dailydatewithgod

Every morning without fail the sun rises (okay actually our planet turns so we can see the sun again, but you get the idea).  Now, I cannot always see the sun because sometimes it is raining or cloudy but it is still there.  And every evening the sun goes down and I am able to see the moon.  Every day there is light and dark and then light and dark again.  I sometimes wonder if God would be interested in not having the sun come up one day just to see what would happen, lol!  Good thing God doesn’t think like I do.  It would upset the rhythm of so many things.  Without fail that sun is rising every morning.  God wants to bring light into our experience, he wants us to see things new again.  God consistently shows up, no matter what.  That is who God is and to be differently would be to not be God.  I have often wondered if maybe God didn’t want us to see something or bring something to light because it would be painful.  I believe that God is right there with us in our sorrows, but wants us to see them in the best light possible, so he brings the planet around to the light of the sun.  He keeps us warm and enables us to face whatever it is.  When I stop to think about it, God is always about bringing light to the situation. Even at night we have the glow of the moon and the stars that are like holes in the darkness.  The key to consistency is clarity of purpose.  If I know what my purpose is, what my intention is then I am able to show up consistently.  If I am still searching for what I am supposed to be doing and who I am then I find it harder to be consistent.  God knows who God is and what God does, so it is done consistently.  God is many things but a bringer of light to the world is one of those things, so it is done every morning.  I don’t have to know all of who I am and what my purpose is but if I connect with God then I can begin to have clarity.  So I can be consistent about turning to God every morning because I know that is where I will find the answers.  This is what bring me to my date with God every morning.  I know that if I keep that committment that I am one step closer to peace, I am connected to myself and to the Creator of Creation. Maybe one of these mornings he will explain to me exactly why he brings the sun up.  For now, He reminds me why he thinks that I light up the world–works for me!  🙂   My prayer for you today is for you to see where God consistently shows up in your life–and recognize it as a sign that you are loved and cared for.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

 It seems like the catch-phrase that I keep hearing these days.  Spiritually it sounds wonderful.  When we are vulnerable our hearts are open, God can come in and embrace us fully.  Vulnerability means we have no walls up and we are touched by all things great and small.  Vulnerability creates connection and an opportunity to stretch ourselves beyond what we think we are capable of because we are leading with our hearts.  My ego however, fights being vulnerable.  It only sees the down side-exposure, possibility of getting hurt, looking like a fool, making a mistake, being passed over, etc.  So when my head begins to debate with my heart I experience a lack of peace.  Vulnerability and willingness to risk being vulnerable are gifts from God.  Left to my own devices I would not opt for this experience.  My ego tells me that vulnerability is what got me into trouble so long ago, trusting is what enabled me to get hurt.  However, if I remember that my greatest weakness is my greatest strength then I can look to those times of vulnerability to show me the possibility of the power of God.  Clearly, whatever I may have experienced in the past did not kill me and in fact it has made me stronger-just like I keep hearing on the radio these days.  Now I can take those experiences and use them to be of service which is exactly what I intend to do. Today is a day in which we celebrate love.  Love is vulnerability.  To truly love another, ourselves, God, even our experience requires us to put ourselves out there, to take a chance.  Take a chance that God is all who God says he/she/it is.  Am I willing to take that chance, just for today?  My prayer for you today is that you be willing even for a moment to be vulnerable and give God a chance to enter your heart and speak the language of love.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

I wonder if my life were to be a silent film what would the screens of words in between scenes say was happening.  I am the first one to say that words are important.  I love what I have heard many times which is our word is our wand and as I am sure I have expressed here before, I need to pay attention to my thinking and my thoughts.  I am also a firm believer that life is in the action.  I know from personal experience that I can have all the right words but they don’t mean anything unless I live them.  I took a class this past weekend in which they talked about communication.  They shared a statistic which I had heard before which is that we what we communicate is (and these numbers are not exact) 55 percent body language, 38 percent tone which leaves 7 percent of what you actually say.  Then when you couple that with the fact that we listen only 25 percent of the time it is clear that our actions determine the majority of what we communicate, not our words.  Our thoughts and feelings become our actions but that often happens in milliseconds and it takes a conscious effort to be aware of our thinking and feelings.  So what do my actions say about the life that I am living.  What am I modeling for others?  What am I modeling for myself?  How do I convey the presence of God in the world?  You are probably listening only to a quarter of what I am saying and you are watching my behavior and listening to how I say what I say, but if the actual words convey so little, then I need to make sure I am conveying a clear message.  What model do you see God demonstrating in your life?  My prayer for you today is that you see how small actions can model God in your life for you and for others.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

I am so grateful that life is about practice.  Not in the sense that this is some sort of dress rehearsal, but rather that it is about learning.  Somehow I missed that memo as a kid.  I thought it was all about doing it right the first time.  I mistook mistakes for a belief that I was a mistake.  My ego was wedded to the story that I was wrong, that I did something wrong.  So I spent most of my life trying my best to make sure I did everything right so that no one would tell me out loud that I did it wrong and confirm the story in my head that I was wrong.  That is a very restricting way to live. There is little room for growth when I am supposed to know how to do things I could not possibly know how to do.  Crazy thinking, huh?  Welcome to my world.  I am so grateful that I have had an opportunity to shift my thinking.  It is not easy to let go of that story because it was working for me.  That is the funny thing about the things in our life that we do, they work for us.  The first step is admitting that we do it, so we have to be aware, the next step is to assess which parts of that thinking and thus behavior are working for us and which parts are not.  Then I can decided if I want to ask God to remove from me that part of the characteristic or way of being.  I have to be ready to do things differently.  So that requires me to be ready to act and think in the opposite way.  I don’t get to wait around for God to take something from me, I get into action and behave in the opposite manner.  I am responsible for taking the action, despite my thinking.  Sometimes the thinking lines up before the action, but not always and I cannot wait around to be inspired to do differently.  Besides everything in my being is so used to going with automatic pilot–that is how we work. That is why life requires a conscious effort, to be awake, be ready and be willing to do things different from our early programming.  I am most grateful for the ways of being that I created as a kid because they got me through.  But as an adult a lot of them are no longer useful, so I need to reassess and determine which ones I want to keep and which ones I need God’s help to change.  I can stand ready to do different.  There is a letter that the apostle paul wrote to his followers in which he mentions that as children we had a way of being and doing, but when we are renewed in Christ we let go of childish ways.  When I am in connection with God, I am a woman of faith who trusts that I am loved and taken care of.  This gives me the freedom to be ready to make mistakes, to try things out, to be imperfect because I am connected to a God that is perfect.  My prayer for you today is that you may be ready to step into your full self, your God self, even if for just one moment, one action–after all, practice makes perfect, right?  Peace~Colleen

In the winter months when it gets cold and rainy (yes, even here in southern California) it feels like there is a disconnect.  Perhaps it is the extra layers on the body, the lack of sun in the sky, or just the focus on dealing with harsher elements that can wear on me. Though I am originally from New York and have certainly dealt with harsh winters, I somehow lack the fortitude to deal with a “real” winter on any long-term basis.  My heart goes out to those who are dealing with the winter storm in the Northeast.  I think the only thing that really stuck with me being from New York (aside from my attitude, of course) is wanting to be close to the coast. The one gem that I do see being in a time of winter (whatever that looks like–physically, emotionally, spiritually) is a longing for a freer time.  A time of warmth, of exposure to the elements without needing so much protection.  A time of play and of juiciness that comes from new life in spring and fall.  Being in a time of winter however, cultivates that yearning for a more exposed connection to myself and to the world. A time when we wont’ need so many buffers (in this case layers of clothing or umbrellas).  I see the same thing happen in my relationship with God.  During those times of distance from God–whether intentional or spaces of growth before the next level of connection, I feel the yearning in my heart.  As I let go of old stories of my ego and connect again with who I am in God, I find that I yearn to connect more.  The beauty of yearning for that connection is it makes me aware of the ways that I need God, of the ways that I rely on a power greater than myself to make it through the day-to-day and most of all the way that God is the best way for me to connect with me.  Somehow by going within my heart and preparing for the next step (whatever that may be) and facing the longing to be more connected I expose myself to myself.  What I am trying to convey, although at the moment feel very inadequate at doing so, is that the times of yearning for connection, to God, to ourselves, to others is just as sacred as the times when we feel connected.  There is blessing in all of it.  The time in the womb is just as important as the moment we breathe new life and cry for the first time.  Life begins now.  I implore you to be at peace with wherever you are today and trust that God is with you and you are with you, whether it feels like you think it should feel or not.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

One healer that I went to see talked about how a lot of problems that we humans experience–physically, emotionally, and spiritually is unexpressed grief.  I also recently took a course given by Neale Donald Hirsch (known most for his books, “Conversations with God.”) and he talked about a similar idea.  I usually think of grief in terms of mourning a death of a person.  I don’t often think of grief in terms of mourning of an idea.  But when I expand my understanding of the possible experiences of grief I can see that we all experience grief in a multitude of ways.  There is a grief that comes with acknowledging that things are not the way we thought they would be.  We all have disappointments, some of experience them early on, some of us come to it later.  It doesn’t matter when or how.  It is not important to compare one’s disappointment over another as being greater or more “realistic” than another.  It is natural to have expectations of how things turn out. I have come to realize that expectations are often times unmet resentments waiting to happen.  I believe it is in the Buddhist tradition that they speak of the peace that comes from not attaching to things.  For some that is physical things, but I think for most of us that is our thinking.  We attach our identity to a certain way of being or who we think we are (or rather the story that our ego buys into).  What has been interesting in my journey towards greater health is that I have had to let go of a lot of stories about who I thought I was.  In the beginning I just thought I was carrying an excess amount of weight around–eating too much, not exercising and taking care of myself.  But things are never what they seem.  What I have realized in my time of recovery from a food addiction and letting go of 160 excess pounds is that my mind is full of ideas that no longer serve me.  Stories of protection and self-importance that I built up as a defense mechanism.  Mostly I think my motives was not to be hurt again, not to experience betrayal by those closest to me.  I remember very clearly one night a few years ago when I took a walk on the beach.  As I stood there and listened in the almost dark to the waves crashing I felt the presence of God standing behind me.  It was a nurturing feeling and it was though his arms wrapped around me and he began to tell me that it was time to open up my heart.  I felt as though his hands reached around to my chest and was pulling my rib cage open to free my heart.  I knew quite well that I had created a barrier of steel and ice around my heart and I began to cry as I felt like my chest was going to cave in.  I could hear God reassure me that it was going to hurt but that in the end it would free me. I stood there and cried like a blubbering fool and yet I could sense this strong presence behind me.  That was almost five years ago and since then I can tell you that I have opened up my heart in ways that I never thought possible.  With that came a lot of letting go of grief.  But I did not do it alone, I had lots of help and experienced many different paths and it continues.  But the solace of God, the comfort of an Almighty Power that reminded me that each time I came up against an old idea that I thought was an integral part of who I am, that it was only a story.  I needed the solace of God to remind me that I am love and light and peace and power and a gift to the world.  I am not something that needs to be apologized for or kept quiet or taken for granted by myself first and then the world.  We need to give ourselves permission to grieve how we thought things should be and not make ourselves wrong for it.  Mother Teresa said you cannot love something if you judge it.  I have begun to understand why the scriptures often say that God is the judge, not us.  We are not equipped for it because we cannot see the whole experience of life, we are finite.  But when we connect with the Infinite Love, we can experience love, let go of judgment and accept that we are exactly where we are supposed to be doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing.  I hope that my story brought you some solace.  If I can in the hands of a loving creator learn to let go of over a 100 pounds of story and expectations, you can too.  My prayer for you today is that you experience solace in the knowledge that no matter what you are grieving in the moment, it has not changed the essence of who you are–LOVE (God).  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

It is amazing to me how I can witness so many things come and go, come and go like a breeze, a thought, a feeling, a car, a day, a many multitude of things.  Life is a constant flow.  When I am present to it, there is so much that goes on around me just as it should be and I am not the least bit disturbed by it.  Yet, one thing will come across my path or into my experience and I find myself shaken by it.  It is not the experience itself, it is my thinking about the experience.  The thoughts, ideas, opinions, feelings that I attach to the situation are what shake me up.  I had the experience very recently to see a picture, an echocardiogram, of my heart. WOW!  Such a beautiful machine that operates with such precision–I do have a healthy heart which given how I have treated my body in the past is a miracle, but I was just struck by the power of this machine that operates every moment of every day inside my chest and I rarely give much thought to it.  God created this beautiful mechanism that makes sure I get blood which carries oxygen in and carbon dioxide out and it all happens without a single thought on my part.  That is the miracle of this body machine that I inhabit.  It does not stop pumping because I am bothered by an experience or a thought.  It just keeps going along-blood flowing in and out, valves opening and closing.  There is even a valve that takes the shape of a peace sign when it closes.  The tech explained to me that it is a good sign when you can see all three flaps that make the peace sign.  I was grateful to find out that I have peace in my heart, literally.  If I show up and take care of myself each day which I believe is part of my given responsibility when I am granted a new day, then the inner-workings take care of themselves.  God is not shaken by circumstances.  God knows that all is working for the good because that is the universe that the Creator created.  A universe where all things can be used for the greater good.  I just need to align my thinking with that so that I can be present to the beauty and the miracle of life.  When I am not shaken I am one with my own heart.  I am not saying it isn’t a challenge at times to not be shaken by experiences or thoughts, but those times remind me that I need God.  I need to be held by the one who is unshaken.  It is like a reminder that I need to come back to my center of creation, to my Creator who designed me–all of me, and is witnessing the ebb and flow of my life with great joy. God does not fear the experiences that shake me, because he/she/it knows that it is those experiences that will renew my draw back to who I truly am.  My prayer for you today is that in the midst of being shaken by life, you remember to connect to the Great Unshaken Being that has placed peace in your heart.  Make it a great one!

I once read that my level is discipline is proportionate to my level of happiness.  It sounds contrary at first but when I realize that happiness, true happiness is not some sort of quick fix but rather a sustained experience of well-being it does in fact match.  I know often the first thought when we hear the word discipline is that we are being punished or found to be in trouble. We are all a disciple of something or some way of thinking, meaning we practice discipline on some level. It could be the disciple of being a good person or following a specific philosophy or religion, but whether we realize it or not we practice a way of life.  I prefer to practice a way of life that leads to peace and happiness.  This often involves delaying the instant gratification for a more sustained sense of well-being.  I often characterize it as doing stuff I don’t want to do first.  Perhaps that is what being a grown-up is about but somehow by doing those things, I experience a greater sense of peace.  Maybe because I do not spent a lot of time in fear of those things catching up with me.  It seems at the outset that living on a whim without any discipline is more fun, more childlike, more spontaneous, more joyful.  But the flip-side is when those necessary things don’t get done and they catch up with me.  I fear being disciplined like the kid who is called to the teacher or principal’s office to account for her behavior.  If I do the disciplined thing first, then I am free to enjoy the time I have and do what I like to do . . . much more freeing.  I need God’s help to be disciplined.  I need the courage of God to stay on track to not be swayed by the latest and greatest thing that wants to grab my attention.  And I need God to direct my thinking so that I can be of maximum service to Him(myself) and to my fellows.  After all, this is what it is about.  I used to think that being of service to others was a way to justify my taking up space on the planet (well at least I am helpful and a good person), but being of service is an extension of my recognition that I am loved by a gracious God.  The creator of Creation deemed me worthy enough to be here on this planet–not just for me, but because I have something to give and to share.  When I am disciplined by that knowledge I can give from that experience.  How have you seen discipline bring you freedom?  My prayer for you today is that be guided by the discipline that you are a creation of love by the Creator of love and experience the freedom of that truth.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen