dailydatewithgod

The power of love can be witnessed through the power of light.  We have a cognitive understanding of how light works and how it affects us.  We know when we are in the presence of light and when it is not present.  The tangibility of light provides an inkling of an understanding of love.  It is something that we can sense with much more than just our eyes.  Much like light, our awareness of it is dependent upon our mindset.  However, our lack of awareness does not mean it is not present.  Love and light spark something deep in us which enable us to see without our eyes.  We sense their presence as an emergence of energy.  When we get quiet we can feel the emerging within us.  We do not in a literal sense give light to one another but we all know what it feels like to be lit up by someone.  When we are looking to allow love to emerge within us others will often describe us being lit up or glowing.  The question remains, what is keeping an emerging presence of love from growing in our hearts?  Are there things we are doing or not doing to avoid emerging? God encourages us to allow what is innate in us to emerge and be shared with those around us.  When we are fearful or controlling it is hard to allow anything but those energies to emerge from us.  We think it affects only us and our mindset but others around us feel it.  God desires for us to get curious about what emerging the truth of light and love would look like in our lives and explore it.

We think of home as a place.  It is our dwelling.  It is where we set down roots.  It is where we identify who we are with whom we belong.  But there is a profound space of home that exists within us.  It is where we are rooted.  It is the space from which we identify ourselves.  It is where love dwells.  We find our peace of mind in the home of our hearts.  We cultivate the awareness of our connection to God and all that is in this home.  It allows us to be wherever we are in the world and know who we are and where we come from.  We are not as rattled by the changing experiences of an outwards home because ours lies in a place that no one can touch unless we let them. Home is the space where God and I meet for our dates each day and I am opened to the breadth and depth of life that exists within me beginning with my breath.

We tend to picture traveling as something happening outside ourselves.  We travel from place to place in our cars.  We travel across cities and countries.  We travel when we move dwellings.  Motion typically involves travel even if it is moving our hand up and down.  Traversing implies a pathway and a direction that leads one across or through. So while we can traverse this great big world we live in by train, plane, or walking we are invited by God to traverse the most important distance, the one within us. It is the pathway between our heart and mind.  We all know how to travel with our mind leading the way.  It is more familiar and therefore more comfortable.  It is a well-worn pathway and we default to it quite easily.  This is not a bad thing.  Our minds are wonderful and we would not be here without them. We all also know experiences where we have stepped outside the path of our mind and traversed the way of the heart.  It creates a broader and more expansive experience of life if we are open to it.  Learning how to join the paths of our heart and our mind creates a journey all its own.  In my experience, traversing the pathway between my head and my heart has opened me up to wanting to know more about how my heart works.  Linking the two and traversing together being sure to not abandon one pathway for another requires discipline.  A similar discipline to showing up for my daily dates with God.  Like the dates, the payoff far outweighs the patience and persistence required to traverse the long and winding road of heart and mind.

It may be difficult to imagine that our perception sets up our reality.  We like to think we do not have that kind of control or impact on our lives. We like the idea when we have a positive perception but don’t like it when we have a negative one.  We like to think it is because of the outside circumstances that we are frustrated, worried, angry, or happy.  It is convenient or at least familiar to view ourselves as victim’s of our circumstances.  I didn’t turn all the stop lights to red on my way to work this morning which caused me to be late.  I didn’t cause that person to yell at me or cut me off.  What could I have possibly done to stop it from raining?  Yes all those things happen to us but we are not victims.  We always have a choice in how to see them.  We can choose to assume that the experience is meant to invoke negativity, complaining, dissatisfaction and frustration but that is our choice.  It is like the expression, one person’s junk is another person’s treasure.  When we are in a good place we look to cultivate experiences of more good. When we are in a negative head space we hunker down and just hope it doesn’t get any worse.  Yet barring up the walls around our heart out of a sense of protection blocks any opportunity for love to come in.  Therefore, we end up experiencing more of the same.  If we opt instead to pause and take stock of the mindset we are evoking through our interpretation of the events, we can choose a different path.  Gratitude is one of the easiest ways out of this. I can be grateful to have a car to drive to work.  I can be grateful that I saw the person cut me off instead of crashing into them.  I can be grateful that the soil is getting much-needed water.  It is not about discounting or numbing out from the frustration.  It is about seeing it as the interpretation of what is happening and recognizing we can stay there or evoke a different experience.  It is not easy, none of this is.  However, it is not as difficult as it seems.  It is different.  It is our default to react to life.  Reacting allows us to survive.  Responding is what encourages us to thrive.  Sometimes I cannot get my head out of the angst or frustration to save my life.  My perception is so wedded to the idea that it is not going to get any better.  This is when I reach for God’s hand. God, help me to see this differently.  God, I need you to evoke a different perception to place in front of what I am currently feeling.  God, this sucks but I trust that love is present somewhere in this and it can evoke in me the eyes to see it, help!

Why do we always say there are two sides to every story?  Aren’t there more?  Is it that we can only imagine a limited number of possibilities?  Perhaps it is because our minds would probably explode if we were to comprehend the full spectrum of dimensions present in every experience.  It is much simpler to imagine the good side or the bad side, the upside or the down side of any given experience or decision.  An acknowledgment that God would encourage us to make is what is one dimension deeper than those sides. In the realm of decisions, is it a good side because of who is involved and a bad side because of who is not?  Is it an upside because of what it is we are able to avoid and a downside because we will not have a chance to learn some lessons despite what it is we avoid?  We will not truly be able to appreciate the dimensions of any given experience or decision until we are in the present moment in which it is happening.  Not until then will we be faced with the fullness of what we need to know to participate or decide what next step to take.  Being open to dimensions means not having it all figured out ahead of time.  The gift of presence comes in the awareness of the multitudes of dimensions impacting all our experiences. God wants us to experience the gifts of dimensions and invites us to be present as often as we can so we can experience them as gifts instead of disruptions.

The visual sense is the strongest for most people.  Like it or not we are impacted by how things look to us.  There is a reason why the cliché of things are not always as they seem.  Even with our visual awareness of what is appearing to us we still filter how we understand what we are seeing through the lens of our thinking.  In other words, the moment we go to describe the appearance to someone else or explain it to ourselves it has changed.  Couple that with the fact that we can only view so many dimensions and angles at one time, what appears to us is only part of what is actually occurring.  It is helpful to seek out guidance before we make assumptions and decisions based on only what appears to us.  God invites us to take what appearances we are present to from the eyes in our head to the eyes of our heart.  From there we can begin to get a fuller picture of what is involved in the appearances in our lives.  God has shown me on our daily dates when I involve eyes of my heart in what is appearing to me, my perspective widens and deepens.  I am able to embrace the appearance of many things that upon a first glance I may have determined do not need to be a part of my experience that day.  When I utilize the power of the pause God has taught me, the appearances to my eye have greater value.  The moment I take to breathe in and engage my heart, allows me to see the kinship with someone who by all appearances is different from me.

For some reason many of us carry around this idea that God is watching and waiting for us to do wrong.  We took our experience of human authority figures and slapped the characteristics onto God.  Even if we were not inclined to do that as children, the adults around us shared with us their perception of God based on what they were told.  In all my years of religious education there was a part of me that wanted to raise my hand in the classroom and ask how the teachers knew that God was the way he was described.  They would point to stories in the bible and historical religious traditions but strangely left out the part about how all of these ideas came through humans. Therefore the human element will always be present in those interpretations. My question is why do we look to adults to be the image of God?  Even Jesus pointed to the children.  Children are open and loving, the believe in possibilities, they see the good in things, they take chances on interacting with others and make observations without editing themselves.  They look out for each other and they play.  Perhaps God is more like children. On my daily dates with God I have learned to reconnect with that open, playful, in the moment, full expressive part of myself that I had as a child.  Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  Maybe we could be pointing people to children when they ask what God is like. Then again, that idea came through me and I am a human adult. 😉

My daily dates with God have taught me the power of being in the moment.  I never realized how much time I spent thinking about the past or the future until I was willing to practice being in the here and now.  We all deal with this and it is not a bad thing that we are often not present in the moment we are in.  It is a function of survival to automate our experiences and orient them to what we know from the past or be on guard for the possible dangers of the future.  Learning to lean on God for my sense of self has enabled me to walk through life with much less fear.  It enables me to not have to be on guard in case I might get hurt.  I have been able to reconcile that like all human beings we experience things when we are most open and willing where we get hurt by our openness.  In defense we build up walls which look different for everyone but  at their essence serve a similar function.  The defenses protect us from further harm.  Unfortunately, they also keep us from accessing the depth of our hearts. Slowly I learned to trust that God did not see the harm the way I did.  I thought it changed the essence of who I am.  I thought my innocence  was stolen from me by my father.  God showed me that I just became blinded to it.  It had never gone away, I disconnected from it.  My father was a powerful man in my life as a child, but no human being can take away what God has created.  He was wounded and acted from his past experience.  He too learned it was not safe to be so open in the moment and never set out to allow God to restore his heart.  I became so broken apart by my addiction that I was more open than ever and this time I allowed God in. Instead of experiencing further disconnect from myself, God invited me to join in the process of reconnecting to who I truly am.

By default our minds will categorize things based on information it has from previous experiences.  It is although we have a little minion between our ears whose responsibility it is to play the match game with everything that enters into us.  We have so much coming at us all at once that it is a most necessary function of our mind to do this automatically. We would be completely overwhelmed and probably not very functional in the world if we had to have everything pass through our conscious awareness.  Yet our mind becomes so efficient it will also filter things we do experience consciously.  My daily date with God has brought me lots of practice opportunities to watch what enters my awareness.  God has shown me to observe with greater neutrality.  Before I make the distinction of something being right or wrong, God offers another lens.  The eyes through which God sees make one distinction.  Is love present or is it being called for? Instead of automatically going with the sticker of good and bad, God invites us to pause, take a breath and look at thing from the distinction of love.  When I am open to see as the distinction God sees my heart is equally involved with the consciousness of my mind and I have learned it is stronger and more capable than I ever imagined.