dailydatewithgod

As human beings, it is in our nature to create meaning.  I am guessing there is some sort of fundamental purpose to our survival that comes from making meaning.  It explains how stories move us.  I often wonder if it is because meaning provides avenues for emotions.  It seems the longer I travel this path of life the more the role of emotions and their connective tissue seem to attribute to a sense of fullness when it comes to lived experience.  Maybe it is the e-motion, energy in motion aspect.  The meaning seems to provide a portal through which emotions can be channeled.  I often feel like I need an excuse or a reason to be experiencing an emotion, especially an intense one.  Yet sometimes it really just is energy in motion.  It is as though the meaning we place on emotions has both hindered and contributed to our ability to allow energy to move through us.  There are benefits and detriments from all the deciphering we do.  It is not that deciphering is good or bad, but it helps to be aware that whatever deciphering we are doing, it is through our particular lens of life.  We understand, discover, and interpret the meaning of anything through our individual minds.  There are some agreed-upon decipherments but even those at some point were accepted by us individually.  We get frustrated when we cannot decipher the meaning because we do not know how we feel about it if we determine we do not know what it means.  The idea that we do not have a feeling associated with something is either admired or thought to be not human.  The deeper question is whether the deciphering is stemming from our minds, our hearts, or both.  Are we simply digesting the information and replaying it in our telling of it to others void of emotion or are we laying on the emotion to convey our interpretation?  Intent plays a role as well as who we see ourselves to be.  God invites us to wonder how our deciphering would adjust the stories of our lives if we involved the mind and the heart equally in the interpretation?  If something which is causing us pain and restriction were to be deciphered through a different person’s lens, would it still be painful and restrictive?  What can we discover about ourselves and those around us when we opt to broaden and deepen our deciphering of life? Sometimes the simplest prayer I can say in any given circumstance is, God, how are you deciphering this? It is just another way of asking God, to show me God’s lens of my life in the present moment.