dailydatewithgod

Our hearts and our spirits are our greatest assets.  Living in a physical material world we rely mostly on our minds to guide us. But our minds guided through our hearts and spirits is what will bring us to a fuller living experience.  We tend to rely only on those things that we can prove or see but it is the Unseen that creates much more of reality than we can even touch upon with our physical senses.  Deep down, however, each one of us knows of an experience beyond the physical, beyond the provable.  It is easy to forget or to push it aside but it is those unexplainable occurrences that wake us up to the movement of Spirit.  There is no rationale reason why we are moved to embrace someone.  There is no evidence to support the decision of a mother who rushes into a running building to save her child.  God spends all the energy of creation to form us where nothing was before.  Why wouldn’t God then invite us to live in the realm of all the energy of creation, seen an unseen?  There is a line from a song I heard over 20 years ago that has always stuck with me: “Sometimes the very thing we’re looking for is the one thing we can’t see.”  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to ask God for the courage to see some of the unseen in our own lives and be open to what will be present itself.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

One way that we can know and experience God is in the stillness.  It is in the stillness of a moment that our hearts and minds can be opened to listening for and receiving guidance.  This is part of my date time with God each morning.  It happens early enough before a lot of the world is going but even more so, it happens before I check my phone or computer.  I have learned that the first one I want to get any messages from is the Eternal One.  It doesn’t mean that every morning I get direct guidance as though some angel appears.  God is typically much more subtle. Whether it is in the quiet moments or through reading a spiritual book, I get a sense of what God’s message is to me for that day.  One word or idea jumps out at me or a picture forms in my mind during meditation.  I can then carry that with me throughout the day to remember our special time together in the morning.  The reality for me is that I desire to know God’s Presence in all the moments of my day, not just the beginning.  Over the years I have noticed my desire for connection with Presence has grown and I attribute it to the date time in the morning.  Similarly to developing muscles, it starts with the time at the gym every day but it is not in the gym where they matter.  They are most useful to me when carrying things at work or dancing or whatever it is that I am doing in my daily life.  My connection is most needed when my head gets loud, when my ego starts on me about how I am not doing enough, and when I feel lost and unsure.  It is in those moments that I can stop and breathe and remember that the Presence I started my day with is still with me.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to how it might be best to embrace the Presence of God in our day-to-day lives in a way that is real for us.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is always who God says God is. God takes care of all that the Creator has created.  Without me doing anything the tidesroll in and out, the trees grow, the flowers bloom, the sun rises and so on.  God has created all these things and somehow they continue.  They are taken care of.  Would not God take care of me in the same way?  Why would God act differently with his creation of me than of anything else?  God would not.  The moment I recognize that all my fretting about and fear of not being taken care is a construct of my mind based on an experience of human beings, I am restored to peace.  God does not act the way that humans act.  This is what makes God a power greater than us.  God is not limited by human thinking and human constraints.  God creates what seems impossible because it is outside the constructs of my mind.  I need to remember this because when I get stuck in a place of feeling stuck or frustrated and I want to throw in the towel, I forget that I can rely on God’s power to carry me through.  It is only my ego mind that resists relying on God.  My heart and spirit look forward to connecting with The Great Creator who can transform the limited human experience I am having.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to accept the idea that the feeling of stuck does not mean that God has disappeared but that we have reached the end of our limited mind.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

Before us stands the greatest moment of our lives–our next breath!  We have no idea of it will come or not, most of us assume it will, but there are many for whom today the last breath they breathe will be there last.  When I think about the idea that all I have is this moment, all of sudden my life comes into razor-sharp focus.  The things that are not so important fall to the waste side and I am acutely aware of the fact that love is all that remains.  So how come I cannot seem to keep this kind of focus throughout the day so that the most important things are ever-present in my mind and I can focus on them instead of getting caught up in the trivial elements of life?  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that God sees these trivial moments of life as just as important on my path of life as the “really important” things.  God is all about the present moment and being awake in that moment.  Tuning into the subtleties of the experience of this very moment, breath in time.  Within this moment is all the love, care, joy, heartache, power, and grace that is needed to survive. And if I stick close to God, I can have that same experience in the next moment.  Just because things are not physically close to me (like family and friends) that I hold so dear does not mean that I cannot be present with them when I am present in the moment I am living in.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to experiencing life fully awake in the moment we are in for as many breaths as we can handle and see what gifts God has in store for us.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

Faith is ultimately belief in action.  It is taking the thoughts and ideas that we have repeated over and over in our minds (belief) and putting them to the test.  Faith sounds all nice and good when things are going well, but when we become challenged, it is harder to hold on to.  It is not something we can see or touch but an inner knowing of the heart.  It is trust in the unseen.  We develop the muscle of faith when we encounter experiences that require us to use it.  But I need God’s help with this because sometimes at the first challenge I want to throw the faith out the window.  How can I at a time in which I need some palpable experience be devoid of any sense of what is real?  How can I continue to believe when everything around me screams that it is not true?  It is then that we are called to a quiet space with God to reside in His presence to sit with the unknown.  It is uncomfortable at first, but by embracing that discomfort our spirit grows stronger.  Our connection to the Great Unseen grows.  God does not ask us to carry out our faith on our own because part of that faith is a belief in the connection to something greater than ourselves.  I have experienced countless times over the years when God did for me what I could not do for myself.  It came because I was willing  to be in my ego’s discomfort of not having the answer but still holding on to whatever little faith I had.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to hold on a little longer, past the point of discomfort, and see if God is really who God claims to be.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

One of the most cherishable elements of ourselves is our capacity for hope. At times it is palpable.  Conversely when we think or feel that we have lost all hope, things look very dark and dim.  When you listen to someone speak of hope they have about something, there is a part of them that lights up. When you watch someone talk of hopelessness their shoulder slump, eyes look down and they seem to be carrying the weight of the world.  I have definitely experienced both sides of the hope coin.  The remarkable characteristic of hope is that it doesn’t take much to help it grow.  All it needs is the spark.  The spark of belief in hope itself. When we reach for God, God reaches back for us ten times over.  All we need to do is be willing to believe that hope is one of the surest signs that God is still with us.  If we have any reason to hope, then we can trust it to keep growing if we keep focusing on it.  My prayer for us today is that if there is an area of our lives that lacks hope that we ask God, where are you in this?  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

The good news is that you are whole and complete.  I know it is not what we are told by this world.  This world sees parts and elements, one side and not the other, and separation.  The ego lives on the theory of separation–persons, bodies, and ideas.  This is how we know it is not the mind of God.  We were created whole and complete and no matter what we may have done or believed in our minds, does not change the reality of God’s creation.  Our task is to be willing to let go of our separate thinking.  We can ask God for assistance as God is more than happy to remind us of the view through which God sees us.  When we are aligned with the thinking of God there is no separateness or pieces, there is only the whole.  My prayer for us today is that when we catch ourselves seeing just one part of something that we ask God to broaden our perspective to see the wholeness.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

When we designed out of love from the very beginning.  Even before we took shape, when we were simply an idea in the mind of God, we were LOVE.  In fact, our very creation was God outpouring love onto the world.  Then as we step into the world and experience and encounter non-loving experiences and an ego that needs a physical identity, we take on the identity and the story presented in the circumstance. This all happens on an unconscious level because as children of love and light we simply want to remedy what is the lack of light and love in our world.  We are giving and generous but lack tools so we take it on thinking that will make it better.  However, even at that young age we forget that if we take it on we are not meant to keep it.  The best thing we can do is take it, bring it to God and ask what do you want me to do with this?  Over time we carry these stories and ideas and believe them to be who we are and we forget all together that which we truly are.  Our task then as conscious adults is to let go little by little of these stories that are layered on top of the truth of who we are.  God invites us gently, sometimes through the most harrowing of experiences where our stories don’t work anymore, to let go.  Let go of the untruth and remember the truth of who we are.  In God’s eyes we are never anything less that what was created, but God knows that our forgetfulness can be powerful.  But nothing is more powerful than God.  My prayer for us today is that we ask God if there is anything standing in the way of forgetting who we truly are and the courage and the tools to let it go.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

This time of year brings about a level of consciousness to how we are living our lives. As we wrap up the year, we look at where we have been, what we have accomplished and where we want to go in the next year.  There are top ten lists of all kinds from movies, people, major events, sayings, and trends of all kinds. Whether one is interested in stopping and reflecting on the year it is being asked of us by many different people.  There is talk of new year’s resolutions or intentions and what hopes we might have in the coming year after reflecting on how we have spent this year.  It is all quite arbitrary considering that the construct of the end of one year and the beginning of the new one is a change of numbers that some dudes in robes in Rome decided on centuries ago.  But is an agreed upon system of measurement.  The reality is that we can reflect at any moment.  Each time we are given a breath, one moment ends and another begins.  We can choose then, even if it is random Sunday in December, to reflect on how we spent that moment and want to spend the next.  I like this time of year with its contemplation and reflection.  I like checklists and evaluations because my ego wants to validate that I can still fit my definition of self-a good employee, a good friend, a good citizen, an all around responsible human being, etc.  There is nothing wrong with those definitions, but they are limited to the outer expressions. This year as I look back I want to notice if my heart has grown any bigger.  What uncomfortable situations have I walked through holding God’s hand that seemed like a mess but allowed me to let go of an old idea?  How often have I laughed?  How many people have I stopped to look in the eye?  Was I as present as possible in my top ten conversations with those that I love this year?  Did I get back up after I got knocked down and did I learn from my “mistakes”?  What ways am I open to my heart growing more in the next year?  How many people do I want to be of service to next year without them knowing?  Do I want to listen closer when God and I spend our date time together next year?  Will I spend less time doing and more time being?  My prayer for us today is that as we wrap up the year in gifts and reflection, we be open to acknowledging the unseen ways in which we have been this year and look forward to more.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

All of life is an invitation.  Each breath is an invitation to keep going, to wake up, and to connect with spirit-to inspire.  We sometimes get lost in the day-to-day to-dos that we forget we have a choice in the matter.  It is however, more about who we are being than what we are doing.  The world measures us by our “to-dos” but Spirit measures us by our “bes”.  If our to-dos come from our bes then we find ourselves living in harmony with our spirit through our actions.  If our to-dos are only in alignment with the world’s expectations and our ego’s sense of self then we lose connection with our spirit.  Sometimes I notice this when I realize that I am not breathing and am tense.  My breath becomes my indication of connection with spirit–literally and figuratively. God invites us over and over when the strain of the demand of the ego’s to-dos gets to be too much, to come to him and be restored to our being.  But we don’t have to wait for it to get too bad, we can choose to be restored at any moment, with each breath.  My prayer for us today is that we stop in the middle of our to-dos and check-in to see if our spirit is present as well.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen