This man started the Facebook page ‘A Message from God’ and now has 1.3 million followers

It started in October 2006, when writer Lee Eric Smith began to pen a book that included short spiritual inspirations.

“I can’t really describe it other than to say that I felt a voice on the inside saying, ‘Get up and go to your keyboard.’ ”

Experiencing his own personal spiritual encounters over the years, he trusted that little voice, and the journey began for A Message from God. By late 2008, Smith launched a Facebook fan page that now has more than 1.3 million followers, and it keeps growing by the day.

“It was written in the voice of God, and it was just the idea of writing something that would serve as guidance for people regardless of where they are,” Smith said. “The book was to be made available at no cost by subscribing to the mailing list on the website.”

Smith said he would post daily the things God was giving to him to help him through a difficult divorce. His journey started from that dark period, a time when he was beginning to post things that helped him.

“Just trying to get up each morning, face the day with love and hope, kind of making my own choice regardless of what negativity is coming at me and how can I take that, hand it over to God and have God produce something positive out of it. Just making that choice every day wasn’t always easy or comfortable, but I’m grateful for what’s come out of it,” Smith explained. “Those messages started resonating with people.”

The “A Message from God” Facebook page had a massive jump in followers in 2014 after the death of actor and comedian Robin Williams. Smith added a video clip from an interview that Williams did with reporter Diane Sawyer in which he opened up about his relationship with God.

“Given how much he had impacted people with his comedy, to hear him talk as thoughtfully as he did, I don’t know if you’d call it him talking about his faith, but he spoke about God,” Smith said. “I saw that video. I shared it online, and that thing went viral. I think it got like 17 million views around the world, and that really exposed the page to a much broader audience. Then I think that was around the time I went, that it jumped from, say, 100,000 to [200,000] or so, but it’s been steadily growing ever since.”

The 47-year-old writer spoke with The Undefeated about his personal journey and his spiritual page.

Where do you get most of your inspiration to share?

I often go through previous posts that I’ve shared. It was the type of stuff that I felt like God would say to me and anybody else just struggling to get through the day, is how those came. Now I might scroll through a post and it catches my attention, and I recognize that somebody else might get a bit of wisdom out of it. The overriding principle, I think, is that if you believe in such a thing as divine timing, that these messages are posted and the ones that are chosen, regardless of why I may think I’m posting it, there’s a larger plan at work. I consistently see people saying, ‘Oh, my God, this is exactly what I needed to see. I’m dealing with this right now.’

I’m always blown away when you see those because it speaks, I think, to how ultimately we’re all humans and we’re all dealing with the things that life throws at us regardless of whether you’re in Memphis, Tennessee, or Madagascar or Manila, the Philippines. There are people dealing with loss, with financial challenges, with, in some cases, war zones and violence. People are looking for hope. I think these messages tend to hit that common thread among all of us. That’s some of the beauty of it as well.

How much of these messages are self-care inspirationals, you ministering to yourself?

Thank God I’ve been able to move out of that season, so it’s a lot of things that are going better for me right now. I want to say it’s an old Charlie Brown quote maybe, and maybe he borrowed it from somebody else, but the phrase goes, ‘I teach what I need to learn.’ I’m keenly aware, even as I’m posting, that, because there’s this concept that if you are a teacher or a spiritual teacher or pastor or whatever, that God is finished working on you and that you’ve got everything all together and that’s why you can teach this, but I don’t believe that’s necessarily true at all.

Would you consider yourself as a preacher, a teacher or just a messenger?

I would consider myself a teacher and a messenger. I don’t think of myself as a preacher, even though some of the people who respond to our posts call me pastor. I don’t really think of myself that way because I don’t put myself on that kind of pedestal. I haven’t been to a theological seminary or anything like that. I do believe that there are things that God’s shown me over the course of my life, and I’m not even just talking about Bible stuff. God can use anything to teach us, from reading books and watching videos about quantum physics to understanding how photosynthesis works in a plant to understanding artificial intelligence. I mean, I have a broad range of interests, and one thing that has served as a unifying thing for me is approaching how I look at the world as if it all not only comes from God but is God.

That conditions my mind to look for the God in everything. Then if you can see God in everything, then you start to see connections where a lot of people don’t see. I like to think of myself as a messenger for those lessons and those connections, as well as a teacher.

What do you want readers to get from A Message from God the e-book, as well as the Facebook page?

The object of the whole project, both the Facebook page and the e-book, are to help the reader develop a closer relationship and understanding with God as they understand it. I often say things like, ‘I’m not trying to convert anybody to any particular line of thought or religion.’ This project, we have Muslim followers, we have Buddhist followers, we have … there’s a guy who contributes on the page regularly who’s an atheist, saying, ‘You guys are delusional for believing in God at all.’

I want to create, and we have created, this place where people — and admittedly they’re mostly traditional — we’ll just call them traditional Christians, but the environment and the community that we’ve created there is a place where you don’t have to believe the same thing. We don’t have to all believe the exact same thing to show love for one another, to be kind to one another and to want to help each other. It’s possible to be a Christian, or for a Christian and a Muslim to sit down and have a conversation over a cup of coffee and even talk about their faith without coming to an argument or blows and to walk away without feeling like you’ve forsaken your religion. That’s possible.

That’s one of the things that I love about our page, but my thing is that even if you read this book, you read the messages, and I tell people, I’m like, take … don’t trust anything you see on this page, but read it. Take your time and go to your private space. Take it to God in prayer or meditation, however that looks, whatever it is, and ask God, ‘OK, this is what I saw on this page. This is what I’ve always thought. I don’t know what to make of it. What should I do with it?’

Why is this project so important to you?

I’d say I think I was raised, certainly, with a feeling of connection to a higher power. I’ve always wanted to be of service. One of the things that was really important — particularly, again, in the days of my divorce, as I was moving through that process — was I wanted to … OK. All right. Here we go. … There were times when I considered ending my own life. That’s how rough it was at one point. I’ve been there. I asked God. I was like, ‘How do I get through this? How do I survive the day?’ Because at that point I couldn’t look beyond just the day that I was in. When I would wake up in the morning, I would ask God, ‘OK, God, who do you want me to be today?’ Usually, the answer was show love, kindness, practice forgiveness even for the people who are trying to destroy you right now. Pray and forgive them. Pray for them and forgive them and try to generate as much love and light as you can. I would strive to do that over the course of the day.

Now, I would give it my best shot. Sometimes my best shot was just getting out of the bed. Other days, I was able to post some of these messages and try to do that, but when I got to the end of the day and I could have my private time with God and say, ‘Hey, God, I did my best today. How did I do?’ I usually felt a voice in my soul saying, ‘Well done, good servant.’ That’s my advice on how to survive these tough times, is to stick to the principles God’s written on your heart and just try to live them out the best you can each day. That’s what I still try to do. That’s what I still work on each day.

How do you see ‘A Message from God’ panning out, moving forward?

I’ll be doing a podcast. That is our plan, and just to continue to mobilize this community to generate love. That’s one of the things I routinely tell people, is that in spite of everything you see going on in the world, whether it’s political upheaval, conflict or whatever’s going on in your world, each one of us can make the choice to be loving and kind and forgiving regardless of what’s going on around us. I believe what God’s really put in my heart lately is, how do we mobilize this movement to end world hunger? I believe we can do that in our lifetime.

If we can figure out, and we’ve already figured out, how to kill everybody on the planet many times over, if we can figure that part out, I refuse to believe we can’t figure out how to feed everybody. It’s just more a question of will. The way we’re going to do that is we’re going to show people the healing and redemptive power of love. Once we get that moving, we’re going to do miracles. Miracles is where this thing is headed.

Which is, most people tend to think of miracles as a supernatural kind of event, you know: the walking on water, the turning water to wine or coming back from the dead. Those are absolutely miracles, but what God’s revealed to me is that a miracle doesn’t have to be supernatural. A miracle is just a revelation of possibility where only the impossible was thought to have existed.

For instance, if you are poor and you are this close to having your utility bill cut off tomorrow and you have no way, you can’t imagine how you’re going to get this utility bill paid, and somewhere out of the blue a good neighbor, or a Samaritan if you will, gets together a group of friends and they all spare 50 bucks to pay off your utility bill, now you can argue there’s nothing supernatural about that. But if you didn’t think it was possible four hours ago and you look up four hours later and it’s happened, is that or is that not a miracle?