dailydatewithgod

I don’t know about you but sometimes I just need to spend a little time sauntering!  It’s an exquisite word that I rarely use probably because I don’t find myself strolling through life very often. Besides, who has time to saunter?  The fast paced life we live in leaves little room for ambling our way from one destination to the next.  It is incredible the capacity and draw we have to speed.  If you have ever spent time around a little child who is just learning how to walk it is fascinating to see how they marvel at every moment of every step. Do we get that same enjoyment out of our pace of walking through life? Whatever happened to skipping?  Is there an age restriction on that one?  I used to skip all over the place.  As a kid it wasn’t about the speed (okay, maybe just a little), it was about the fun of it.  God gave our bodies all these marvelous choices of how to take the journey.  The magnificent thing is the option to change multiple times during the course of a day.  Sometimes its a sauntering kind of day, other times it is just when I want to be more present to everything along the path I am traveling.  In the same way God gave our bodies multiple modalities of travel, our minds have multiple modes of presence.  Instead of deciding that we should only multi task or always put intensive thought into things, maybe there is room for both.  Maybe both ways are right.  Perhaps we are not being wrong when we aren’t intentional about where we are focusing our attention.  Perhaps it is a moment we need to saunter through our head about some other thought.  I have experienced on my dates with God the immense latitude and openness of Spirit to be accepting and forgiving of where I and my head are in at the moment.  Perhaps God is trying to teach me something about how to be with myself even when I am sauntering.

One of the more valuable tools that I have learned and continue to practice is in changing the evaluative conversation in my head.  As like all of us, I am full of judgments.  It is part of the human condition.  I am inclined to comparison of myself and other people, cultures, families, or coworkers in all areas of life.  Prior to waking up to a more compassionate way of living I was entrenched in the right versus wrong conversation.  I would aim to live rightly, but often felt like I was living wrongly or not enough or the best possible.  The variations of this conversation are endless.  They all stem from the fear of not being enough.  Learning to change the conversation from right versus wrong into works or doesn’t work is significant.  Does how I am being, thinking, relating, acting function as evidence of who I know myself to be at my core?  Do my decisions live out as a function of my role as a child of God?  Taking the sting of the judgment isn’t about getting myself off the hook but bringing it down to practicalities.  When I recognize making decisions from a place of worry or anxiety does not work to keep my heart open and expanded, I can make adjustments.  However, there may be a time when making a decision based on fear that does function for me, for example, when walking alone in a dark alley.  The potential for growth and learning the possibilities in the power of love come more readily when I am not in my head about how I am doing it wrong.  I can laugh at myself when I see evidence of the dysfunction I am seeing show up in my life.

I believe we all have several roles to play in our lifetime.  Sometimes we know very clearly what those are and we step right into them without much thought.  Other times we spend a good deal of time trying to figure what our role is.  Then there are the roles that we are placed in by virtue of our birthplace or society.  Somewhere in the quiet space of our hearts is the connection to our most vital role.  God invites us to connect with the essence of who we are and tap into the power of who we are called to be by virtue of our creation.  We can roam this earth playing all kinds of roles and miss out on the one that fills our spirits and ignites life in those around us.  We often don’t notice until the other roles we are in seem to either fall apart or not fulfill us in the way they used to.  Some people hear the calling from their heart and connect with it early on. Some of us take a while to even notice the heart that is sending the call.  I would fall into the latter category.  The good news is it doesn’t matter when you answer the call of your heart, only that you do answer it.  It is the role of your life and it is not a one time thing.  It is the role within a role which feeds the energy needed to keep showing up in our lives. God invites us to embrace the dance of living from the truth of who we are in every moment of every day.  It comes through the other roles we play and the ones we don’t think we signed up for.  It is about embracing the gift of our life and seeing what living from the space of truth in our hearts allows us to be present to this day.  God has shown me one moment at a time, I can reconnect with my heart and listen for the calling of love whenever I want.  I can also choose to ignore it or push it aside.  In the end I know which decision brings me a fuller sense of life.

Growing up in the desert there is a stillness that exists in nature I have found not too many other places.  There is something about the quiet nature of those early moments of dawn as though it is the breath right before the sun begins to sing its glorious song of awakening.  The quiet is also the space in which I have had to face some more unsettling parts of my being.  Yet the call to quiet can feel like a gentle whisper from God to step just a little closer.  Not getting input from outside of myself allows me the chance to tune in to what is going on inside of me.  I presume this is the reason many spiritual traditions have contemplative prayer practices or silent retreats.  The misguided conception is that one immediately finds a space of peace along with the quiet.  My experience has shown me I will first awaken to how loud it is inside my head before I can reach the quiet of my heart.  Sometimes it is my body that seems to be screaming for my attention. Either way the willingness to be in the quiet is the portal to peace.  If I continually ingest noise and sound there is no breathing space for the disquieted elements within me to make it to the surface. Peace comes from sitting in the inner noise that arises upon the outside quiet long enough to be reunited with the quiet knowledge of the truth of our hearts.  In the season of spring about to be reborn, there is a quiet just like right before the dawn.  Perhaps this is a good time to take God up on the invitation to reconnect with the quiet within existing deeper than the noise within which we resist by filing our outside with sound.

I grew up feeling often like I was hiding.  And if I wasn’t actually hiding I thought I was supposed to be hidden.  Based on my experiences I assumed people did not want to hear what I had to say.  I thought if I kept my mouth shut everything would somehow go away.  When that didn’t work food allowed me to escape along with TV and sleep.  I certainly had moments of feeling alive but mostly I felt as though I was just trying to get through.  I remember around age 20 thinking, maybe it just doesn’t get any better than this.  I was severely depressed at the time and while I did get professional help and enough relief to keep moving forward, my deepest shadows still remained hidden.  It was not a conscious effort on my part to stay hidden, it was my best bet for survival.  There was no space to talk about what was really going on.  There was no one who I thought would listen until I got into recovery.  The magic of 12 step rooms is in one’s opportunity to experience authentic expression and acceptance for one’s authenticity at the same time.  Just even having three minutes in a meeting to stand up and say what I was feeling and no one interrupting me was an earth shattering experience.  It was the gift I didn’t know I so desperately needed until I made my way there.  If I could have traveled a less demoralizing path to get there, perhaps I would have, but that is not my story.  Upon my willingness to face myself, my shadows, and let go of the one thing that I thought was saving me-food, I found a way out of the darkness.  It has given me the courage to face the deeper darker shadows of incest and self-degradation.  I realize it wasn’t a lack of effort or desire on my part to bring the shadows to light, it simply was not time until it was time.  God knew when I would be ready to face up to the darkest stories of my life and let go of those that no longer serve me.  My experiences, while not unique, may seem extreme.  Yet it is the little shadows still lingering that can take me out just as easily.  It is the inclination to distance myself from someone who looks, acts, or believes different from me.  It is the forgetfulness to see another person’s innocence when they are annoying me or not doing what I want them to do.  Those are just latent elements of my shadow which wants to hide and protect my heart.  Those are the times when I need God’s help to return me to the truth of my heart.  With a reminder to breath, I remember that in the deepest part of the core of who I am, there is only light and it is the same with whomever or whatever I am facing in the moment.