dailydatewithgod

As people who measure our life by time in hours, minutes, years and so on it may appear as though there are delays.  We are waiting for someone because they are delayed.  We were hoping for a package to arrive and it is delayed.  We are on a trip and our car breaks down and causes a delay in our arrival.  Through the lens of chronological time, there are delays all over the place.  It almost seems like we spend our life navigating around the delays.  God invites us to open the eyes of our hearts to reframe the perspective through which we see a delay.  I attended a retreat in high school called Kairos.  Chiros versus Chronos both from the Greek language referring to two different understandings of time. Chronos is the minute measurement and Chiros or Kairos is God’s measurement.  The first thing we had to do was turn in our watches.  We were given the chance to let go of watching out for and dealing with delays.  Those in charge would instruct as we needed to know. There were probably all kinds of delays that occurred over those 4 days but I was not aware of most of them.  I trusted the faculty and students leading the retreat to not let us miss out on anything.  There were conversations and laughter, long (at least they felt like long) meals and recreation time.  In the space of Kairos we were able to be.  Chiros is the lens of our hearts.  Through it we see a delay as an unexpected gift and a chance to surrender to God’s vision for our day instead of ours.  It took me many years of our daily dates for me to be willing to let go of my idea of a delay and open up to God’s idea of an opportunity.  It is not easy to let go of one’s agenda and find a reason to be frustrated by any kind of delay.  Often I simply need to pause, take a breath, open my heart a bit and ask God, what is the gift in what I think is delay?  What is the unplanned pause you are showing me making room for today?  This is not easy when it comes to a delay on the road or a delay of needed information but what is the point of trusting God if I cannot show it by being willing to let go?

When we say that we or someone else has a certain je ne sais quoi we are talking about their flair. Life is full of flair.  It is the energetic force that moves in and through us.  When we connect to it in a specific way, the expression of this energy is our flair.  We might acknowledge it as a talent or a way of being as if it were completely cognitive but our flair comes from our energetic presence and connection to the greater life force.  We tap into it when we are in a flow state. It shows up in the poignant moments of life that we carry in our memory. The flair of life is about our connection to the life within us as well as around us.  When we figure out what our flair is it becomes the expression of life itself.  Connecting to our hearts opens up the flow reminding us we are always connected to all of life.  We just get stuck in our heads and think life is about us being human doings, not human beings.

As a kid growing up near New York City I marveled at how energetic and electric it felt being in the city.  There is an ambiance of the fast-paced, flashy lights, and so much going on at once that draws me in.  I notice a similar feeling when I have visited Chicago or San Francisco or when I lived in Washington, D.C. although each has its own unique flavor.  This exposure early on to the big city and its heightened energy was then balanced out by the contemplative and quiet nature of the desert I moved to around age 10.  At first, I hated it.  There was no one around, it was too hot, where was the ocean, and so on?  Over time I found an element of contemplation was thread through my being just by the presence of a pause which was not amidst a hustle and bustle style of the city. On some level an opportunity whether welcomed or not, to notice my inner workings.  For anyone who is not yet ready to face their own reality, there are many distractions and numbing agents available to assist.  It would be a good long while before I would have the necessary tools to open up and hear what was really going on for me.  Even amidst the contemplation of the desert, I was not yet ready to make use of the pause even offered between each breath to reconnect to my heart.  I do not fault myself for that, I believe there is a purpose for everything under heaven as it says in Ecclesiastes.  What I now appreciate learning on my daily dates with God is how to utilize the pauses both given to me and the ones I create.  I have come to know that no matter what my outside environment is, I can find a space of pause to reconnect to my own heart whenever I want or need it.

I remember so clearly in my mind as a kid when I would get out of the bathtub and my mom would wrap me up tightly in a towel.  She would rub my shoulders to help me dry off my body keeping as much warmth from the bath with me before I went to put on my PJs. I would make noises as she put the towel over my head to dry my hair. We would usually end up laughing and it was the felt sense of being wrapped in joy, silliness, and love. Being wrapped in this way is a constant for God when it comes to how God relates to us. On my daily dates as I began to open myself up to being present with God, I had a familiar sense of such a wrapping around my heart.  Up to that point, I thought the way to keep myself safe was to put an iron chain around it and board up walls around it to keep it from getting hurt.  Slowly God showed me that each of our hearts exists within this wrap of never breaking courage and love.  As we learn to live and breath connected to this heart sense, the more the wrap flexes to make room for more growth.  The feeling of our hearts breaking is merely the adjustment of the wrap to a newer reality of what it means to love.   The wrap allows for the flexing and while it seems in our minds that our hearts break, the only breaking we are really experiencing is the dismantling of whatever uninhabitable barriers we have placed on our hearts.  The wrap of God leaves room for us to grow and expand our hearts to experience the fullness of love.

When we are so busy moving and going, it is hard to know what is motivating what.  God invites us to pause and pay attention to what portion of ourselves is showing up for our lives at any given moment. I do not believe there is some perfectly balanced human being who is equally all portions of body, mind, heart, and soul all the time.  It is more like dancing and weaving through life attempting to bring the right portion of heart and mind to a decision. It is remembering to bring a portion of the soul when seeing the face of someone we cannot stand.  It is adding a portion of logic when we are emotionally overwrought. It is adding a dabbed portion of the body when we feel stuck in our heads.  The elements of ourselves are involved at all times.  The energetic layer which portions out what is driving our thoughts, feelings, actions, and habits tells us something about the efficacy of our lives. If we want to make some changes maybe it is less about being someone else or doing something drastic and more about changing which portions are present.  The power of the pause God taught me on our dates gives me room to notice what portion of myself is most present and available in the moment I am in.  From there I can choose to respond.

Given we all were created in harmony with nature is it really a surprise that we ebb and flow as all of life does?  There seems to be some sort of unwritten rule that as human beings were are fixed or need to be fixed because we are broken.  Perhaps what looks like broken is merely on the path to wholeness.  We view everyone through the lens of our own experience and reality.  Yet those we are viewing do not have the same exact experience or reality or vice versa.  So how is it possible to make any kind of accurate classification as to another person’s broken nature.  And what does broken even mean?  A broken bone heals over time.  A broken relationship either mends and returns the people involved with each other to a union or makes room for other relationships.  A flower that has a petal that has broken off is sharing its beauty outside the reach of its form and blesses that which it lands on.  God encourages us to see what looks to our eyes as broken as simply a move in a different direction.  Our hearts open us to see brokenness in and of ourselves and others as part of the process.  The sight of our eyes extends beyond the vision seen with our eyes and we are invited to look in an unknown direction when we encounter brokenness.

The journey of life seems to be one of learning and growth. We all know the destination and on some level, it appears futile to grow since, in the end, we can’t bring anything with us. From a pragmatic perspective, one wonders what the point is.  Why bother growing if all that is going to happen is it is going to come to an end?  Why bother expanding our realm of perspective or learning from the situations we find ourselves in?  As far as I can tell aside from an inner drive to grow and learn, it is about having the opportunity to make the most of life.  Before I got into recovery I spent so much energy trying to control my life and keep myself safe.  It was an overreaction to the chaos I was exposed to and unbelievably unsafe circumstances.  We all have the bubble or reality which bursts the realm of understanding with which we come into the world. Some bursts are bigger than others but we all have them.  They could be seen as cruel.  They could be seen as not needing to be bursts at all.  Why not just a little prick or pop? Then again, maybe it was a prick or pop but it felt like a burst. I think of the bubbles we used to blow from bottles of soap when we were kids. The bubbles burst seemingly so easy after such steady breath to make it as big as possible.  However we experience this awakening to the realm we have constructed, the burst becomes the element that wakes up our heart.  It awakens the heart, perhaps closed off due to protective thinking and behaving.  The awakening then calls upon us to give the heart equal resonance and power in our lives as the minds which created the realm of understanding we have. The breath has been steadily calling on us to pay closer attention to our hearts but our minds did not leave room in their realm except perhaps for functional purposes.  The burst begins to feel more like a steady heartbeat as we allow the realm of power to flow equally between our hearts and minds.  It is in the space of communication that the spirit of life dwells and connects our realm to those of others.

I am not sure why listening to or watching people do impressions of others is so funny and fascinating.  Some comedians make a living from it. I believe on some level we all take ourselves way too seriously so it is a relief to see someone act like someone else knowing it is not them. They are freer in some way to go with the impression they have of another person.  It is not as easy to swallow when you watch someone do an impression of you, at least it wasn’t the first time I saw it done.  However, with a little bit of time, I became fascinated by it.  We do not often realize the impression we give off.  Of course, the person who is impersonating does so through their own particular lens so it can vary from person to person.  One of the times I saw a student of mine do an impression of me in front of a group and started to feel angry but after a couple of deep breaths, I started to laugh.  It was done as part of an 8th-grade sketch on all the teachers and she did such a good job.  The impression of course was comprised of things you do not think kids notice and was exaggerated but she did a good job!  It gave me a reason to not take myself so seriously and worry about what impression I was leaving. The fact that she did the impression and was not overly worried that I would be angry with her and hold it against her says more about the internal impression I had left on her.  She was a student I had in class and worked within the student government.  Whatever elements of my behavior that translated into funny musings might stick in the minds of my students but the fact that they took a chance that I would laugh along with them meant they saw in me a playfulness that I did not know I impressed upon them.  While I am probably reading too much into it, I find myself wondering in our day to day lives how much of the impression we leave with others is felt and how much of it seen.  God invites us to recognize the impression on our own hearts of ourselves and how we bring that to every encounter with others.  It is my hope that I seek to be impressed by the presence of the hearts of others along with whatever comes across.

There are so many categories and labels that are both consistent and varied it may be hard to keep track.  It all boils down to which ones we need to know. It helps us to be able to categorize and place value otherwise we would simply be overwhelmed by all the information we are receiving. Therefore the ability to judge is a good thing and a very human thing.  But like all things good there is a flip side.  Most people who are attempting to better themselves or be more spiritual would say they are seeking to be nonjudgmental. I am not sure this is possible.  It seems to be part of the mechanism of what it means to be a living human being.  Judgment is simply a label that we use perhaps incorrectly to mean things like excluding, hold against, make wrong, and so on.  The ability to judge something is inherent, it is what we do with the judgment that matters.  All kinds of things go through our minds, but it is what we take into action that is evidence of who we are being.   I can have a tremendous judgment about how someone is dressed or an idea that he or she expressed.  It may even ascertain that my thinking or dressing is better or worse than the other person’s.  None of these judgments matter unless I treat the people differently as a result of it. God invites us to join the power of our hearts with our minds’ ability to judge so we do not allow them to fall into the good or bad bin and dictate our behavior from the space of lack of perspective. If we could not judge, we would have no way of knowing what to think of our behavior upon reflection and therefore not be able to improve.

When we learn to take a closer look at how our internal reality is effecting our external reality the real world of exploration begins.  One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from the French author Marcel Proust. “The real voyage discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” It speaks to the idea that as we grow and learn the eyes through which we see the world changes.  Also, as we learn to clear the lens from the internal eye, the clearer we can see.  The internal clearing is that of our hearts and minds.  When we discover ideas and feelings lurking in our hearts that disturb us or surprise us it is important to embrace them.  By acknowledging and accepting them as what is we meet ourselves where we are.  We cannot change or alter the direction of our vision by wishing it were different or shoulding it away.  The lurking elements of ourselves only have power when they stay in the shadows or concealed by shame. Our internal awareness means we can bring them into the light.  We can reach to God to find the place of compassion for their presence and allow them to know they need not lurk about unknown anymore.  If we are willing to be courageous we can make enough space for them to find what is underneath the lurking elements.  Most often it is an attempt to take care of ourselves while well-intended also has or has had adverse consequences in the landscape of our lives.  I cannot say that each time I discovered a part of myself lurking in the shadows that I jumped to embrace it.  The first quarter or so of my life I ran from them, told myself I was bad, and stuffed it down with food. In recovery, as I sat in rooms where people shared what was lurking in them and how they learned to not hide them my courage to face what was lurking in me.   With it came the willingness to share what was lurking within me with God on our daily dates.  In the space of our time together I found God to not have the contempt or fear that I had of what was lurking in me.  It was then that I came to know God as a power greater than myself.