dailydatewithgod

Now is the time of year when people begin to reflect back on the year that is closing and focus on the new year.  Many of the things that we set out to accomplish over this past year may have come to fruition, some not.  We have several ways of evaluating whether or not the year was successful, some productive, some not.  God’s measurement of success is surely not the world’s.  God’s measurement of success is: were we there?  Did we participate fully?  In whatever it is that was happening, were we present to it?  Did we play the cards that we were dealt or did we wish we had gotten other cards and spend the year waiting to be given a chance to change our hand?  Did we jump in with both feet or just walk around the edge of the pond and wonder what was in the water too afraid to even dip our toes in?  Only we can truly know the answer to that question, others cannot answer it for us.  My prayer for us today is that we look to how we can make the most of this year by what we do today. Can you participate today?  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

We have a beautiful opportunity to choose and do what we want with our lives. Each day that we are given a new breath, we are tasked with living out each of those breaths with purpose and intention.  It is important to have an overall purpose in life, but sometimes we find ourselves overwhelmed by that prospect.  We get caught up in the weight of having goals and attuning ourselves to our desires and discerning why we are here.  All good things and important to come to an understanding of, but what about right at this moment?  What is your purpose right in this moment?  How is God calling you to be and do with this very minute?  Our life is a series of moments that stitch together the fabric that makes up who we are.  My prayer for us today is that we take a step back and with each fresh breath ask how can I be God in this very moment?  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Gratefulness used to be reserved for a one or two-time of year focus for many many years for me.  When my spiritual practice changed to a daily discipline, gratitude began to be a daily part of my life.  It is amazing the power it has to shift my thinking about everything.  It is so simple and of course, very cliché these days, but stopping and focusing on what I am grateful is the key to better thinking.  I do not use gratitude as some sort of “let’s pretend like everything is fine” attitude, but rather in the midst of everything that is not fine–what good can I focus on at the same time.  It lightens the atmosphere and takes away the negative energy.  A simple practice of listing for myself each morning and each evening three things that I am grateful for helps my mind to begin to look for that instead of what is wrong.  My prayer for you today is that you have the strength and courage to make gratitude a daily discipline–whatever form that takes.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

There is a song called my greatest mistake by Sheryl Crow where she sings about a past relationship and refers to it as her greatest mistake.  The song title alone makes me smile.  What a concept!  I have spent most of my life being afraid of making mistakes, of being “wrong.”  That is because I personalized it.  I thought if I make a mistake, that it meant that it wasn’t a mistake.  What a relief to realize that my thinking was incorrect.  Actually, when I look at it now, the fact that I saw things that way for such a long time is not a mistake either.  It is how I knew how to conduct myself at that time.  Now, I know better, so I can do better.  I can live freer because I see that being “incorrect”  is actually what is perfect for me.  It is all in how I look at it.  Life is 10% what happens and 90% how I react to it–that includes my reactions to what I say and do.  If I see that by making a mistake, I am making something that I can learn from then there is no wrong, there is no incorrect.  Or, if you like there is incorrect because it is in-corrrect–heading towards correction.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to embrace our mistakes as God-given opportunities to learn. Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

The skin of our body is our largest organism.  We have multiple sensors and receptors on our skin that are constantly sending messages to our brain of what is happening.  Most of this, we are unaware of.  Again, this is a gift because it could easily fill our day to be thinking about all the information we are receiving just in regards to our surroundings and sense of space.  But when we experience something through our skin that moves us we are touched.  Touch can be very healing and very harmful depending on how it is used.  Various cultures have specific norms regarding who can be touched and when and how.  A baby can die from lack of touch and live because it has been held and touched through critical moments–ask any Neo-natal nurse.  We shake hands with people to greet them, we hug those we are close to, we kiss those we are familiar with. All of these encounters send messages to each other about how we are connected.  I have read multiple places that as adult human beings we need so many meaningful touches per day for our own sense of well-being, connectedness, and it even lowers our blood pressure. So does this mean we need to go out and start hugging random people? Not necessarily, but if we want to feel connected and whole we need to acknowledge that part of that comes from how we touch each other.  Healthy touch does wonders for our outlook on life and it brings us back into the present moment.  We can be anywhere in the world in our head but when we are touched we are brought back to where we are right now.  God is not physically present in this universe but when we touch we becomes his hands, arms, hearts, faces, and carriers of love.  My prayer for us today is that we look for an opportunity to connect and “touch” each other literally and figuratively so that we might experience the presence of love.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Intimacy seems to be one of those buzz words that we hear a lot about lately: How to create more intimacy in our relationships.  Intimate connections are what we should be striving for on all levels, etc. I once had someone break down the word intimacy-“In-to-me-I-see”.  It struck a chord in me when I heard it. It was different from any previous understanding I had seen or heard before.  It is true that I will be able to accomplish little in connecting with another human being if I am not willing to look at and recognize me.  How can I get close to someone else if I am not close with me?  Intimacy requires a level of vulnerability, of revealing myself fully to another human being.  How can I reveal that with which I am not familiar?  Drawing closer in my own relationship with myself and acknowledging all the elements of myself–good and bad, strong and weak, actually allows me to connect more with others.  If I am able to truly see all of what makes up that which I call “Me” and accept it in my heart then the eyes through which I see other people is full of greater compassion and acceptance.  As long as I am running from me because of not wanting to look at any imperfections or failings, the more I will simply look to others and see their flaws and imperfections.  What I resist, persists. Other people are mirrors for us.  They give us a window into our own beings.  Sometimes we don’t want to look so it easier to make it about them.  In the end, we are all we got.  God invites us to get quiet and to connect with him and ourselves.  God is not afraid of what we are afraid of.  My experience of God is that when I finally am willing to face that which I fear most about myself and I go within, God is already there waiting with open arms of acceptance.  It happens that way every time.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to spend a little time getting to know ourselves.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

It can be such a simple thing and yet so powerful.  When we experience kindness our heart responds by being softened.  Kindness makes me think of a big soft pillow that your head touches down on after a long hard day–you just melt into it and within no time you are off in dream world.  The beauty of kindness is that it can be expressed in the simplest of ways–a smile, holding the door for someone, letting someone go in front of you on the freeway, paying someone a compliment, saying Thank you–those are just a few.  One element of kindness that often gets missed is how we speak to ourselves. When I finally got quiet enough, God began to show me how I speak to myself.  At first, it was very alarming how harsh I can be in my thinking towards myself.  It is often still my inclination to harp on myself or use negative terms–as if that ever motivated me to something greater.  What I did not realize is that if I am unkind to me, the kindness I extend to others is a facade. I am not giving from who I am, I am giving from who I think I should be.  Now, that does not mean I stopped sharing kindness with others, but as I practice self-kindness in my thoughts and words, when I extend kindness to others it comes with more love and authenticity.  My prayer for us today is that we have the courage to ask God how we should speak to ourselves with kindness.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

We live in a very goal driven society in the United States. I amazed at how much I am able to accomplish when I am in intentional and purposeful about what goals I work towards achieving when I create structure around accomplishing them–a plan of action.  When I am working towards a goal I am pursuing the end result that I hope will come out of the goal.  But what am I really in pursuit of?  When I stop and examine why I am driven to accomplish something or reach some sort of accolade, it is because I think that it will create a certain experience in my life–a feeling, a sense of purpose, a new meaning.  These are all worthy things, but ultimately the most rewarding experience is when I begin to cultivate that which I hope to achieve in the present moment.  All we have is this moment, this breath, this current experience.  Yes, it is good to create and work towards goals but if I am not present in the little moments along the way then I am missing out on the journey. The journey is the destination.  When I have not accomplished a goal or it didn’t work out the way I had hope, I have found that in working toward that goal I created the experience I was reaching for, and did succeeded.  It just may not look that way to the outside world.  But I don’t live out there, I live in my own heart.  The fact that I took action in pursuit of the goal itself mean that who I was being was someone who saw themselves as capable of worthy of whatever that end result would be which means I am already being who I want to be.  My prayer for us today is that we acknowledge the gifts we have been given that grant us the courage to step boldly in pursuit of our big and small dreams because that is who we are. Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

The mind does this survival thing of looking for what is separate or different in any given situation.  Or at least that is what we are often left focusing on. One of the principles of adult learning is that as adults we look to connect with something with which we are familiar when learning a new concept.  It is the way of utilizing what we already have knowledge of as a base so that we can discern and focus on the new tasks.  It also gives us a sense of confidence from which to draw and a sense of where to file the new learning.  Our minds will quickly assess a situation by noting what is familiar, assume it already knows how to handle that, and focus on the differences so that it can know how to handle the potential “danger”.  This is quite a design that we have.  The good news is that the establishment of connection is already there.  The challenge is to move our thoughts away from what is separate or different about a situation and focus instead on the similarities or what we are readily able to connect to.  This requires us reassuring ourselves that the different is not dangerous.  Like, I said, it is a survival technique.  My prayer for us today is that we ask God to help us to focus on how we are connected to those around us instead of how we are separate.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

When it comes right down to it, we don’t really know why we are here.  We come up with multiple answers at any given time in our lives.  They say that man’s search for meaning begins when he/she asks the questions: Who am I?  Why am I here?  As a person who felt uncertain most of her life I often find it less that comforting to know that m awareness of life begins with my questions.  I always thought it was about having answers.  But answers are simply my minds ideas about why.  My mind is very creative and there are forces at work that are far beyond my understanding that I could not possibly comprehend.  My job is to be present to the best of my ability, take the next indicated step, and continue to ask questions.  When I do experience real answers to my questions, they usually come in forms and experiences that I had not imagined.  I often laugh when I reach a truth (the kind you sense deep within your own being) and I think, “really, this is what brought me to that?  I had no idea that by walking through this particular process in my life that I would come to a new understanding of who I am and who you are.”  The key is to remain open and as much as possible, let go of ideas of how we think it is going to turn out or “supposed” to turn out.  This leaves room for us to be surprised by God.  My prayer for us today is that we have the courage to show up in our own lives, even the most mundane of circumstances, and be open to what surprises and answers God might have for us.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen