dailydatewithgod

As someone with a good memory I pride myself on being able to remember things that other people tend to forget.  Conversely, I am very hard on myself and think something is wrong if I do not remember something. As I have matured I have learned to let go more and not be so hard on myself, thank God.  The longer I live there is more information in my brain and sometimes it reaches capacity when I least want it to.  I have also learned that in the grand scheme of things, I can trust that what I need to remember I will.  The downside of a strong memory is I can also remember things I would rather forget.  Mostly I want to forget the shameful, embarrassing  or traumatic events and experiences.  With God’s help I have learned to flip my relationship with my remembering.  The grace of being able to remember what I learn from an experience and forgetting the nitty-gritty details or feelings leaves space for a willingness to grow.  I heard recently someone say that they gave a graduation speech and said they hoped the new graduates would fail as much as possible.  I almost gasped and thought about my relationship to failure.  I always saw forgetting as a failure.  It is amazing the connections and meanings we put on things.  I internalized the idea growing up that if I failed it meant I was a failure and I would fall out of favor with others.  Who wants that?  In my daily relationship with God I see that sometimes the most powerful thing I can do is forget the meanings I create.  Things happen.  Life is awkward and uncomfortable.  We make mistakes so we can have something from which to grow. Forgetting my relationship to remembering allows me the opportunity to not have the right answer or be in control.  Ah . . . the freedom to just be. . . .How many more meanings might it serve me to forget?  Growing in the image and likeness of God is not about being perfect.  It is about embracing all the elements of ourselves and allowing God to use them to create love. What one person sees as failure, God sees as a perfect opportunity.

We all have gifts given to us to be shared.  They come in multiple forms from momentary to a life-long process.  We all know what it is like to be touched by someone else’s gift.  It could be their smile, musical talent, attention, money, curiosity, athletic ability, or kind ear.  We are often led to think we have nothing of significance to offer unless its elaborate, grand, or can change the lives of many people.  Yet how important is the offering of a guiding hand to someone who is blind?  How valuable is the offering of a smile to someone who is having a bad day?  How much impact is felt in the offering of music to the heart of someone who feels numb?  As a child I loved the story of the little drummer boy.  The only thing he had to offer was the playing of his drum.  He did not have the elaborate gifts of the kings, but his gift played with all his effort brought a smile to the mother of the newborn king.  When we connect with what our hearts have to offer throughout our lives or even just in this day, we can bring joy, peace, and the presence of love to any situation.

We get to choose the people and ideas that we keep close to our hearts. As adults we have a say that I we did not have as children.  We have voices to express opinions and share ideas.  As children we often do not have a say in who or what we allow close to ourselves.  There are expectations, even as adults, which cause us to be at war with what resonates with us. God does not desire our hearts to be a stomping ground for everything.  What we allow near to our hearts, if it is to live within us, must move with the same rhythm.  In my past when I have allowed things and people near to my heart that did not resonate with me, I chose to shut down my heart in order to make it happen.  There are a million reasons why and they are not important.  The important thing is seeing I was the one to suffer by allowing the nearness to my heart.  Shutting down was effective to numb me out but it cut off the access I had to my own heart.  It caused me to put casings and guards around my heart.  On the outside it looked loving and wonderful.  Inside my heart longed to be free.  After a time, it all broke down and while that was painful, it was the best thing for me.  It caused me to reevaluate what I allow near to my heart.  The actions, ideas, experiences, and people I bring near to my heart now go through me and God.  Each time I ask God, Is this person, idea, or experience something that resonates with my heart? Will cause me to grow in love and give love more fully to the world?  There is no formula, there is no system.   It is a day-to-day walk in the moments of the breath.

My prayer for us is the courage to pause in the moments of our breath and check in with our own hearts and God and ask if what is nearest to our hearts is resonating on the frequency of love today.

This time of year is fondly referred to as the season of giving.  It is a mixed bag of rushing to the stores or on-line to find that great gift for your loved one or coworker that tells them you are thinking of them with love this time of year and sharing the wealth through donations or service to charities. Children wait in expectation to see if Santa will fulfill their wishes and give them what they want, we fret over find that perfect gift to give, and people wondering where their next meal is coming from are treated to a full Christmas experience of gifts and a holiday meal.  These are all wonderful aspects of giving.  Giving is just one part of the process.  This is also a season of receiving.  When we open our hearts and our hands to give, we make room to receive.  We sometimes hear the message that giving is more important than receiving.  I think God is trying to tell us that giving is part of receiving.  One cannot happen without the other.  If we are holding on to something in our hands we cannot take on anything else.  If we give and don’t receive back then we do not allow the other person the opportunity to give.  The key here is the freedom of spirit in which it is done.  Giving out of obligation or expectation means our hearts are still closed to the process and purpose of giving which is love not obligation.  Sometimes it is hard to separate all these ideas.  God encourages us to go into our hearts and connect with how we can give love.  It may be through a gift, a smile, letting go of an idea that blocks us from growing, or receiving from someone else.  It is all an opportunity to give love. Openness to the freedom of the form and our mindset in the moment in which it is happening allows us to be about giving as God gives.

I am not sure if you can relate but it is sometimes hard for me to slow down.  I mean literally.  I will catch myself walking down the hall at work in a hurried fashion for no reason at all. Yet when I do I am able to breath better through my steps.  I think my body actually enjoys it more. But life is one thing after the next and there is not much time to even slow down let alone rest.  I love naps but I do not live in a culture that values rest.  Perhaps it is the consumerism.  Perhaps it is the fear of missing out.  Perhaps it is interest in so many things and so many people. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.  Perhaps it matters little why rest is not valued.  I don’t think God calls on us to evaluate the reasons for why we do what we do as much as the ability to choose if what we do resonates with our inner core and allows us to grow in love.  When you look at Hebrew story of creation, there is this remarkable thing that God does after creating like crazy for six days.  God rests.  It made me wonder when I read it.  Why would God need to rest?  I mean, God is all-powerful and created the concept of rest, but why is God taking the time to rest?  Perhaps (there I go again) God was attempting to model something for us.  We can grow, change, create, start new, destroy, transition and keep going, or we can stop along the way and rest.  God invites us into times of rest maybe not on a set schedule but the mechanism appears to be built-in.  We can go and push ourselves to the brink of death if we want but unless we take some time to stop and let it sink in, what’s the point? If we never have time to rest and enjoy our creations just as God did, did they really serve a purpose in our growth.   Rest allows for breath.  God invites us to not just do, but live.  Living involves time for everything.  I am not the moral failure my mind tells me I am being because I choose to rest and breathe it in.   Sometimes the simplest prayer I can say is “God, help me to remember I am a human being, not a human doing.“

The beauty of God’s vision is the wholeness through which it operates. When we see ourselves and others through the eyes of our hearts, we see a wholeness and a completeness which is the very essence of our being.  Love does not witness broken parts or separated selves.  Love’s vision is complete and continues to hold its vision despite what our minds tell us is happening.  Some of our greatest accomplishments have helped us distinguish our different elements.  Our minds are bodies, our spirits are all parts of ourselves but when we stayed focused on the separateness we lose the message. They work together in a very intricate way and need the complete package to be the complete package.  In the same way it happens as we view each other as only separate.  Yes, we are physically men, women, children, elderly, authority figures, poor, rich, kind, mean and all the many variations of who we are and how we show up in the world.  They are all valid but our ability to thrive and create comes from our coming together.  Finding the complete spaces where we work together as kind and mean, strong and weak, men and women, children and elders, left and right, foreign and domestic is what allows us to grow and be our whole selves.   We think by only surrounding ourselves by those like us are we able to create more love.  Yet when we find the heart space to make room for those who seem most separate from us we can create a completeness of being that would not be there otherwise.

The Spirit of Creation lives and thrives within all of us.  It is the part of us that finds hope in the most desolate and remote experiences.  It is the one extra breath we manage to find amidst the suffocation of life.   It is the joy that catches us laughing as things are falling apart.  This gladness is the evidence of life continuing to create even as things are dying.  It is hard to imagine when we are face down in a time or season of darkness that light will ever come again. It is always darkest before the dawn.  Yet gladness is the energy of expectancy that maybe because it happened yesterday, it will happen again.  It is the trust after each exhale will come another inhale and again and again.  I heard it once said that the reason breath work is so powerful is not because of the number of breaths in or out or the amount of time in between but because of the concentrated attention and decision that one will come after the other.  Our mind relaxes at the promise of the next breath in or out.  There is a sanctity and a gladness found for the mind in the space between.  The gladness of our hearts allows us to be in the in between spaces and not get lost entirely.  It is a trust in the ebb and flow between the b and the f.  Gladness is where our heart fills in the blanks of our minds willing us to hold out just long enough to let love win again and again.

I used to wonder a lot how it was possible to know what God’s will is for me. It is not as though God was going to appear to me with a list of things to do or send an angel to sit on my should with a specific directive every time.  So how in the course of my day was I supposed to know if I was doing my will or God’s will?  Our daily dates have taught me a lot about what it means to listen and hear the voice of God.  I don’t mean hearing an actual voice, but when I am bent on doing something my way, there is often a loud and booming voice in my head.  The moment I pause to consider another option I get a bunch of objections.  It I were to give that voice a visual it would look a lot like a child throwing a temper tantrum.  I know because I used to throw those when I was a kid.  I have learned that what I am hearing there is not God’s voice.  The motivation of that childish voice is fear, anger, loneliness, seeing approval, and proving worth.  I know God motivates from the space of love, approval, worthiness, exploration, and learning.  So an alternative idea to the one screaming in my head would likely be the voice of God.  When I am attuned to the voice of God the answers are often simple, straight forward, and seek to create more love.  So while I don’t hear a literal voice, hearing the themes of love, approval, worthiness, joy, exploration, learning, and peace speak loud enough.

There are many, many thoughts that go through our minds throughout the day.  Many we don’t even realize because they are the same thoughts over and over. The ones we notice are the ones we latch onto.  The ones we allow to lead us down a path of thinking about it and formulating ideas and stories.  The question is, do those stories lead us in a direction that supports us or brings us down? Do they help us to grow or keep us stuck?  Do they convey the idea that we are worthy and here for a purpose or we might as well call it a day?  The first step is to recognize that each thought that leads us is an opportunity to explore it. It’s not about shutting it down or making it wrong.  It is an indication of where our thoughts spend their time and what message they are trying to tell us about ourselves.  I have had many terrible thoughts that I found leading me down a dark spiral and at first I ignored them, fought them, or made myself wrong for having them. Strangely, that did not work.  Then, God showed me how to invite them in and see what they were there to tell me.  A mindfulness practice usually involves learning how to be with oneself and that means all of oneself, body, mind, and spirit.  When we stop running from what is leading us, we have the power to steer the direction by using it to find the light hidden beneath the darkness.

Functioning under the belief that my heart had suffered too much injury and I needed to keep it under lock and key to protect it was a logical choice given the circumstances.  I had just had my heart broken in two.  I was in college and it was the ending of the relationship between myself and my first love.  I remember telling God, “Well, I guess it’s just you and me again.” I vowed I would not open my heart up again until I was certain that the person I was with was someone who I would be with for a very long time.  I was young and hurt and I did not realize I was setting myself up to suffer even more.  It did not occur to me that my desire to protect my heart essentially cut off my own access to it.  I thought I was doing the prudent thing.  After all, my heart genuinely felt like it had been not just broken but yanked out, cut into a million little pieces and then tossed back at me.  In recovery and establishing a more authentic relationship with God I see the fallible safety measures I set up for myself.  I gave myself an excuse from opening up my heart again to myself or others.  I was in a lot of pain and practicing a lot of self-destruction, like someone who did not have access to her own heart by the time I humbly crawled into recovery.  I also did not have the vaguest idea at the time the other elements from my past with which I had not dealt.  Now I realize as God has shown me on our dates that my perception of needing to be the one to protect my heart, while well-meaning, actually caused me to keep re-injuring myself.  God showed me that the protection I was seeking was actually in place from the beginning of my existence.  God set it up so that no matter what we experience in life, our hearts cannot be truly injured.  It can feel that way and we can think it so, but our human experience cannot change our spiritual essence  living vibrantly in our hearts.  I built up walls and put layers of ice and chains on top of my heart and then lost sight of the truth of my heart and only saw my protective measures.  After a while I figured there was no point in looking to see if anything else was there.  God led me gently into breaking down and letting go of the layers of protection I had set up around my heart to reveal a light still burning brightly with love always protected by its never-ending connection to love itself.