"Perhaps other people are advanced enough on their respective paths to contact a God in whom they believe, but I knew nothing of God when I cried out for help."

Larissa Kaye Batten (LLbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.

"Please somebody help me please."

I wrote the dire words in a drunken scrawl across the pages of my journal over a decade ago.

I do not recall writing the words, thanks to the cloak and dagger of drunkenness I had wrapped myself within to write such a desperate plea.

Nor do I remember how many times I might have uttered or written such words in one form or another at the time.

But I recall with utter clarity the depression and desperation that shadowed my very existence no matter where I walked or ran.

I could surround myself with bar crowds, concert crowds, football stadium crowds, or graduation crowds, and still I was haunted by an ever-present conviction that I was alone in a world of pain and despair.

"Shape up or get professional help," my mother told me once during my college years.

I was well beyond shaping up by that time, and certainly no professional help could restore someone in such dire straits as me to a sense of peace and well-being.

"If you have a problem with alcohol," my mother told me another time, "then get help."

Yet alcohol was only a symptom of a hole so big inside I was destined to find nothing to fill it.

I was scared, angry, depressed, and determined to continue along my destructive path until I solved my own problem with my life - by somehow getting rid of it.

An old friend told me once that it does not take courage to die; it takes courage to live.

Little did I know when I wrote the words, "Please somebody help me please," that I was not crying out for a man, alcohol, food, or suicide to save me.

I was crying out to a higher power of my own understanding that would release me from my pain and teach me how to live a rich and abundant life.

Perhaps other people are advanced enough on their respective paths to contact a God in whom they believe, but I knew nothing of God when I cried out for help.

As far as I was concerned, I was a human shell with a hole inside as large as life itself.

If I could go back and rewrite my journal entry that night, I might choose vastly different words.

"God, I need your help. I can't live this way anymore. Please God help me."

"Child, I am here for you. You are not alone. You have never been alone. You have only perceived yourself to be. Sweet child, hold out your hand, and let me help you now," God would answer.

"But God," I would argue. "You don't understand. I have such a hole inside. How could you possibly fill it?"

My tears would fall like leaves in Autumn, unstoppable.

"My child," God would reply. "You have never had a hole inside at all. I have given you everything you need from the start. You only imagined a hole, for you never stopped long enough to see all my love and faith and hope in you."

"But God," I would argue still. "Surely I could not have everything inside I need. Listen to all the people who cry like me that they have monstrous holes inside. Is it all our imagination?"

"It is indeed, dear child. Look inside you now, and see and feel the soul that is you. Your soul is the God in you. Your soul is everything you have needed all along."

I am a slow learner, and I have walked and roamed and meandered and skipped and run and stopped and started again down a long, awesome, God-given path to the light and love of the deep of my soul.

Indeed, I have found everything I needed all along. My soul is the God in me, and today I have a friend in my soul. My friend is God, and I am never alone.

I never had a hole inside; I only chose not to look. Perhaps I was afraid of falling into my perceived vacuum of aloneness.

Now I know the Truth. I only imagined a hole inside me.

God is everything to me today, and God fills me from within.

"Please somebody help me please," I scrawled across my journal pages that night.

I have walked a long road to find my own understanding of the God I love and the God who loves me, but it has been more than worth my while.

Not only did somebody help me just like I asked for in my journal, but God chose to be the one.

"Thank you, God", I write in my journal often now. "Thank you God for this beautiful day."

Thank you God for this beautiful life.

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