dailydatewithgod

We walk through life on a certain level of automatic-pilotness (my creative word).  There are crucial elements of our existence that require this and I am grateful for it.  But as we begin to see the life that comes from being fully present in the moment, God calls us to be awake and alert so that we may choose how to be in that moment.  It requires a level of responsibility that our mind may not be interested in but our spirit knows is imperative.  It is in living with gusto and conscious decisions that we create our lives.  It is in creating our lives that we are most connected with God, the creator of all life.  Believe it or not, God is calling you to be in creation mode with Him.  What a lovely invitation!  How can we show that we are willing to kick it up a notch in our lives and step into the creative process?  Simply by saying yes to today.  Whatever it is, say yes and thank you.  Does this mean putting up with being hurt and burdened and suffering? No. It means being willing to see each occurrence as an opportunity from which growth and creation can happen.  Life is 10 percent what happens and 90 percent how we react to it.  We have such power in the pause and the decision to choose to act, to create, to give life to any situation.  My prayer for you today is that you have the courage to take one situation and turn it into your moment of creation.  Remember the God of all creation is right there with you–you have an expert in your pocket–go for it!  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Over and over again I hear the messages that call me to step up and be my greatest self.  Early on I learned the value of reverse pride.  It was portrayed as a virtue.  What I did not understand that thinking of myself as less than was still rooted in me thinking of myself.  True humility is me being my best self, sparking the fire of life, and recognizing that when I do so I am one among many.  I am not greater than by living the gifts I have been given.  I am simply playing out my role.  I have never been handed a death sentence, not literally anyway.  I did wake up at some point and realize that I was slowing destroying my life, but I was never told by a doctor that I only have so long to live. However, each day that I live I am walking to the end, I just don’t know how long I have.  So I must not waste today.  I must grab hold of it with gusto and shine!  I must spark that life within me to shine for all to see.  That might mean creating something that impacts the world or it could mean smiling at the person in the grocery line behind me who keeps nudging forwarding and tapping their fingers with impatience.  You ever notice that those irritating people are the last ones that you want to spark any kind of love towards?  According to God, those are the very people to whom we are called to be love.  It goes contrary to my mind which usually balks at the idea which says I should only do that if I know it will impact that person.  That is until I remember the time when I was feeling impatient and restless and saw a little kid in the grocery story a couple of isles over who was singing and laughing and turned my direction. No one had to tell her who to be from her heart, she was just living it.  And she didn’t care or change whether or not anyone noticed!  We are born with that spark.  How interesting that the longer we live and get to the end the more we don’t live from that heart space.  My prayer for you today is that you take a moment to connect to your heart (God) and garner up the courage to be sparking in your life. Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Do you remember when you first got out on your own?  You were out in public and you didn’t have to hold Mom or Dad’s hand anymore?  There was a sense of independence of being grown up because you could do something on your own.  Yet there were times when they would tell you again to hold their hand. Maybe because you were in a large crowd of people or crossing a major street.  We may have resisted especially if we thought for sure that we could handle that on our own as well.  Maybe you threw a fit, who knows, but we have all had those experiences of being on our own and then seemingly having to revert back to needing help in some way.  It is all however, in our perspective.  Needing others, needing to not do it on our own, is not a sign of our failure.  It is a sign of our participation in relationship. We don’t resist when our date reaches for our hand to hold, We usually welcome it.  In our hearts we like the feeling of being connected and knowing we have someone by our side.  God reaches out for our hands all the time.  The funny thing is it isn’t even so much that we can’t handle it on our own, but rather that he wants to share it with us.  Something about the holding of hands makes us more present. In fact, any time we connect with our body brings us to the present.  This is why taking a breath is so powerful.  We cannot be anywhere else when we are focusing on our breathing.  Amazing that God built within us such a simple tool to bring us to the present where he is ready and waiting to hold our hand.  My prayer for you today is that you recognize when God is reaching out to hold your hand and be willing to take a chance at being present in that moment and take in the love.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

They say don’t sweat the small stuff.  I also read another tag line that said, “it’s all small stuff.”  It makes sense when we stop to recognize that life happens in little moments, one at a time.  Even the big things that happen are simply an end result of a series of small stuff.  As much as we may pride ourselves on multitasking, we do not actually do more than one thing at a time.  We allude ourselves into thinking that we actually do more than one small thing at a time.  Perhaps there is a reason why the day can be broken down into minutes and seconds.  Maybe we are meant to stop and treasure those individual small moments.  When I think back on special times in my life.  It is the small gestures of kindness that I remember most–a look, a smile, a hug, a card, a wink.  These are all ways that God uses us to remind us that He is near. This means that it is in these small ways that we get to be God for each other.  We are here to love because we are love.  Sometimes love is cutting through a line at the airport to declare one’s love before she get’s on the plane so that everyone applauds (insert similar scene from most romantic comedies).  But most of the time it is when mom made us lunch and put a note in it to say hello.  I get reminders all the time throughout the day that my date w/God is not just about our morning time together but when I am stuck in traffic and see a bumper sticker that makes me laugh.  So don’t sweat the small stuff, be in the throes of the small stuff so that you can experience  what it means to be and bring love to others and to yourself.  My prayer for you today is that you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear the small ways that God is rejoicing over you taking one breath after another throughout the day.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

One measurement of peace in our lives would be the level to which our outer lives matches our inner lives.  In other words, is what I think and say match what I am doing?  Given that thoughts and feelings create action in our life, it would seem that is always what is happening.  So, how is that we sometimes find ourselves acting in a way that goes contrary to our belief (our repeated thoughts)?  For that we have to look at underlying thoughts and beliefs that reside in our subconscious.  Given that so many decisions are made at that level it would seem silly to disregard what is happening there.  Yet we tend to resist looking under the hood for fear of what we may find.  In my experience the fear is just our ego wanting to hold on to some identity that it has created.  But our spirits and our hearts call us to take a peek because in our heart of hearts we long to be congruent with how God sees us.  It is only by bringing to light that which is hidden that God can heal and embrace and thus teaching us to do the same.  Love doesn’t grow in the dark. My prayer for you today is that you have the courage to look under the hood and let God the mechanic show you the possibilities that exist for aligning yourself more with who you truly are.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

What makes you come alive?  What gives you energy?  What wakes you up and puts a surprise in your day?  How often do you allow for those experiences in your every day life?  Or do you just look for them at special times?  I can guarantee you that each day that you wake up and say yes to the day, God is invigorated!  One more person to share his love for the world.  Yes, this is what we are called to.  Little us are called to spread love in the world.  You might be thinking , “But I don’t feel like I have much love to give.”  I get it, I often feel the same way. But that is okay, God will not only give you the day but if you turn it back over to Him, he will provide what you need to do his work.  The challenge is to look for little opportunities to be the message of love–a smile, a listening, a keeping your mouth shut when you really want to give someone your two cents about something.  It is the simple gestures of love that invigorate us and allow us to move from one moment to the next.  My prayer for you today is to look for as many small ways that you can invigorate the world around you and thus be invigorated yourself.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

The eyes are our portal to our perception.  We tend to think because we see it with the naked eye that it is exactly what happened.  Yet, why is it that two people can be present at a situation and report seeing two totally different things?  What the eye sees may be the same but by the time the images enter the brain and attach to the words to express, they have gone through our brain and its filtering system.  That filtering system will then inform of which pieces were most important, etc.  This is why they say that eyewitness testimony is not as reliable as it sounds.  If we want to get a better idea of how we are perceiving things, then we need to get quiet.  We need to get in touch with our spirits and question the thoughts and ideas that come from our minds.  They are not bad or wrong, we simply need to take a closer look.  The beauty of having a pause between what happens and how we react to it is that it gives us a chance to take a closer look and to choose to act instead of react.  The reaction will come from our brains’ current patterns and grooves created at an early age.  Again, not a bad thing, but given that we are not in that same place or situation anymore, the reaction may no longer apply.  My prayer for you today is that you give yourself the gift of the pause so that you can draw closer to yourself and choose to act from the present moment.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

We are given the greatest gift each day.  When we wake up and take a breath we can be thankful that many people didn’t get that same breath this morning.  Clearly, God has something in mind for our day.  We will always have our own agenda and ideas of how the day “should” play out.  But what if we made room to take on what God would have us do and be?  It would create an unexpected experience filled with some uncertainty, excitement, curiosity, and energy not normally used.  If we simply go with our programming and our plan then we are limiting our life experience.  The exhilaration of living God’s will in our lives is not because we are clueless and need to get it right or be perfect but rather because the plan that God has for us always will exceed our imagination and sense of possibility.  We fear it because it will call us to change and grow and we don’t know what that looks like.  But the fear is based on the idea that we will have to figure it all out.  As if God will bring us to it but not through it.  I have had my share of those times when I though God abandoned me and they were painful.  What I realized over time is that God did no such thing because that is contrary to the consistency and certainty of an omnipotent being.  I simply lost sight of God because he no longer showed up in a predictable way.  I needed to broaden my horizons.  The moment I start putting God in a box or think I have God figured out, I have lost sight.  My prayer for you today is that amidst your plans you be open to what God might have for you to experience and have the courage to take the action in that direction.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

If I want to know where my life is going I need to take a closer look at where my attention and action is.  If I find myself in a situation and wonder how I got there, I can backtrack and look at the decisions I made along the way. Those decisions and actions stemmed from a way of thinking.  If I look at my habits and my ways of being, those are a result of my accumulation of actions which came from decisions based on thoughts and feelings.  In looking at my character, I can take a step back to my habits which stemmed from my actions which came from my decisions based on thoughts and feelings.  My character will dictate my destiny.  Everything stems from my thoughts which in turn generate feelings based on my perception of a situation which becomes the basis for my decisions which create my actions which form habits, which develop character and write my destiny.  Many a well-known person has laid that all out, perhaps more eloquently than me, but hopefully you get the point.  The embodiment of who I am being today is a result of the thoughts that I think.  So if I want to make an adjustment to my life I must start with what thoughts am I filling my mind with.  There are many unconscious thoughts that go on below the surface which are based on programming from earlier life experiences.  This why we react to things in seemingly incomprehensible ways.  The first step is awareness of our automatic thinking.  My prayer for you today is that you have the courage to stop and recognize the thoughts that run through your head.  Becoming aware of them will begin to shed light on what fills your life.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Before we were born we spent about 9-10 months in our mother’s womb.  I have yet to meet a human being who came into this world without that.  It is essential that we have that incubation time to prepare us for what is coming next.  Why is it that when we get into that new experience that we expect things to happen quickly?  In the same way that we needed time to grow lungs and arms and legs and develop a heart, we need time to prepare for what is coming next in our lives.  If we are gathering ideas and learning along the way then we are in the process. The process of attaining necessary skills or experiences that will make us ready to handle whatever comes next. Each step is valuable.  Can you imagine if you had rushed out of the womb without your lungs being fully developed?  You would not have lasted long.  If a caterpillar is rushed out of his cocoon, his butterfly wings will not be ready to fly.  Trusting in the process and understanding that the attainment of the goal is not in the final outcome but in the process of attaining.  What if we put on blind folds when we got in the car because we were only interested in getting to our destination?  We would most likely crash the moment we pulled out onto the street and then where would we be?  It can be frightening sometimes to walk through the journey, but that is what we have each other and God for.  We are never truly alone because if we open our eyes we will notice that on the path are people who are doing exactly the same.  My prayer for you today is that you may see the gifts of attaining the goal that you are working towards, not just the attainment of the goal itself.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen