dailydatewithgod

There is something unique about the people with whom we choose to surround ourselves.  There is a common phrase used in leadership and self-improvement circles about noticing the five people we surround ourselves with and the effect they have on who we are, how we behave, and what is important to us.  Scientifically there have been studies demonstrating the power of the crowd to influence behavior.  Often times it is mentioned as a warning instead of something to make note of, something to be grateful for, or something to look to what we might be contributing to others.  The positive side of community in the heart-felt sense is the power of genuine connection.  It is marked by people we can be ourselves with and do not need to put on a show.  Community is the people that we can be vulnerable with and who share their stories of similar situations without needing to fix us.  Community of the heart is there with us in the madness, in the joy, in the confusion, and normal boring ups and downs of life.  For some people this experience comes from family, church or faith-based groups, 12-step groups, work, extended family, school, and many more.  It matters little where we experience community of the heart but that we know it as the place where we can wear our heart on our sleeve and those around us will want to get to know it, all of it, all of us. This sense of heart community was something I did not understand the strength and power of until later in life.  I have learned the grace and the power of being with people who are delighted when I am present, to whom I am not obligated to contribute to but want to because I am able to see the beauty of their hearts and all the messiness.  On the outside we may not have a lot in common but our hearts know how to mirror each other.  I have learned the pain and the beauty of letting others in my heart.  I see that I was not ready for this until I learned to develop that kind of heart relationship with God. Looking back on my life I can see where God showed up in heart communities in little moments all throughout my life.  I am grateful to be willing to risk experiencing it more fully today.

One thing God is diligent about is God’s love for us.  It seems that no matter what we say, do, or feel, God never waivers in love for us. If we are willing to recognize ourselves as made in God’s image, it means the distance we feel from the power of love is an illusion.  The tenacity of love’s presence is alive inside of us.  We may have gotten disconnected from it but just because we have does not mean love disconnected.  In those moments of disconnection, I go back to what I have learned on daily dates with God  and I reach for God’s hand, tell God where I am, and ask for affirmation of the truth of love.  One thing I have the tenacity to do is not give up on God even when I want to give up on me.  Showing up each day for our date no matter my state of mind or how long I can be present for, I do it.  I know it is me God wants to spend time with on our date.  It is the tenacity of my heart allowing me to let go of my ideas of what prayer and meditation look like.  The tenacity gives me the openness to release my expectations of God’s presence in my life.  It reminds me of a song I think I first heard as a little first grader.  In my K-8 Catholic school the graduating 8th graders were standing on the bleachers in the gym singing the song, “Here I Am, Lord.” Even at a young age, it struck me deeply the way the author spoke to God: “Here I am, Lord. Is it I Lord? I have heard you calling in the night.”  Looking back it was the longing and the questioning that drew me in.  The idea that all I needed to do was to let God know that I am here and simultaneously wonder if it was me God wanted.  I did not have to know if I was the one but I was willing to take a chance from something inside me. I am not sure I heard God calling in the night but something inside of me felt drawn to God.  “I will go Lord, if you lead me.  I will hold your people in my heart.”  My tenacity fuels my willingness to be led by God.  I just didn’t know as a kid how much I would be asked to leave on the side of the road.  As far as holding people in my heart, I think it is something that we are led into one day at a time. We all get a chance to do it when we remember to see others from the eyes of our hearts.  It takes tenacity but God provides us with plenty of it if we are willing to tap into it.

I have heard the expression the universe abhors a vacuum.  While it seems somewhat contradictory given that the universe seems to be full of open space, it is the perception based on the human eye.  Perhaps it is less about what it looks like and more about what is actually existing.  One thing seems to be clear,  God’s intentional nature.   God does not create things randomly although life sometimes seems to be random.  We are called to have the same level of intention in our own lives.  We too are creators of our experience.  We may not be the origin of the experience but it is always up to us how we want to handle an experience.  In the grand design there is room for everything.  We tend to think that if something goes away it must be replaced by something else.  Perhaps God who makes room for all experiences is calling us to replace something with nothing. Maybe what our hearts desire more than anything is a time and space of nothingness.  It is the breathing room needed to make sense of the constant onslaught of information and experiences.  It is about having a way of allowing ourselves to ingest and grow.  It is like the naps children take frequently throughout the day while they are learning from everything.  We may outgrow the need for the frequency but anyone who has had a good cat nap could tell you the refreshing nature of a break and a new start can be invigorating. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one to jump on in between time or rest, but my heart has shown me the benefits of allowing room for the breath to awaken me to the beauty of life.  It is almost as though our hearts know deep down the value of integration.  We so often rush to replace one idea with another and not take the moment in between to determine if it is the most fitting for where we are going next.  Replacing something with nothing before another something is what God is calling us to in order to bring our hearts in alignment with how we can grow in love from what we are experiencing from day-to-day.

When we think about people or situations that we hold in high esteem they are the same ones we are mortified when they are not given the respect we feel they deserve.  We voice our opinions, we put policies in place, we encourage everyone to take notice of what has been treated with dishonor.  So how is it that we are okay with treating each other without honor?  If I am created by a loving God who desires me to live out the truth of who I am which is an expression of love, then so must everyone else who is alive.  If I treat myself as less than such a creation, I am not honoring both my design and the designer.  I have often thought that perhaps the common expression of treating others the way you want to be treated is being lived out. In any given situation I have been inclined to be very hard on myself, to lose my voice, and to be harsh in how I speak to myself.  How we treat others may be more of a mirror of the lack of honor we give to ourselves and our divine design than we realize.  Perhaps if we start by acknowledging and letting the core of who we are be our truth, we would be more inclined to honor others.  God has shown me on our dates and through my daily life that when I cannot muster up the energy to honor myself because of the truth of who I am, I can lean on God to show me.  God, I do not see me the way you see me right now. I know it is what is keeping me from being able to honor myself and those around me.  Help me to know in my heart what you never forget about the truth of all your children.

We have this unique capability as human beings of saying one thing and then doing another. It is easy to identify in the grandest of ways.  We call the people who do so in big way hypocrites. But we are all hypocrites.  Unless we have found a way to be perfect, there is room for hypocrisy. I see it in my life all the time.  When it is keenly on my radar, meaning I see it readily in others, I begin to notice it in myself.  It has been most prevalent at work.  I experience it specifically in a meeting requiring updates from people.  As people take turns, a number of them will first say they have no updates and then proceed to continue on about their part of the project or idea.  In other words they provide an update.  Its maddening.  Why do we do that?  Have you ever been asked if you have any other questions and you immediately answer no and then ask a question?  Or you asked if have any comments and you say no but go to make comments?  It causes what we say and do to lack substance.  I certainly have been guilty of both of those habits.  We often do not think before we open our mouths.  Perhaps we do not think what we have to say is important or that the other person does not really want a response.  The point it not whatever story we are telling ourselves.  The point is to bring who we are to the situation.  If who we are being means our words do not match our actions it makes us seem less substantive.  God does not create hollow beings.  We all have a contribution to make and it is important that we make it. I will actually stop myself when I realize I have said no and correct my response right then and there if I need to. The example I run into at work may seem silly but it is a microcosm of what is happening in all areas of our lives.  If we are to live as the beloved creatures and messengers of God the actions of our lives must match our words.  God is ready and willing to help us be a person of substance by encouraging us to check in with our hearts.  From the core of who we are we know the words to say and the actions to take so we are in alignment with ourselves making the substantive impression on the world we are meant to make.

It is funny on some level that a description of a behavior is contained within the sound of the word as we make it.  It is one of the marvels of the English language in the same way much of our language uses body processes to describe situations and circumstances.  We talk about being punched in the gut when we are taken aback by an idea or action of someone.  We say we are starving for attention or that we hunger for something that is emotional.  Shushing is something done often to admonish someone or what we see adults due to kids when they are loud in a situation calling for quiet.  It can also be used as a comforting expression to calm when we are ramped up emotionally.  I can hear God shush reassuringly when I am upset or in pain and beginning to make up stories about why it is happening.  God teaches me to tell my mind to shush when it begins to quickly conjure up reasons for something.  When those reasons will only lead me down a path of stress and pain my mind needs to be shushed so as not to create more chaos and suffering.  It is not done in an admonishing fashion but more of a there, there, it is going to be okay.  I know you want to try to make sense of this but before we do, let’s quiet down and listen in to what our heart is telling us.  Shushing is a way to pause and let our hearts speak to us before our minds run away with the latest story.  The story coincidentally is usually a slightly different version of the previous story it created causing me to feel bad about myself.

Although it is not something we can see with our eyes it is something of which we are aware on an intuitive level.  The lambency existing in all of us stemming from the core of who we are is engaging to those around us.  When we sense the energy of love emitting from someone else’s heart or our own we are filled with the lambency that gives life.  Even in our darkest times it is the soft nature of this light of our being that will never go away. As long as we are breathing we have a lambency alive inside of the truth of who we are. It can take another person to notice it in ourselves especially when our own eyes are clouded by the darkness of our reality.  I remember in college a friend of mine asked me to sponsor her as she went through her spiritual initiation into our common faith practice.  At the time she asked me I was stunned.  I was nursing a broken heart from the break up with my first love and thought my whole heart was shut down.  When I asked her why she wanted me to sponsor her, she said she saw a light in me.  I thought it had been snuffed out.  I in tern was blessed by being able to walk with her as she grew deeper in her relationship with God and aligning herself with a path allowing her to live it fully.  It helped the lambency to go from a soft glow to a bright light and kept me engaged in my own life and remembering to see it as a gift even though I was in a lot of pain.  It was the lambency I witnessed when I first walked in the 12 steps rooms of recovery.  The people there had a light in them that did not bowl you over but was ever-present in their eyes.  It was a lambency I had not seen in my own eyes (the few times I actually looked at myself in the mirror) for a long time.  I was so marred by my addiction to food and sugar that my own eyes had become dull and almost dead to the vibrancy of life’s light in my heart.  I am reminded over and over again when I take the time to look people in the eye, there is a lambent energy alive and well in them.  I do my best to acknowledge it just in case they have forgotten where to find it in themselves.  God gives me the courage and the breath to pause and remember to look for it. I think it is God’s way of helping me remember God’s presence in my every day life.  God is sneaky like that. 😉

We identify hurt in our lives from the pain points. Whether they be physical, emotional or spiritual they present is with a choice of how we want to approach it.  We can look at the hurt in our lives as a message about how we perceive the pain.  We can look at our hurt as though we are victims of circumstance.  We can look at the hurt as some sort of existential punishment  or sign of us being wrong or bad.  Our approach sometimes depends on the gravity of our hurting.  One of the more challenging experiences in my life has come by evaluating how I handle the hurt I experience in my life.  It seems to be the difference between having pain and suffering from the pain.  When I am willing to see me hurting as a call for attention and not a sign of my value or role in life, there is room for my heart to enter.  I remember having an experience on one of my daily dates with God where I was imagining the person of Jesus comforting me in his arms.  As my head lay on his chest I saw his heart surrounded by thorns.  It is a depiction I have seen in statues known as the sacred heart of Jesus.  I asked if I could touch one of the thorns.  He said yes.  They were very sharp.  I asked him if it hurt.  He said matter-of-factly, “only when I believe it is real.”  The more I create story and validate it about my pain the more hurting I experience.  I often think of this experience with Jesus and ask myself when I am hurting, what part of this is not real?  What could the pain be here to teach me instead of hurt me?  It is not easy and I do not default to it but I am steadfast in my belief that I am here in this life to learn from everything and everyone.  God encourages me to check in with my heart because I may be getting lost in the unreal story I have created about my pain and lost sight of the lesson.  Just as those thorns were piercing Jesus’ heart, so too can my heart pierce the perception of my mind to open up space to move from hurting to hoping to healing.

Woody Allen is credited with saying “Showing up is 80 % of life.”  If we aren’t present there is not much we can do.  It is the courage of our hearts that prompts us to show up. While our heads are busy giving us all the reasons why we can’t participate, our hearts can engage our emotions in moving us into action.  How often have we found ourselves doing something we told ourselves we could not or would not do and yet we are participating in it?  I have learned to notice the things I find myself objecting to participating in as well as things I am willing to participate in.  Often there is something underlying the unwillingness in our minds.  If we stop to take a look at the story we have created around what participating means, we can get an inkling of what is driving the conversation.  God encourages us to run our choices in every area of our lives through the barometers of our heart. Participation in life takes courage, it takes faith, it takes being willing to fail, and all those powers come from our heart.  When we choose participation in life from the core of who we are we find ourselves showing up in a way we never thought we could.

There is great power in words.  I do not think it is a mistake that people read and reread texts they hold sacred over and over again.  Perhaps you have known the experience of rereading something and seeing things you did not see before.  We feel a sense of relief when we have words to name and describe our experiences.  The first thing couples are asked when they find out they are expecting is if they have any names picked out.  When we get a new animal the owners have to come to a decision on a name for their new pet.  It has been scientifically proven that human beings love hearing the sound of our own names.  We feel pressure to pronounce the name of someone we are interacting with correctly.  The one who names something is considered the founder whether it is a company, invention or medical diagnosis.  The name of God while not the same for each religious or spiritual practice, is typically held in high regard and used with respecting and reverence.  Naming is more than letters put together to form a word.  It is an identification.  It is an orientation and a way of connecting.  The sounding of a name creates a vibration and leaves a resonance after the word has left the voice of the person speaking it.  Naming is a chance to make a connection with someone or something.  God’s name is written on our hearts.  When we venture to connect with the truth of who we are we experience the vibration of love’s deep claim on our being.  The claim has been there since God wrote our names on God’s heart.  It’s God’s way of showing respect and reverence not only for our names but for our very being.