dailydatewithgod

As we grow and progress in our lives there are designated markers which let us know we have reached the top. The awards, the graduations, the promotions, the accolades, and the prizes. There is a concrete expected way for us to know we have reached the summit, we have made it, we are at the pinnacle. Since we live in a world that readily has available a number of ways of knowing whether or not we have accomplished the goal or deserve to say we have reached the pinnacle we do not often stop to pay attention to all the little pinnacles along the way. How many marathon runners consider it a pinnacle the first time they went for a run or even put on their sneakers? How many actors consider it a pinnacle the time they memorized the lines of their Oscar winning role? More importantly, how many people just stop being and living once they have reached a pinnacle of any kind? Unless the pinnacle is a death certificate, no one. God invites us to look at all the pinnacles we are reaching each day of our lives. How about our first breath of the day? What about the smile we gave someone instead of a frown despite how frustrated we were standing in line? Measuring the pinnacles of our lives only by the outside world’s recognition leaves little if any acknowledgement of the journey especially the journey of the heart. When we use our hearts to open our eyes to the variety of pinnacles we are reaching within one given day, we open up the power of gratitude and see all of life through a new lens. It is so easy to take for granted the idea that taking our first breath today is a pinnacle and the only way we were able to set a course for the next step which will get us to the pinnacles that everyone else is able to see. It is not an either or proposition. It is both and. Allowing our hearts to adjust the lens of our minds to seeing the pinnacles along the way to the understood or accepted summit changes who we are being and makes room to fully embody the experience of reaching the pinnacle everyone else is able to recognize. God calls us to see ourselves as the pinnacle of creation she sees at every moment of life.

Is it possible while we are busy trying to reach the pinnacle of accomplishment according to the world we are clouding the vision of our hearts present to our embodiment of the pinnacle of life today?

There are many groups in which we belong simply because we fit a certain set of characteristics that we had no choice in like gender, familial order, and color of hair. Additionally, we find ourselves in a collective because of the profession we are in, the school we go to, the trip we are on, and more. Being a part of those collectives are somewhat of a default unless of course we chose a particular profession because we wanted to be a part of that group. The instances in which we choose the group or we accept the group’s invitation to join them are the ones that are perhaps a truer representation of who we are. Yet, given that we have no control of the behaviors and actions of others, sometimes what is labeled as a collective action may not be something of which we are aligned. Navigating the need for belonging and the innate desire of our hearts to be the truest expression of ourselves can put us in conflict with ourselves. It requires creativity to navigate how we want to show up and participate in a collective. God invites us to relish the collectives we are a part of as they represent the oneness of the truth of life while still honoring the truth of our expression of the same oneness. It is not easy, but courage means moving through discomfort and fear holding on to the hope and trust in the power of God within us. Simple but not easy. Sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is acknowledge and accept that every person is fumbling with how best to creatively show up with a collective and as the truth of who they are at any moment just as we are.

Are we willing to rely on the courage of our hearts which gives us the power to dance creatively in what it means to be a part of a collective and the truth of who we are today?

We all think we want certainty. For certain it would bring relief to our minds. It would help us to feel less anxious. We could face the world with greater assurance. We would also find ourselves with no need to be present any longer. Our minds would wander into unknown possibilities of what we could be doing instead. Instead of doing or being in the very thing, we were certain was going to happen. The challenge with certainty is the assurance we seek in it robs us of one of the vital elements of what it means to be alive. God encourages us to rest in the amount of certainty provided in everyday life as it comes. God invites us to breathe and live in the assurance of uncertainty. It is what calls us to find the assurance we seek outside ourselves within ourselves. The lack of certainty garners the resources of our hearts that revel in novelty and mystery which can feed our minds the same if we are willing to accept it. The assurance we seek outside is a mirror of what we are not finding within ourselves. Finding a resting place in the heart of who we are to be capable and available to what is calling us to show up as the best version of ourselves in this very moment is what it means to be alive. It does not always make sense. We cannot know for certain how it will turn out. But when we go within our hearts to find the truth and meaning of the very core of who we are we find the assurance that for right here, right now, we are exactly where we are supposed to be. Yes, I know it is not always easy but fretting about how to make things more certain never brought me the kind of peace of mind that taking a moment to pause and connect into my heart to remind me of the beauty of being alive always does if I let it.

Are we willing to discover a way to take a pause from our mind’s sometimes frantic attempt to look for certainty and tap into the well of assurance of what it means to be alive today?

So often choices in life are presented as an either-or. It makes sense given that we live in a universe of duality that the easiest thing would be to pick one or the other. The longer I am around in this game of life the more I see between the choices. I see levels and nuances that exist when making room at least in some way for both. It is as though it is less of either or and more of and. How much do we value the light when we have been in the dark? How much more grateful we are for freedom when we have had to experience imprisonment? It is as though there is a spectrum of reality and depending on what we are focusing on we see the flaws or the features. They both exist simultaneously, so our choice is based on what we want or need to focus on at the moment. It is not about how to be rid of one. Over time a feature can become a flaw and vice versa. It becomes about a creative lens and an awareness of what end of the spectrum is drawing our attention. God invites us to embrace the creativity of our minds in helping us to know where to focus on our attention when it comes to making choices in our lives. Just because we choose to focus on the flaw does not mean we have to rid ourselves of it. Perhaps the reason it is in our awareness is to bring the creative spirit of our hearts to adjust the lens through which we are seeing it. Our hearts may be knocking on the door of our minds to shift our perspective to how we can bring the flaw into the light and see its features.

Are we open to broadening the spectrum of sight the lens of our hearts illuminates for us when we are looking at our flaws today?

It is outside our realm of understanding what unconditional love actually is. We talk about it like it is something we should all expect of ourselves or others. Living in a limited bodily experience means we can have moments of it. Just as everything cycles there are times when it is there and times when it is not. The moment we think we have grasped it we lose it. God is the embodiment of unconditional love. Because God is love and nothing else. We get a taste through other people or experiences but to fully know can only come from experience with God. I do not mean a God of our human understanding but something beyond even that. Most of what we carry around in our notion of God is an idea of God in human image. With God, love is like basking in the sun. It is a complete and total experience. It is not something that will wax and wain. It is all-consuming and cannot be turned away from. It is not a human fault that we cannot comprehend the unconditionality of love. It is in the design. As St. Augustine put it many years ago, “our heart is restless until it finds is rest in thee.” We are created to be in a relationship with God. The kind of relationship we will not get anywhere else. The best thing we can do for ourselves is let go of our ideas of what we think we know about God and love and dare to imagine what it would be like to simply bask in the gaze of a beloved being who sees nothing other than love.It takes creativity to set aside what we have hard-wired into our brain based on the limitations of love we experience as corporal beings. But with God all things are possible.

Are we open to creatively exploring what it would be like to bask in the love of God if only for a moment today?

I still remember this commercial I saw as a kid. It was for some kind of pain relief and the lyrics of the music were “I haven’t got time for the pain.” Somewhere internally I recall thinking, good luck with that. Life has all kinds of pain. It is this strange philosophy that seems to exist with us humans that we want to exclude the parts we don’t like. I am not a hedonist, I do not seek out pain or discomfort but it does happen. I don’t revel in it but I have come to terms with the idea that perhaps there is more to it than my limited perspective of not having time for it. Life has a way of directing us to what we do or do not have time for. I always think pain is the great equalizer. No one gets through this life without it and it is one of the things which we can all relate to. It comes in many different forms and in my recovery I have learned to cultivate a different relationship with it. I mean really, if it exists, then it must be in the design. If God created it in the design it is either because it serves some sort of purpose for growth or because God is bored and sadistic. I have had my moments of believing the latter but found nothing but despair and apathy. God invites us to create new relationships with all kinds of life’s experiences. To pause and step outside of the accepted conversation steering from what human’s have decided and take a closer look. Ironically the remedy to pain is not to run from it, but to give it time to tell me why its here. What it is to teach me. After all, it is neither good nor bad, but my thinking makes it so. It may be inconvenient but who said life was supposed to be convenient. Probably the same people who say life is supposed to be fair. Engaging in the relationship with God means opening myself up more and more to how God sees things and how God sees me. I know from my daily dates with God that the loving vision God has of me is much greater than I have of me. God trusts in my strength, my courage, my compassion, my ability to feel and connect, my desire to know all of what life has to offer, and so much more. When I am faced with pain I fall for my beliefs about me. Those are always limited. Strangely the remedy to life’s pain has become a willingness to lean more deeply into God. Not because God will rescue me from it but because wants to reveal to me who God knows me to be deep down.

Are we curious enough to make time for the pain and discover God’s remedy today?

I was reminded recently about the power of clarity that comes from pairing things down when deciphering how to handle a situation. It is something I learned a while back which with practice gets easier. We are such creative beings and we learn through storytelling so it is quite natural when we are sharing an experience or presenting information to elaborate or embellish. It is more convincing if we can provide nuance details about the scene and the mood of a situation. Even better when we present the inner narrative of the people involved and the felt sense or unspoken experience of others who were there. Much like when we read a story it would cease to be a story without those details. No one picks up a book or reads an article expecting a list items. Yet at the same time, what we are reacting to in a given situation is rarely about what is actually happening and more of what we make it mean. The meaning we attach to experiences is based on those filled in details that we create. In order to provide elucidation about why we are having the reaction we are having we need to cut out the elaboration. It is not easy and feels counterintuitive. It is a practice that God invites us into when we are ready to seek peace around whatever it is. Seeking elucidation about our reaction to a given experience is the opportunity to get to know ourselves more intimately. When we are caught up in the elaboration it is hard to see the forest through the trees. As we replay the scene in our mind we get snagged each time we connect to the elaboration which gives justification for feeling the way we feel. When we take the elaboration elements and remove them from the story, we are focusing on what actually happened. It is hard at first which shows us how addicted we can become to feeling the way we feel. Yet it is no different than interpreting tone of voice to a text message or inferring body language from an email. Neither of those things are included in the typed text. Elucidation allows us to discover what thoughts, expectations, feelings and more we brought to the experience. Those are ours to navigate through. With practice we can free ourselves from being victims of a situation created in our mind through our creative elaboration and embark on the path of elucidation which leads to the chance to get to see how we show up and what snags we are carrying with us. Identifying those snags helps us reach the inner part of ourselves that is in need of some compassionate attention.

Are we willing to make a practice of elucidation for situations that seem to snag us downward today?

I am switching things up a little this week. I recently, had a bodily experience of expressing anger (in a healthy way) and afterwards I was prompted me to creatively express it through this poem:

Dare to Feel . . . Just Because

You don’t realize you are carrying it
Until it begins to eat you up from the inside
Despite all the signs
You will deny
It grows in you until it bursts

For some the bursts extend outside of them
catching others off guard
For others it bursts inside of them
seeping out and spreading all around all unaware
nothing to catch off guard
Until it builds up and your tolerance weakens
The way it maneuvers through you is what you cannot stand
Yet still you deny its power
The squashing of the energy
Comes from the influence of fear
The same fear that kicked things off in the first place
You have no voice
You have no say
Someone above you gets the voice and gets the say
You are too little to speak
You are too little to object
Big hands and big feet
Are no match for little hands and little feet

Though you want to run your legs are much shorter than his
So you clamp down and stuff it in
You hold on and clench
You wipe it from your memory
so you can somewhat breathe when he is around
You learn to hate the parts of you that wanted to be there
Be in the fear part
Be in the anger part
Be in the energy part

You wake up having gotten your own set of big hands and big feet
only to realize the little hands and little feet are frozen still
So you learn to breathe
You learn to move
You learn to think
and you dare to feel
Even the anger
Even the hate
Even the rage
Even the fear

You become accustomed to the pangs of fear
that grip you like a movie being replayed through your cells
You learn to discern the signs which initiate the clenching
You breathe and hold yourself
Like the one with little hands and little feet needed to be held
You rock her and rub her shoulders
You tell her you are sorry
You tell her she is safe
You keep telling her until she breathes
You keep telling her until she is willing to feel
To feel the anger
To feel the hate
To feel the rage
To feel the fear
So it is no longer trapped inside your big hands and big feet

It is like fighting to dare to desire another breath
It is a battle for your soul and for the liveliness that you squashed so long ago
It comes from a hope that there will come a time
when the first instinct will be
To breathe instead of clench
To sing instead of cry
To stand tall instead of shrink
To dance instead of freeze
To speak instead of be silent
To feel safe instead of scared
To allow desire instead of fear it

No one wants to hear
No, he does not want to hear
But he is no longer here
and I do want to hear
all of it
I want to free me of it

Slowly, 
every cell that was tainted by the fear
comes to know it is no longer our reality
Our heart spreads the message
What is real is being here
with our little hands and little feet
Walking together in the victory of having changed our reality
The reality where all of who we are is sacred and treasured
Valued and safe
Cherished and beloved
Just because

I presume God put forethoughts into the design of living beings. As much as God is about the moment, God is also about the the process and the journey. I just wonder sometimes given how much about ourselves is hidden from us until, of course the moment it is not. I remember a TV show years ago where a God character would give this teenage girl assignments but only give her the info she needed. She, of course, felt like the hints she got were confusing or missing something. So she asked to be let in on the full plan. The God character reminded her it was not part of their deal but agreed to oblige her just once and let her see the plan. The next scene is her passed out on the floor and her mother is tapping her shoulder to see if she is okay and asking if she fainted. And she mutters, “hints, hints are fine.” It made me laugh out loud because I have had many such a discussion with God. Frustrated and confused because I felt like I was flailing in the dark and did not understand where things were going or what I was supposed to do. I do remember at the roughest times yelling at God with something like, “Listen! I don’t know what you want from me. What am I supposed to do? You are the one with the big picture, here, not me. So if you want me to be doing your will, you are going to have to do more on your part.” I do remember that when I was in college and doing my inner city volunteer teaching work I was in such a place. I remember many a time shaking my fists at God. It was not until my late 20s when I got into recovery and upon reflection I realized what I would not have been ready to do in order to make room for God and take in more of what God had in store for me. I was too addicted to sugar and using my weight as a protection device and self-criticism tool to make room in my heart for more of God’s voice and love. Hindsight is 20/20 and perhaps that wasn’t it at all, but given the what I know understand and do not understand about God, I see how I was not ready until I was. It is a reminder to me that God has a creative sense of timing on things. There are so many levels of things that unfolded when I was ready to face my demons that I did not have all that I needed around me (forms of God with skin on for one) to keep opening up. Now when I am in moments of feeling disconnected from myself, God, others, or wandering around feeling lost I know it is time to reach for the hand of God that is always within me. That was not something I was ready to see before. What I felt like was God’s absence was merely a misperception. God has never been anywhere else and today all I have to do is pause, take a deep breath and connect to my heart. I may not get any kind of divine message but when I get centered with all that is in the moment somehow what happens next does not concern me. I still believe God has a creative sense of time and I may not agree with it but I never wonder where God is while it is all in process.

Are we willing to trust that no matter how much the timing of things seems to suck or how lost we feel we can always rely on the power of pausing and reconnecting with the presence of God in our hearts today?

When I think of luxurious I don’t typically think of my life specifically. My mind goes to what is portrayed in Western culture as lavish. Expense cars, jewels, big house, unlimited spending, staying at a plush resort, first class flight accommodations, and so on. Yet I cannot deny the moments when I have a felt sense of lavishness by what one might consider the most ordinary things. When I a dog playing with its owner. A couple walking hand in hand. The breeze blowing on my skin and feeling the warmth of the sun on my face. All of these things create a lavish open space in my heart that cause me to take a deep breath. These moments of lavishness speak of the simple and yet profound nature of what it means to be alive. My eyes may not see it until my heart wakes them up. In a lavish moment when I catch my breath, my whole body awakens and is generously granted a new lens through which to see my seemingly ordinary life. God encourages us to take notice of the lavishness of the presence of life in and around us while we are busy comparing our ordinary circumstances to someone who is staying in the penthouse suite . Our hearts are willing and courageous enough to show us the lavishness of our lives if we are willing and courageous enough to be open to seeing it.

How many moments of lavishness can we witness today?