dailydatewithgod

God is permanent.  God is everlasting.  God reminds us always that we are connected.  Life reminds us that we want to remember that we are connected.  At any given moment there are many things to be grateful for.  A practice that I have developed over the years is to end my day expressing gratitude.  This way when my head hits the pillow my last thoughts were of the gifts of my life.  My intention is to come up with at least three new things to be grateful for each night.  I have noticed a direct correlation between that practice and the eyes through which I see the world around me.  I find as I go through my day I see things and instead of spending my time reflecting from a place of good or bad, I am able to see what I am grateful for.  A woman crossing the street hunched over and slow and I am grateful to be able to walk with my head high.  I see a couple walking hand in hand and I am grateful that there are people who are not afraid to share their love for one another with the world.  The homeless man on the corner on my way to work reminds me that I am grateful for my job and the roof over my head.  The doctor I am training at the hospital reminds me that I am grateful that I am healthy and not meeting him under other circumstances.  Waiting in line at the grocery store I am grateful that I have money to pay for groceries and all the hands that went into creating and bringing the food to the store for me to buy.  At any given moment there are so very many things for which I am grateful. It just takes practice to see them.  Being in gratitude strengthens my relationship with God and with myself.  My prayer for us today is to discover at least three simple things for which we are grateful that we never noticed before.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is fullness.  God is all heart.  When we engage in an authentic relationship with God our hearts becomes full.  God knows how to fill us in a way that defies imagination.  God wants nothing more than to help us remember the heart from which we were born.  God works tirelessly to provide opportunities for us to return to God and remember how to love.  Our spirit rejoices in these opportunities even when our mind and our body do not.  This is what allows us to move forward in hope.  Our hearts recognize what God is offering and propel us to inch in a little closer and see what it is all about. My prayer for us today is a level of curiosity that will allow us to explore God’s plan for our heart.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is discovery. God is closeness.  When we connect with God we have access to the clarity of mind that only God has.  This allows us to take a closer look at our lives.  We can easily go along in life not stopping to reflect on the way we are being.  We exist a lot of the time on automatic pilot.  Our brains are designed to ensure our survival and as long as we are breathing, the  mind sees no need to stop and examine how it is doing.  Then something happens to wake us up.  Our wake up call is a chance to examine life as we have been living it up to this point.  I have had several wake up calls in my lifetime and they come in big and small packages.  The biggest one for me was when I had to face the reality of my sugar and food addiction and the extra 160 plus pounds I was carrying.  I was in pain, shut down emotionally, and life just wasn’t working. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore that things were okay. I had no true sense of peace in my heart.  I needed help and thankfully I reached out for it.  I could look upon the examination as resulting in a terrible prognosis. Instead I saw some hope when I found a solution.  God knew it was time for me to stop trying to figure it out and learn to fully rely upon Him.  It has been a humbling experience these past 13 years but I would not change a thing.  The evaluation in my life continues because I do not want to fool myself back into the mind or body space I lived in before.  Today my relationship with God is the single most important element in my life.  My prayer for us today is an openness to an honest evaluation of our lives to assess for the level of peace.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is joyful.  God is bountiful. God is God wants us to experience the joy, bounty, and beauty that is within us.  God knows it is there because we are God’s creation and thus an extension of God.  We tend to look outside ourselves for happiness and sometimes we find it.  But it is not the kind of lasting happiness that God can provide.  The power of God’s kind of happy is the eternal.  The simplicity of God’s kind of happiness seems to elude us because it can only be experienced in the moment.  The moment is when we the eternal meets the now.  The more time we spend with our minds in the past or the future, the more it eludes us.  Knowing that we are completely taken care of and looked upon by our creator allows us to breathe a little easier and enjoy where we are in the moment.  I have spent a lot of my life looking for someone, something, or some situation to make me happy.  It wasn’t until I started dating God that I found that those kinds of happiness were fleeting and my eternal source was so close to me I couldn’t see it until I slowed down to look into my heart.  My prayer for us today is the courage to slow down and be present in the moment so we may experience a happiness that transcends any circumstance.  Make it  a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God dwells deep within us.  God is in the places of our heart and soul that speak love. God always sees us as the light that God created.  There is no where in our experience, good or bad, that God is not willing to go.  We stop God.  We act in fear to look at the parts of ourselves that we do not want brought to light because we think that they cannot be enlightened.  We have not been able to do it, so we don’t think that God can either. We forget that God is light and the light exists to dispel the darkness.  We forget that the darkness is something we are experiencing, not who we are.  We can invite God in to the interior of our hearts.  God will not come uninvited.  If we are willing to take a chance that God does not see darkness the way that we do then we can hope.  My prayer for us today is the courage to believe that God does not see darkness in ourselves or others the way we do and invite in God’s view.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God always has right perspective.  God is present in every moment in our lives, even the ones when we don’t feel God’s presence.  As we go through our day we can carry an attitude of connection with God.  Or an attitude of going it alone.  If we don’t feel it we can reach for God’s hand and act as if.  Our attitude determines our focus. Our attitude feeds our mindset. Our attitude determines our perspective.  We can approach our day that God is with us or not.  We can adapt an attitude of gratitude for what we have or focus on what we are lacking.  We always have a choice.  When I am in an attitude of kindness, gratitude and patience I am connected with God’s perspective.  When I am in an attitude of dislike, focusing on differences, ungrateful and irritated I am lacking God’s perspective.  It is not about right or wrong it is about recognition.  I simply need to pause and ask myself if I am finding myself in a space of freedom from the latter or the former.  My prayer for us today is the courage to ask for God’s help in adopting an attitude that align’s with God’s perspective or if we are already there be grateful for it.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is calling. God is knocking. Are we answering?  Maybe we don’t recognize the ring.  Maybe we think the knock is next door. Maybe we keep expecting it to come in a way that makes sense to us.  I am guilty of not seeing God because I had a preconceived notion of how God was going to show up.  I remember many a time being in a Catholic mass and feeling like God wasn’t there. How could that be?  How could God not show up?  Maybe the readings didn’t make sense to me.  Perhaps the communion experienced seemed rote.  Maybe father’s homily didn’t connect with anything in my life.  These are all possibilities.   But what about the kid in the pew in front of me who kept turning around and smiling at me?  What about the older woman who stayed after mass to pray the rosary?  What about the man who stepped out of the way so his wife and kids could receive communion first?  What about the announcement for volunteers to help at the homeless shelter the following Sunday?  Maybe my vision of where God was supposed to show up was so clouded by an expectation that I missed all the other invitations in my heart?  Maybe because I have felt the presence of God very strongly in church before I just assumed it would always be in the same.  God is about surprising us.  God is about enchanting us and finding a million ways to say that He loves us in this moment.  Maybe God knew better than anyone that what I needed to return to my heart that day was not a profound homily but a smile from a child.  Whatever our spiritual practices are they do not define God.  God will continue to reach for our hearts in more ways than we can fathom.  My prayer for us today is a willingness to set aside everything we think we know about how God will be calling to our hearts and be open to answering.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is now.  God is present. God moves forward always.  We can emulate God when we remember that we cannot go back.  The past is there for our learning.  Its purpose when recalled is to notice patterns of being.  Each new moment is a fresh opportunity to be fully present and move with it.  If we take our mind space by a preoccupation with what has already happened, that is less energy for the present.  Then we find ourselves missing out on the very moments that propel us forward.  Wherever we are in the presence of our mind is what we take with us into the next moment. So our forwardness can come from the present or the past.  It is our choice.   God does not spend time ruminating over what we have done.  God is all about what we are going to now.  Sometimes there are amends to be made but those are changes going forward so that we don’t continue to act from the same place we did in the past.  My prayer for us today is a willingness to let the past be in the past and embrace the moment of now where God is and go forward.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is limitless.  God is boundless.  We were created in our fullness of spirit to create continually. We create with energy that is embodied in our thoughts and in our actions. We cannot help but be creative because we were designed by the ultimate creator.  The request that God has made of us is to create and expand the love that is within us.  God calls us to bear the fruit of love in all we do.  We have what we need to do this we just forget.  Our minds have often disconnected from our hearts in many ways causing us to not go to love as our first resource.  God can and will restore this within us if we ask.  When the restoration occurs we can be fruitful with our love in a boundless and limitless manner.  The return to love requires us to reach for the hand of God and admit that we have lost our way.  God does not judge but gets excited that we have asked to be restored.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to ask for God’s helping hand in restoring our heart so that we can be fruitful in the creation of our day.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is the brilliance of the shining sun. God is the magnificence of a shooting star.  God is the softening of a warm hug.  We can live in and through this same reality when we want to.  Anytime it is open and available to us because God’s glorious being permeates all of reality.  The brilliance, magnificence, and warmth are present in so many forms if we open our eyes.  Not just the eyes in our head, but the eyes of our heart and soul.  They are what guide us to connect with the glory. If we slow down a bit and get quiet and connect within we will notice that deep down we want to be in the space and experience of glory.  We desire at the most core of our being to be so connected to our creator that our heart leaps when we are present to it in the smallest of forms.  It doesn’t need to be grand gestures of love that move us.  Sometimes I am struck in the deepest way by the simplest of expressions.  Today I saw a man open the car door for his date as they were leaving the restaurant and as I took a breath I noticed that my heart was smiling.  A very simple act of kindness has the power to move and transform us.  When we allow it in, we can then spread the glory of love in our own small way.  My prayer for us today is that the eyes of our heart and soul be open to witnessing the glory of love in the smallest of ways and in that moment breathe it in.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen