Re: Spirituality and Belief crisis...help!

Dear Pale Blue Tint,
I remember when my life was in crisis many years ago. I had reached a point where I simply did not want to live anymore. I had endured a situation which left me feeling guilty, dirty, low and despicable, even though in reality none of what happened was my fault.
I had not been raised in any religious tradition and had no idea of what the difference was between one religious system nor another. It didn't matter anyway because I simply didn't believe that there was a god, as I saw religion as just another weakness of the human condition.
After this episode which produced a catharsis in me, I went home feeling dirtier and more wretched than I had ever felt in my life, and in fact, up until that point I had never felt particularly bad about myself nor regretted very many of my actions. But this day was different, it was as if the whole weight of the world was on me, and there was a life or death urgency to have an answer. In my desperation, I asked if there was a god, but I said, if there is a god out there, I need a god who can clean me up. After crying this out for a few hours, I had a visitation from a being that I recognized as the central character in the paintings of the renaissance period. ( I was an art history major in college).
Knowing that this was a response to my desperate plea, I just asked: "Are you God?", to which He answered "Yes". I said"You?, you mean the guy in the paintings, you are God"? and again He said, "Yes". Then I asked the all important question: "Can you clean me up", and once again He said, "Yes".
Immediately, the most marvelous sensation of warm , soapy, bubbly water started to swirl inside my body, and with every passing second I felt more and more squeaky clean. Bubbles began to rise up from inside of me, and they would go out of me through my mouth, also adding to the sensation of a purification.
Towards the end of this process, He showed me two very simple pictures, but in them I understood things too far reaching to ever put into words. One had brilliant light, full of every color of the spectrum, but rays emanated that permeated everything. This also included all that was honest, pure, happy, clean, good, kind, gentle, beatiful, etc., etc. The other picture showed darkness, full of hatred, meanness, wretchedness, spite, grotesqueness, etc.
Then He said "One is Me, the other is not, which do you choose"? I had to laugh at the question, wondering how any answer could possibly be any different, and I said "I choose you, I choose you". At this point just by my experience, I understood completely who He was, and what all of this had been about. I wondered also how it was that I had totally ignored all of this before this moment.
I was so happy that I began to sing to this marvelous person that had just made me feel brand new. Like a very little girl I wanted to show my gratitude and make Him happy, so I just kept singing. But at some point I realized that anything I could say would not be able to cover or express the inmense joy I had inside, so I began to make up a language to sing to Him, and to my utter surprise and delight I found that He completely understtod me! This caused me to start laughing along with my singing, and I knew that He was laughing too, because by now He had become the very best friend I would ever know.
It was the next day that I began searching for a bible. I didn't know what a Bible was, had never seen one closer than a few feet away, but now I just "knew" that I needed to have one. That I did, and started with the book of John, where I read the most wonderful account of the love of Jesus Christ, and I marveled at the fact that this was the same Person that had come to me in response to my question of: "Is there a god that can clean me up"?
Two days after this, I turned on the T.V. and there was a program with some guy praying. I stopped to listen and I repeated the prayer. Then they gave a phone number which I called. A few days later I found myself in something they called a "prayer meeting", and they prayed for me. A sweltering heat covered my body, and I cried tears that burned as they rolled down my cheeks.
Several days later, when I was supposed to enter a hospital to have a Breast Cancer removed, my doctor discovered that there was no more cancer. Subsequent tests proved that it had disappeared without a trace. I then learned something more about this God I had just found.
He's never left me since!!!
Every single Christian person has a different story, because Christ meets all of us at our point of need. Our needs may vary, but He's always the same. But it is only He who produces the changes in us, we just need to come to Him exactly as we are, and He loves us no matter how or what we are. The one thing I promise you, is that there is never, never any reason to fear Him, and that all the stuff that you read in His Word that seems so cruel or strange about His character, will be much clearer when you let Him come in, because once He does, you will fall in love with Him, and you will never be the same again.
HE LOVES YOU, HE LOVES YOU, HE LOVES YOU, HE LOVES YOU.............//That's why Jesus came "I have come that you may have life, and life more abundantly".