dailydatewithgod

There are many moments in our lives that catch our attention. Whether they catch us off guard or we are prepared for them we find ourselves drawn in.  The same happens when God calls but the answering is from our souls and so sometimes we are able to ignore it.  We downplay the call or rationalize our way into thinking that there is no calling from God or the universe.  We like to pretend that we only answer the calls that come through our phones or direct human contact.  But our souls will tug at us from within when they hear the call.  Intuitively we know answering a call from God will open up our experiences to being present in a complete and whole new way of being.  It is what enables us to live in the truth of the love we are.  When we let go of what we think the call will look like or even how we answer we are free to experience God as she is in the moment.  He call to us from within and outside of ourselves.  Our souls know deep within when it is time to answer, it is our work to pay attention to the movement of our souls and act accordingly.

We like to make things complicated.  I think on some level it makes it more dramatic and we love to be the center of our own play of life.  Mostly I think  our minds don’t like to rest on the simple answer.  If it is too accessible there must be more to it we are not seeing.  Sometimes we need to dig deeper but sometimes when we do that we are just making a bigger hole.  I think I pass on the most accessible option because I miss it.  I am too busy looking for the more in-depth reasoning or justification.  This creeps in when I hear other people explain why they do something I don’t understand.  It is often the most accessible option for them, but I could not see it because I am not them.  I am busy conjuring up a big story as to someone’s reasoning for doing something and I have it all wrong.  I have learned over the years to ask God to remove my stories and give me a listening ear, an open mind and a kind heart.  Whether a person does something l like or not, I am not inside their head and have no idea what is most accessible to them when they make decisions.  I believe people do what they know, why would they do anything different unless it does not work for them?  On my daily dates with God I am invited to check in and ask, “God this is what is accessible to me, is this how you see it?” My greatest power comes in remembering that God is always the most accessible.

My prayer for us is the willingness to notice what is accessible to us and check in to see if it is the path we are called to by God today.

Through the practice of my daily prayer and meditation date with God each morning I have noticed the awareness of the small things of life.  These seemingly inconsequential moments in which profound exchange of life and love happen.  It can be a look from a man to his daughter in the grocery line or a grandmother who helps her grandchild who ran off put her shoe back on.  These are small little events which speak to the power of love and care that we have for one another.  In a world where the media focuses on tragedy and terror it is easy to forget that the small moments of life are always present.  One might think we are all at war with each other but the small moments tell a different story.  I would not be aware of these small experiences if I did not have the practice of tuning into such moments within myself.  God shows up in the smallness of life to show us the profound nature and power of love but we have to be awake enough to see them.  It’s in the smallness of the kind driver who patiently allows me to back up again because my parallel parking skills need some work, the laughter that you hear from across the street, and the wiping of tears from the face of a friend.  God is ready to show us all the smallness of love if we want to see it but she cannot force us to breathe and pay attention.  He always has on hand multiple moments of smallness when we want to open our eyes.

We breathe in.  We breathe out.  There is day and then night, darkness and then light.  There is winter and then spring.  Nature, including our bodies, has within its design an active and a rest cycle.  Both are needed.  Our world spends most of the time focusing on the active part.  We get things done. We achieve goals.  We go out and make things and make things happen.  We are productive and therefore successful.  Yet catch anyone who did not get enough sleep and they can speak of how less productive they are able to be that day.  Rest is a necessary part of living.  We cannot simply keep going and being active.  Wrestling with the concept of rest has come to the forefront many times on my spiritual path.  I am so used to thinking of myself as a human doing that I easily forget I am a human being.  If I neglect to slow down once in a while I become robotic in nature and lack flexibility in mind, body, and spirit.  I suppose is part of the human struggle between the heart and the head.  Finding a place and space of rest for one’s mind is what allows for clarity and space to hear the messages of our heart and soul.  Rest is not always sleeping, it is the pausing, it is the letting go, it is the enjoyment, it is the relishing of life.  Just the other day, I was sitting outside eating lunch.  When I finished I continued to just sit there and enjoy the feeling of being outside before I rushed off to my next thing.  In that moment I saw a family pass by and share a special moment of recognition of the two mothers who were visiting as they were adorned with flowers.  It was so simple and yet so profound.  I notice a lot of these simple exchanges these days between people when I take the time to rest and be in the in between.  My daily prayer and meditation dates with God have taught me the power of resting in the moment, being present with myself and all that is happening in that moment.

We spend a large portion of our lives chasing after our goals.  We look for the thing or person or idea to obtain and when we have it we think we will be done.  The reality is we are so used to the chase that not long after getting what we want we are fixated on what we can chase after next.  What if we approached our spiritual life this way?  What doors might open up if we decided to chase our hearts?  What would our world view look like if we were chasing the presence of love in the moment?  It too would never be complete.  Maybe if we transposed our drive to chase after worldly ends to chasing after spiritual ends we would find beauty in the process.  Okay, messiness and anguish sometimes, but always as we make our way through, beauty.  It is our heart which speaks to us of the importance of the chasing being the process not the end goal.  It is the lessons we learn along the way, the acceptance we begin to practice, and the humility that arises from realizing we cannot control the outcome.  Some spiritual teachings would say not to work towards worldly goals or possessions as they ultimately will not provide what it is we are looking for.  I don’t think it means letting go of the chasing.  I think it is a call to re-frame it.  What if we utilized the chasing as a way to expand our hearts and minds in greater love?  What if the chasing brings us to a place of greater acceptance of others and ourselves?  In my experience, God uses everything for the good.  The good is about spiritual growth, about becoming more of our true selves as is already present in our hearts.  If we allow ourselves the chance to embrace the lessons of spirit in our chasing then we may receive fully all the gift of the process of a spiritual path.

Our bodies have these built-in ways of refreshing and renewing.  We notice it when we take a deep breath, stretch our bodies, cry tears, and rest our eyes.  The miraculous nature of these simple physical actions is they also are a cleansing for our spirit.  Within them is a pause when we calm our hearts and slow down for just a moment.  It gives spirit a chance to speak to us and bring us home to ourselves.  Our spirits long to be renewed by life and love.  When we surrender to the cleansing offered by our bodies we connect with ourselves and open up our hearts.  For me this is not apologizing for crying when I am touched by something or upset, not feeling weird about stretching outside of an exercise class or even just giving myself permission to stop and take a deep breath.  It seems silly when I look at it but those little ways in which I inadvertently make myself wrong for being a full human and spiritual being are like making my soul wrong.  God did not create a anything wrong in me or you.

My prayer for us is the courage to embrace the little cleansing and renewing properties of our humanness to create stronger connections to our spirit today.

When we use the faculty of choice in our lives we are acting from our true selves.  God gave us the capability to make decisions about how we want to see the world.  For a long time I thought I had no such faculty.  I viewed my life through the lens of a victim.  Yes, as a child I was the victim of incest, but I grew up.  There is nothing I can do to change that experience but I can use it to inform and build my faculty of choice.  I can continue to identify with that reality only or embrace the one I am in the present moment.  I can choose to accept God at her word when she tells me my true self was never harmed.  I have the faculty to believe when he whispers that even such a difficult circumstance can bring about the most trans formative experience.  My faculties include the ability to ask God, “Please help me see this differently,” when I am stuck in the myriad of difficulties of every day life and cannot see a way out.  The faculty of choice will never be taken from me as long as I am a child of God.  I may not always like my choices but they are within my power to make.

We live in a vibrant active world.  There are so many things going on, most of which we are not even aware of, but it can be overwhelming.  We have multiple senses operating simultaneously that pull in information and filter it.  Our brains are this magnificent machine assisting us in digesting the world in and outside of ourselves.  God calls us to moments of quietude where we can slow down and tune into our hearts.  On our daily prayer and meditation dates God and I spend quality time in quietude.  In the spaces of breath, the lack of movement of my body, and the resting of my attention on a focus to keep me present.  It is not a perfect scenario as sometimes my head is going a mile a minute about what I need to get done that day or what happened yesterday.  But I bring all of that and my heart into our date and present myself to my Creator exactly as I am.  In this space of quietude the first response I get from God is one of excitement.  God is always grateful that I showed up.  I downplay that importance and it has taken me a long time to be able to let that in.  It is so simple but if I was not willing to stay in the quietude no matter what I would never have been able to let that level of acceptance in.  It models for me how to greet the parts of myself I am not always glad to be made aware of or of others whom I rub elbows with on the path of life. The quietude becomes my teacher in the simplicity of creating space for love and light to be present in the moment.

The reality of love within you does not cease to exist simply because you are not aware of it.  No matter your understanding of God and the power of life and light, it is still fully present in full force within yourself. We are blinded by the vision of the world and look outside of ourselves for the love and the light.  God encourages us to take time in stillness to discover the light of love beaming from inside of ourselves.  What stops us is that we first encounter the dark and hardened layers we have placed on top of our hearts.  God is not dismayed by these because her vision allows her to always maintain the true vision of us.  We can engage God in helping us beam a light through the darkness if we are willing to ask.  Some feel unworthy to ask  or ashamed of what they have created.  God does not see unworthiness or shame.  He gladly steps up to help ignite the beam within us and illuminate the innocence we have buried deep within.  On my daily prayer and meditation dates I am reminded that God is always willing to help us ignite the beam of our hearts if we are willing to ask.

The power force of our lives is our breath. Unless we are breathing we will stop living. The miraculous element of our breath is its inherent nature. If you are alive, you are breathing even when you are not aware of it. Our ability to use this power force of life is in our conscious connection to it.  When we can use it to bring healing into our lives. Just think of the times you stopped and took a deep breath.  As you exhale your whole body begins to relax, tension in your muscles let go and you have a new freedom in your physical being. God designed life to be just that simple.  We can make time stop when we pause to take a breath. Any time we need to reconnect with our power we just take a deep breath, bring in new oxygen to our body and then release.