dailydatewithgod

I am a very practical person.  I pay attention to what the purpose of something or someone is. I have a hard time engaging in things that do not make sense to me or do not seem to serve a purpose.  At least not without saying something.  I am interested at heart at what the function is.  I’ll admit I like clearly defined roles and structures.  I suppose it enables me to feel safe.  It is also very practical.  If all the people involved know what their function is they can carry out the task more efficiently, people can provide their expertise, and interactions can be successful.  On my daily dates with God I began to look at the function of others things like my thoughts, my feelings, and my body.  In asking God to help me see things differently I noticed an inclination to focus on the function.  What is the function of how my family and I interact?  What is the function of my leg that is bothering me?  What is the function of the idea that I won’t budge on?  All things serve a purpose and when I started pausing and looking at the function, I found I could distance myself from the stories I had created in my life.  For example, one morning on my way to work I was struggling with how I saw my body. I was dissatisfied with the shape or how my clothes looked and so I asked God, “How do you see my body?”  Immediately the word functional popped into my head. Functional?  I knew I had not come up with that response.  My next thoughts were, “Seriously? Functional? That’s it?!  That’s so boring!  What about beautiful vehicle for my soul?  God presence to the world?   How about totally sexy moving machine?”  I am certain God gets lots of laughter at from how I think.  I, of course thought the best alternative to my self-loathing perspective was one of dramatic self-praise.  Again, I see how God is a power greater than me.  When I focus on the function of my body I am able to see all the miraculous things about it.  The way it gets me from one place to another, processes food, keeps my head and heart connected, allows me feel laughter in my belly, and those are just a few things.  Focusing on the functional nature of my body, shifted my perspective from self-loathing to admiration.  My heart became so full of gratitude for how my body functions and how it does so no matter what I think about it.  When we turn our attention to the function, we are able to see if from a clearer perspective.  One that is not clouded by our layers of thinking and judgment.

Feelings are a funny thing.  As someone who has always felt them very strongly they can be overwhelming.  I often had the sense that I had to do something with them.  Perhaps it was just get them out of me. As a child I was accused of being overly dramatic.  I was compared to a silent movie star named Sarah Bernhardt who was very dramatic.  I took that to mean I needed to keep it locked down.  There was no room for my big emotions.  At least that was the implied meaning.  Feelings and thoughts have energy.  We are made of energy.  What we do not process in our minds, goes into our bodies. My body was clearly carrying a lot of thoughts and feelings at over 300 lbs.  It was only when I stopped using food that I began to experience the ones I had managed to shut down completely.  I also found that my body seemed to have held on to them as if it was waiting for an opportunity to release.  In recovery, I learned how to engage in my thoughts and feelings without being a victim of them.  It is a life long process and I presume I will keep learning until I die.  My first modus operandi was to make the feelings wrong, push them down and then eat over them.  The space between the feeling and the eating was long enough that I never would describe myself as an emotional eater.  The truth of the matter was that by the time I got into recovery I was way more than an emotional eater.  I had taken it to a destructive level.  One of the many gifts of not destroying myself with food is a renewed relationship with my feelings.  They may be uncomfortable or unknown, but if I don’t hurt myself over them I can pay attention to what they are indicating.  Feelings stir within us thoughts, more feelings, and can propel us into action.  Developing a daily relationship with God gives me a space to pay attention and evaluate those stirrings.  Are they coming from a belief system, a person, or a previous experience? Are the stirrings based in reality or fantasy?  Are the stirrings something I just ride the wave of or do something about? Are the stirrings coming from me, another person, or from God?  Any and all of the possibilities that can exist in a particular moment are a lot to process.  I need God’s help with that.  My part is to not judge the feelings that are getting stirred, but identify and accept.  Only then can I align the stirrings with my mind and heart to determine if there is any action to take.  I recognize the stirrings as simply indications of energy moving within me.  For someone who spent her life making her feelings and her body wrong, it has been quite a process of restoration and it happens with God’s help one day at a time.

One of my favorite what I call God-songs (songs that remind me of God and God’s presence) is “Everywhere” by Michelle Branch.  She sings of a knowing and a unknowing of God.  She speaks of how sometimes she can see or feel God and other times she cannot.  Yet throughout there is a sense she has that she can trust God is there and she is not alone.  I think often we are looking for a certainty from God in human form.  Our sight and our feelings are concrete ways in which we experience life.  I believe sometimes God is very humanly concrete, but other times my knowing of God doesn’t even make sense to me.  I also know God to show up in different ways.  I sometimes cannot see or feel God because I expect God to be a certain way.  What I connect to most is that my relationship with God is the one thing that helps me know I am not alone.  Like the songwriter I too have been touched through my eyes, my body, and my heart by the presence of God.  There is no going back.  At the end of the song, she asks, “Do you see me?”  I believe it is a common human struggle to see God in ourselves.  We have evidence in things outside of ourselves but in the quiet spaces we wonder what God sees.  Many years ago when I lost over 160 or so pounds, I had a hard time recognizing myself in the mirror, literally!  My body had changed so much over the course of less than two years and my mind had not caught up.  I started to say a simple prayer at night before I went to sleep.  I would look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror and say “God, help me to see me as you see me.”  At the time, I was thinking of my physical body.  Now I realize my prayer was much deeper.  It was a reaching out to see all of myself and all of life, everything, everywhere with the eyes of God.  Perhaps that was what the song writer was looking for too.

Images carry a great deal of weight in our minds.  Our brains seem to latch on to pictures in ways it does not connect with letters and numbers.  We dream in images.  Clearly there is a language of understanding that gets communicated with pictures.  It is no mistake that any one picture can convey multiple meanings.  Often times we are not able to grasp something until we picture it.  Some languages create pictures with their lettering.  When we can place ourselves inside a picture of an experience or feeling we are better able to relate to what we are experiencing.  God is inviting us to be in the space of picturing where there is not one definitive notion of what is happening. There is mystery in a picture because what one sees depends upon their particular perspective or mood of the moment.  Unfortunately, this is what makes eyewitness testimony so fallible.  The beauty of picturing allows room for things to change.  When we come back to a picture we can look at it from a different angle. Often, once we label it with words and numbers we go with those and don’t look back.  There is a time a place for words and numbers to guide our experiences and interpretations.  Just remember that before you knew how to share your experiences in words and numbers you created pictures.  It connects us with a more innocent place within us.  It creates an openness to mystery.  When we find ourselves attached to the labels given to an experience, God invites us to pause, take a breath, and go back before we created the labels and see what we were picturing.

When we hold on to something, that something has a hold on us.  We do not often perceive it that way until we attempt to let go of it.  In fact, it is not until we attempt to let go do we become aware of just how much of it is holding us. We experience this with people as well as ideas and beliefs.  We have an aversion to loss because we view ourselves as only having a finite experience. We are certain that letting go means we will have less.  I find it curious that some of the most powerful gestures to indicate willingness are open hands.  People hold the posture in prayer, in conversation, and it is what is necessary for a handshake.  If we are holding on, we are not able to receive anything else. I do hope there are things we all hold on to. It is not a black and white experience.  Like all things, God invites to an awareness of what we are holding on to and determine if it is holding on to us.  Especially if it is keeping us from being open to receiving more love. When we determine what is holding on to us, we can choose if it serves us or not and if we are willing to let go.  Sometimes we are not aware that though we may be no longer holding on to something such as a person or a belief, we are still held by ideas attached to that person or belief.  Ideas about who we are or what transpired. Those ideas sometimes deep within us which keep us from being able to receive the love God is ready to place in our open hands and hearts. It takes courage to let go absolutely and it can take time but once we make a decision to do so the opportunities to no longer be in holding are presented.

Taking time to connect with ourselves is important.  God spent all this time and energy in creating us from scratch, making sure we have everything we need to be able to live and carry the message of love. If God finds value in so attentively designing us maybe we could spend a little time getting to know ourselves.  How often are we fascinated by the way we laugh or marvel at how we can walk up a set of stairs without thinking about it?  Do you ever wonder why your heart skips a beat when you see someone who takes your breath away?  Is your heart letting you know something about you or the other person?  If we choose to cultivate a connection with ourselves we can more clearly fulfill the role God has given us in this life. Paying attention to what we are thinking, feeling and doing not from a self-obsessive perspective but so we may use the information to inform our thinking, feeling, and doing going forward.  We may have reached a point in our lives where we do not know how we got there.  I know I experienced it when I got into recovery. In my case, the questions were, “how did it get this bad?” and “why do I feel so purposeless?”.  They were important questions for me to ask. Yes, they were more in-depth than how did I my legs move me up the stairs, but those simpler questions came later. Living in recovery means taking a look at what had led up to that moment and choosing to wake up and connect with myself and God so I would not look back 20 plus years from now and have the same experience.  By paying attention I was able to learn more about the design God created within me and get a clue as to what it is all meant for. It is not a one day, one weekend, or one retreat process.  It is a lifetime of cultivating connection with myself, with God, and with others. I cannot continue on a journey of fulfillment on my own.  I need others to teach me about them and myself and I need God to be with me to know which next place to connect.

We all have a role to play in this drama called life.  Our lives become the orchestration of that role to the extent we are aware of who we are and what we are doing.  We can engage in the beauty of life’s mystery when we are open to how we can be the signature of love in any given moment.  We personally are the message of love in every situation we find ourselves in.  We have a unique set of experiences and characteristics that make us the most qualified person in that situation to be the messenger.  To be aligned with this role we have been personally given, we need to clear away any idea of the contrary.  A lot of us walk around with impostor syndrome hanging over us.  We cannot imagine that we are the ones personally assigned to be the message of love.  So instead we convey a message of fear and uncertainty.  Yet because God is able to use everything for the greater good, all is not lost.  We all have known situations that seemed the farthest from the reality of love which became the catalyst for an opening to love on a deeper level.  Pausing to check in with ourselves is the first step to aligning with our personal mission of love in the moment we are in.

We all have our particular inclinations.  We are drawn to certain ideas, people or experiences.  When we think about the people with whom we will most likely get along, ideas we are open to, or experiences for which we would sign up we become aware of our tendencies.  God has no particular tendency.  All That Is encompasses the grand design of the fullness of existence.  God knows there is no specific person, idea or experience which has any less love within it than any other.  We have tendencies which shelter our hearts from the things we perceive might hurt us as they do not appear to contain the love for which we are seeking.  It is the tendency of survival to hold on to what is known.  Yet in the world we live in today, what constitutes survival is a given for most people.  Our brains often behave as though we are still living as cave people and hunting for food in the forest.  So our desire to survive may extend itself far past what will actually compromise our survival in today’s world because we do not have to fear lack of shelter or food.  There are those in this world unfortunately who do still not have those basic needs met.  That kind of baseline survival is not what these tendencies are. Our tendencies of survival are often formed in areas where our actual survival is not threatened, it just feels like it.   I am very grateful for them as they served me at the time I needed them. When we look at the ideas, people, or experiences with tendencies different from our own and are reluctant to open ourselves it them, it is a sign that we believe it will compromise our survival.  God gives us the power of a mind to extend past our tendency for survival into thriving but it usually means being uncomfortable. Discomfort is sometimes a mask for unfamiliar which can get at our sense of safety which brings us back to survival.  On our daily dates God has shown me to notice the tendencies I hold onto for survival as a flag that I feel unsafe on some level.  When I see it I can pause, take a deep breath, and bring it to him.  She can help me to recreate a safe space in my heart from which I can open back up to living more fully and expanding my tendencies.

Being children of the Great Creator we all possess the capability to create.  There is sometimes anxiety that comes up for people around the word creativity. They have created this notion that creativity is only the stuff of artists and poets.  But creativity is about what you are generating in your life.  Whether it is a thought, an experience, a relationship, a mindset, or a feeling we all have the capability to notice what is generating within us and what is generating from us.  A victim mindset would have us believe that we are at the mercy of our thoughts and our feelings.  Yes, they happen seemingly without provocation sometimes, but we can choose the ones to which we give power.  This  defines what we are able to generate in our lives.  What we focus on expands and when we grow our attention towards the thoughts or feelings that are coming up at any given moment we generate more of it.  Over time if we do this absent-mindedly we build a mind muscle that is defaulted to that particular mode.  This is why people who are older are often seen as having strong ways of being and less open to new ideas.  We become an amplification of our own particular mindset the longer we live from it.  It gets regenerated over and over and it is what we bring to everything we experience.  Who we are being is what makes the experience. The power is in beginning to notice what kind of focuses we automatically generate and deciding if we want to change the course.  We can do this at any time.  It is simply a decision to generate and focus on more of the thoughts and feelings we want to have in our lives.  The ones that can create the kind of person we want to be. I learned the power of this on my daily dates with God when I was choosing to observe my thoughts and feelings without judgment or story.  It takes practice but it works.  It is empowering to acknowledge having the capacity to generate more of the kinds of experiences we want when we focus on what we are generating.   It is not about some magical ability to change the circumstances but what kind of being we are generating no matter what is the circumstances.

It seems highly contradictory to the world we live in to embrace the in between moments.  The times when we are waiting for one thing to end or something else to begin.  The reality is while we are waiting there are things happening.  We are the ones who make the decision that it is not worth our time and attention.  It sets us up for dissatisfaction with our lives in the present moment if we label waiting as something we have to get through.  What would happen if we told ourselves standing was not worthy of our time?  How about meeting different people that we would not normally encounter while waiting for the elevator to arrive as not worth it?  When we put waiting in the context of the situation in which it is happening, we make a blanket statement that whatever is happening is not okay.  God invites us to recognize that life is part of a flow of experiences.  We move from one to the next and while it would be cool to teleport everywhere until the age of Star Trek we will find ourselves in these in between moments . . . waiting.  Perhaps the time of waiting is giving space to focus on something needing our attention either in our minds or in front of our faces. We do not always know when we are the ones tasked with being the messenger of love.  If we hold contempt for waiting in line at the grocery store we may be hindering an opportunity for us to be the face of love for someone on the line next to us.  It is not about carrying the burden of other people’s happiness but acknowledging we are not on this planet alone.  We impact each other with our presence.  Our decision about the worthiness of waiting applies to everything and everyone surrounding the experience, not just ourselves.