that my spirit animal is the Dove. Normally I would have brushed something like that off, like, okie dokie smokie! 
lol
But then Doves started popping up everywhere! Not outside mind you, I don’t do the outdoors all that much these days! But books, webpages, cards, apps, random emails. Like everywhere! So I couldn’t really ignore it anymore. And I started researching if there where any Deities who were associated with Doves. And oh, boy!
The more I looked, the more I found! The furthest back I managed to take it before it started to become just “lore” was Astarte the Phoenician Goddess of love, fertility, sex and war. Which were not all associated with her in the beginning, but over time and from the many Goddesses associated with her she was eventually given all of those accolades. Is anyone else familiar with her? She is associated with over 40 different Goddesses over time. It is believed she was all of them just called by different names of the centuries! She was, is, Aphrodite, Anat, Athena, Venus, Isis, the list goes on and on!!
Has anyone else come across this sort of thing and if so, how do you determine, decide, or go with!? Is that essentially why the Triple Goddess? As she is actually multiple Goddesses in one? Is it the same for the masculine counterpart? Are all of the Gods and Goddesses essentially one God and Goddess in the end, just repeated over time? Man, my mind is completely blown and I am even more confused and unsure than I was before! It is a lot to take in.
Also, sorry about the long back story there! I felt compelled to go into detail for some reason! 
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) The children weren’t allowed to participate in anything they considered not to be a Christian holiday, so they didn’t decorate, hand out, dress up, or anything related to Halloween. They even stayed home from school on those days. I have talked to people that I knew about Jehovah’s Witness… nothing seemed to fit or I didn’t seem to fit anywhere. Where my mom had originally gotten me interested when I was a teenager into the craft, but then, turned that right around when it served her purpose into I was worshipping the Devil & even had an altar in my room dedicated to him. She used the things she had gotten my initial interest sparked from as the defining reasons for what I was doing. (she is the one that introduced me to crystals & astrology when she realized that star gazing & watching the night skies and storms and weather patterns & how they interacted with land & animals around us where we lived intrigued me. As well as when we would go to visit my birth mother & my interest in the differences in nature, the animals, and views from there & kind of comparing & contrasting the two, I made potions and was constantly mixing & matching herbs, plants, playing in the rain, visiting the ocean & how calming it was to me, especially when living in a landlocked state was just about unbearable for me… I could go on… but enough rambling from this foggy brain… 
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church. One of my sons has gone to a church that he said was more like a party, there is a gift shop, coffee shop, singing, dancing, a light show… I think it’s some kind of Baptist church… but I’m not sure… he only went a couple of times. We leave their beliefs up to them. My oldest son follows Norse paganism and works heavily with Odin.
