dailydatewithgod

We can all too easily forget that we play a part in our minds and hearts.  We are not simply beings reacting to everything.  We are the authors of our life story.  We get to choose which characters get the most lines and the strongest roles in each scene.  Not because we are directing them but when it comes to the narrative of the story, we are the voice of the narrator.  God invites us to look at what we are authorizing as influential stories and people in our lives.  When others share about their lives whether written or spoken it is always done from their perspective. We are the same.  Whether the story has a good or bad ending depends on what we are authorizing.  The power of a particular person and their role in a given situation has to be authorized by us before it goes to print.  Having a good or a bad day depends on whether we are authorizing a negative or a positive mindset.  Having hope or despair is contingent on what view we authorize of our past experiences.  As Victor Frank so aptly put it ,  “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 

As someone who is drawn to writing, which probably does not come as any surprise if you notice that I write these blog posts daily. I am encouraged by how such a simple form of expression allows me to access my heart.  Writing does come from the head.  I think thoughts and then I type or write them out.  Writing is about using one’s body to give life to an expression of ourselves in a descriptive way.  It is not always easy to know what to say or how to say it.  But if we get caught up in whether or not someone will understand the expression of our hearts, we have lost the point.  Writing enables us to take some of the jumbled thoughts in our heads we are trying to figure out and see them concretely.  Just emptying the mind a little at a time creates more space for us to connect to our hearts.  Some of the noise goes down and we can get in touch with the internal compass that is guiding our pen.  Many great leaders and spiritual teachers have shared their thoughts and ideas through writing.  We benefit when we get to experience someone else’s perspective through the written word.  Someone had to write out the scriptural texts we reference to create an understanding of God. But the most important element of writing is how we get to see ourselves.  Not all writing is necessary to share, but giving ourselves the opportunity to release the thoughts from our head can provide a window for some peace of mind is priceless.  Only when we have some peace of mind can we connect to what our hearts are telling us.

Sometimes the path ahead is clear.  It looks like a straight line that will lead us from one point to another.  Yet the moment we step on the path we find the winding curves we did not see ahead of time.  It is as though the road adapts and changes as we set forth upon it.  It can be disconcerting if we chose to walk the path because we thought we knew where it led.  In my life those are the kinds of paths I thought I was taking.  It feels safer to think we know where things are going.  It makes it worth taking a risk and putting time and energy to getting to what we have determined will produce the end result we want.  Yet life does not operate in this way.  There is a flow and a movement that creates a winding path with corners and curves seeming to take us off track.  What if the winding part is the most important part?  Being in the space of not quite knowing where things are going allows us to let go into the flow and just be.  We are not human doings who are only designed to go from one point to another.  Our hearts and our spirits calls us to embrace the winding nature of life and let go and trust we have what we need to survive.  The winding parts are the encounters we did not foresee, the people who seem to be in our way, and the character building opportunities to see things from a different angle.  God encourages us to trust we have not been abandoned on the winding parts of the path but have a unique opportunity to find God within the truth of who we are when what we see with our eyes is not all of what is there for us to experience.

To live life we need courage.  Courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to go ahead anyway.  Courage comes from the heart in meaning and in energy.  To develop courage we are asked to use the muscle of our hearts.  We walk through life faced with many different circumstances and experiences.  Some we struggle with, others come easy.  All of them we are handling in the way we know how.  Human beings do what they know.  Unless we are open to learning different ways we live by our defaults.  This is not a good or bad thing, it is just the reality.  If we want to handle life differently, if we want to grow our courage, we have to step out of our default programming.  We need to be willing to stretch ourselves and be uncomfortable.  Learning to live and breathe through moments of discomfort or unfamiliarity which breeds fear by its nature, requires us to rely on our hearts.  God instilled in us the ability to handle all that we are presented with in life.  Handling it may mean asking for help.  Handling it may mean we are successful on the first attempt. Handling it may mean admitting we do not have what it takes and we do not know what to do.  Our hearts which give us the power to handle it from where we are in the moment does not judge us.  Our minds tell us we are handling things poorly.  Our minds look for ways to get out of handling the discomfort and default back to what it knows as normal.  God encourages us to lean and breathe into our hearts for handling all we are given in life. Our hearts know intuitively how and when to engage the mind without judgment so as to create a cooperative experience of handling this moment.

For as much color there is in the world we have a way of seeing things in black and white.  Black and white are not actually colorless but rather the degree of the reflection of light through which we see and perceive color.  Being open to color or grey simply about being in the midst.  When we are open to color we do not have to depend upon an extreme of all or nothing in order to function.  We make space for breathing, for mistakes, for learning, for the mishmash and the synchronicity of life.  The degree to which we are willing to show up for the in-between is the degree to which we will witness and experience the color of our lives.  God created a beautiful pallet of colors through which we can embrace life if we choose it.

Why is it only when things break we are able to see what they are made of? We could find out ahead of time through investigation but we don’t .  We accept things at face value and presume it is the whole picture that matters. When things break we view them as flawed because the are no longer whole. But if the parts make up the whole, who says witness the brokenness is of less value? What if we gain a deeper appreciation of something because we are not able to see all the wondrous elements that compose the whole thing? God invites us to bear witness to our breaking and brokenness of others in the same way.

Listening to coaches in business and sports there is a lot of language around upping one’s game. It’s about going to the next level, striving to get better, and see what one is capable of accomplishing.  While I would not call God a coach because it seems a little two small of a role to place upon God, she does encourage us. In God’s world, upping one’s game is not just about actions, it is about being.  We look into our hearts to define ourselves and acting from a place of truth. Upping our game is not just reacting to what happens but taking it and being the truth of who we are despite our initial inclinations or expectations of the world around us.  Upping our love, upping our compassion, upping our level of forgiveness towards ourselves and others.  Showing up with the core knowledge resonating from deep within us and being who God designed us to be.  Sometimes we get fatigued and it feels hard.  Sometimes we find muscles we did not know we had.  Sometimes the outcomes are not what we expect.  Upping our games means we are not competing against anyone but ourselves.  How can I up my kindness today?  How can I extend forgiveness where I was not able to extend it yesterday?  What would it look like to up my level of self-compassion?  What is a possible way to be the truest expression of my heart today when I find myself afraid?  Upping our game in God’s world calls for us to rely on God to remind us who we are and trust that God knows what God is talking about when we sense the whisper of our hearts: I know and believe in the truth of who you are.

There is a way of seeing things on the outside of us that we can easily see as other.  While outer does not mean other we tend to think it does.  We perceive something as separate from ourselves as merely interacting with us but not being connected to us.  On the surface this is obvious.  I am one person in a body and unless we are embracing we are not connected.   Yet each of these outer interactions are interpreted by our inner point of view.  We are much more connected than we realize.  To other people, to situations, to ourselves.  It is convenient to label something as other simply because it is physically outside of us, but the real awareness consists of looking at where we can grasp the thing outside of us as a vehicle to provide information of the inner side of us.  We react to what someone says to us we think because of them.  Yet it is our interpretation of them we are reacting to.  Think of any time you have read a text message from someone and been offended by the tone.  What tone?  Even if your phone was able to put a voice print to it, it would not sound the way you played the tone in your head.  Or how often have you been bothered by one person who said excuse me and another person who said it you took it as them communicating effectively in a crowd?  The outer experience if we use it to its fullest capacity becomes a learning tool or awareness of our inner experience.  God invites us to take all these outer occurrences and use them as lessons of the moment.  What kind of space are we in internally when we interpret things with a grain of salt or manage not to take it personally?  How might we create more of that internal experience so we are not feeling as though life is jerking us around?

As people are motivated to live and grow they are looking to establish a name for themselves.  We look at what we stand for and what is important to us.  We work within the parameters or outside the parameters of what is already established and choose to follow along or go against the grain.  God has established the template of love in all elements of life.  It is clear that the light of love is what underlies all of existence.  When we opt to operate in a way establishing ourselves in alignment with love we have the backing of all of life.  When we choose to operate from the viewpoint that all things are a demonstrate of love’s presence or the call to love, how we conduct ourselves becomes clear.  We either want to operate effectively within the realm of life by cooperating with the established system of love or not.  On the path of establishing ourselves as players in the game of life designed by God or players in another game.  God does not withdraw the established inheritance of the presence of love depending on our choice. That would imply that the establishment is unreliable.  However, God does not force our hand.  We can decide what we want to be establishing in ourselves.  God is ready to show us how we can can be the effective in the world.  Aligning ourselves with the established nature of life allows us to be in the flow of creation and seek out many possibilities.  Establishing our role in the game of life, begins by getting to know the truth of who we are.  When we are ready to stop running from what we fear we might be and get quiet, God is there to receive us with the elaborate established nature of the power of love.  Establishing ourselves in the truth of God’s world enables us to find the peace and joy our hearts know as our truth.

The thing about surrendering the way we see things to God and opening to how God sees is it’s too simple.  We think in order to let go of our imaginings and envision something more we have to reconstruct our lives with the flip of a switch.  Our whole lives will be altered in a single moment never to go back to what we were seeing before.  Envisioning is about being in possibility.  Envisioning is about hoping.  Envisioning is about heart.  Our minds tell us we must know all the minute details and have it all figured out before we can engage in possibility.  Seeing as God sees allows us to play by envisioning what could or might be.  It engages our hearts and our spirits to puts around and see what it can come up with.  God not only invites us to begin envisioning what the heart sees around us, but trust it will happen.  We are afraid if we let go of whatever certainty we claim to have the bottom will fall out from underneath us.  We forget that God is there holding the spaces of imagination. When we step like a child into God’s playground, there is not room for fear only learning and exploration.  Envisioning allows us to hope and peek at what is possible.  Envisioning allows us to breathe and be touched by the moment.  Envisioning makes room for what is sometimes unspoken out of fear.