dailydatewithgod

In the Hebrew scriptures God tells Joshua of the plans He has for him.  They are expressed as plans to prosper him, not harm him, plans for hope and a future.  Earlier in the story, God told Joshua that He knew him before he formed him in the womb.  Clearly God has had his eyes on Joshua.  The wonderful news is it is not just Joshua.  An abundant, prosperous, hopeful life with a future is there for all of us. God will not harm us.  It doesn’t mean that harm will not come to us.  It does mean that God will not be the one doing the harm.  Many of us have experienced harm in our lives and we blame God for it. I certainly did for a long time. So when we read about plans for a hopeful and abundant future, it doesn’t correlate.  In the Christian scriptures, Jesus conveys the same message.  Many times he tells his followers that he did not come to condemn them, he came so they might live abundantly. It made me wonder, how does this work? In my date time I have begun to see things differently.  I realized I had bought into the idea of God as being some sort of rescuer, he is called a savior, right?  But maybe what I need saving from is not reality.  Maybe what I need saving from is only seeing things through the eyes in my head?  When I shut down my heart to rescue myself from harm, I cut off the main valve of access to God.  No wonder the idea of abundance completely baffled me.  Only after a breakdown of my reality and slowing letting God in close enough to shed light on the darkness around my heart, did the ice and steel begin to melt.  Then I could begin to entertain the idea of abundance.  It is a daily process starting with curiosity and a little willingness to consider that things could be different from what I thought they were.

At the most vulnerable moments of our lives we look to be held by love.  God’s always holding space for us to return to when we feel torn and tattered by life.  She is ready to embrace us when reach out. He wants for us to know deep in our hearts lies a reality of how he sees us. The reality God is holding does not change not matter what we think, feel or experience.  No matter where the winds take us on this wild ride of life, we are held by the consciousness of God within us.  It has taken me a good while to become willing to sit in the messiness of my own thinking long enough to travel the passageway to my heart.  Sometimes it seems as though the road is broken down and under construction.  Yet God takes my hand and reminds me my heart is in me and to just allow myself to be held by God’s unchanging belief in who I really am.  To get to the point where I can relax and allow myself to be held might just take our whole date that day but God is ready to meet me in the holding any time I want.

Within the realm of human experiences is the opportunity to experience life on multiple levels.  Our physical senses alone give us the chance to taste, touch, hear, see, and smell our lives.  Then there is the intuitive sense or feelings we have about our lives.  We have a spiritual sense about what is happening and a mind sense that interprets the information from the physical senses.  There are probably ones we do not have names for.  All of these are vehicles through which to experience and make meaning out of our lives.  We use the information presented to make decisions about what we want to experience going forward.  We also sometimes make the information itself wrong.  The reality is the information coming from our senses has no meaning except for what we place on it.  A sense of smell is neither good nor bad but we have a reaction to it and determine it is one we want more or less of.  There are societal and family definitions of what is a good smell and what is a bad smell.  This varies depending on where, when, and within whom we grew up.  Our feeling sense is the same way.  A feeling of anger is neither good nor bad but we have attached a bad or wrongness to it and made it not okay. As a woman this is especially true.  Yet anger is a helpful signal to know when we feel threatened.  It creates a fire in us that may prompt us to make a decision.  The same for sadness or even happiness.  Our feelings are indications of what we are experiencing.  They are not us.  We are not angry, we feel angry.  We are not happy, we feel happy.  We run into difficulty with feelings when we identify ourselves as being them.  So why is it acceptable to say, I AM ANGRY but not acceptable to say  I AM FRESH when neither is the truth of who we are.  God encourages us to notice our senses and use them as information, not identification.  She is there to remind us that the truth of who we are is far beyond anything we could be boiled down to a smell, taste, or feeling.