Ogun Holder knew full well the Bible story of Jonah and the whale. His intellectual understanding of the tale led him to believe that running from God was futile. But because he had never run from God before, he thought he d try it anyway. Spoiler Alert: It didn't work.
Holder's journey begins with a pious but questioning childhood filled with mandatory church attendance and boisterous congregants. His road leads to a teenage rebellion, and then to a collegiate crisis of faith. He seems to hit a dead end in his 30s as a responsible grown-up until he paves a new path to Divine self. It's a path he's still walking.
Readers will relate to the honesty and humor in the mash-up of emotions, ideas and experiences Holder shares about parenting, spirituality, relationships and theology. When taken to heart, these rants might, in fact, lead you to your own revelations.
Ogun Holder is the executive director of Unity For All, a nonprofit ministry with a mission of global transformation through spiritual education, empowerment and engagement. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and daughter. Rants To Revelations is his first book.
Over the course of our almost fourteen year marriage my wife said and did things that infuriated me to no end. My default response was to say "Yes Dear" and keep the peace, which would infuriate me even more. To be fair, I also said and did things that aggravated her so much that I consider it a minor...no, major miracle that we're still together.
We don't irritate each other nearly as much anymore. And it's not because we've settled into a relationship of complacency, going through the motions and taking each other for granted. We chose to apply a spiritual teaching that we used with other people but for some unexplained reason we didn't apply to ourselves.
It was to realize that another's words and actions were a reflection of who we are, for better or for worse. When I became angry it was most likely some unhealed trauma that I swept under the rug only to be tripped over by the one closest to me. I had to do a thorough cleaning, not just for her or our marriage, but ultimately for myself.
Book Excerpt
Rants to Revelations
As it so happens, being in a relationship, especially a long-term one, is one of the greatest opportunities to discover the best of ourselves. Why? The idiosyncrasies of another become a flashlight, or in some cases a floodlight, that illuminate the shadowy corners of ourselves we would rather ignore and leave to gather dust and cobwebs of unawareness.
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