dailydatewithgod

When we look at our lives through our eyes we can only see what is visibly available to us.  We are impacted by the colors, shapes, depth, distance, attention level, and so much more.  With all the elements we can be influenced it is easy to conceive that we are often hindered by our line of sight.  Then there are the elements not impacting our eyes but the interpretations we place on the information provided by our eyes.  We see things based on past experiences, expectations,  and similarity.  None of these have to do with the actual function of sight but it impact what we tell others and ourselves that we are seeing.  I find it helpful to ask God to help my sight.  I ask to see as God sees because I am aware that my sight is hindered and amplified by so many factors that I may be missing something essential.  It is humbling to admit that our sight doesn’t work like a camera or a video but maybe it was not meant to.  Perhaps it is about embracing the fluidity of sight and not overplaying its value.  God wants us to open the sight of our hearts and sometimes what we see or think we see with our eyes keep us from being willing to do so.

I am very grateful for God’s view of who I am. I am grateful to know that no matter how lost I get in my own thinking about my circumstances God is ready to remind me I am more than what I am feeling and experiencing in the moment.  God isn’t about rescuing me from my thinking and feeling which I wanted him to do for a long time.  She is about standing with me in the moments of distress from my thinking and feeling as the presence of the alternative.  He wants me to know I cannot erase what he created in me and through me.  No thought or feeling will destroy the interior reality God constructed within me.  I may get lost in how to find and connect with it.  I may spend too much time in my head trying to figure it out.  But when I have had enough, am in enough pain, or a little willing to believe there is another option, God is the next thing I see.  She guides my hand to my heart, encourages me to take a deep breath, and see what she sees within me.  He recognizes I may need to spend some time in the interior space soaking it up before I can walk forward in trust of it.  God is just happy when I let go of assuming I must figure out and do it entirely on my own.

In know one of the greatest tools I have learned in my recovery is to pause.  When I was entrenched in my disease I had no sense of what it meant to pause.  If it had anything to do with an agonizing space of silence I would avoid it.  I was not someone who would necessarily react quickly.  I was much more the type to stand back and wait, but the pause I did not have was the one within me.  As a survivor I learned how to make myself invisible and unseen or at least I thought that was what I was doing.  Just keep quiet, no one really cares what you think or feel, just disappear.  I blotted out as best I could my sense of self by keeping quiet in the public arena while destroying myself with my thoughts and my habits on the inside.  I never shared what I was really thinking because you would think I was disturbed and when I did let it seep out I would cover it up with humor.  The learning to pause gave me some space between a thought and a belief.  I assumed because it was a thought running through my head, it must be true.  Once in a while I would earnestly seek out God’s guidance but God always seemed to take too long.  I determined it was quicker to get some relief even if it was harmful to my body or my psyche.  The recovery process taught me to pay attention to my thinking and I learned key expressions like, “Thanks for sharing” when talking to myself.  Little by little God was guiding me to sit in the pause like I sat in meditation each morning on our date.  I realized I could pause, take a breath, and question my thinking instead of taking it as gospel.  I learned the pause provided the badly needed boundaries in my internal life and consequently they showed up in my outer life.  Pausing and breathing is the one thing I can do when I don’t know what else to do.  Over time I have learned to hear the angels tell me to hang on to my heart in those moments and take another breath if needed.  Anything that needs to be answered will be brought to my now more open mind since I paused to put some new breath in there.