God and the sustaining love of God were very real to me as a child-and I accepted both the experiences of God's presence and of God the inward teacher, as completely natural. Let me share one example from my own experience that I remember in all its original power. I was five or six, and playing cowboys and Indians with the neighbor boys. As a girl, of course, I was the Indian. I can feel even now the warm earth under me, and the sun on my back, and I can see the corner of the high porch near which I lay.
Death is no game.
It was a deep, personal, inward realization that, no matter what others said and did around me, that teaching was real and right and I was expected to live by it. It is a homely example, I know, but this is how what I knew of God spoke to me then, and one way in which God still speaks to me now. There is first an inward realization and then the steps set out for me to take. In the case of this particular teaching, I could never play that game again-and I suppose my identification with American Indians stems in part from that inward lesson. When I grew up my own children never had toy guns.