dailydatewithgod

There are always at least two sides to every story.  Actually, there are way more but for simplicity sake, it is helpful to acknowledge at least the existence of more than one side.  Just like as human beings there are many physical and personal sides to us and how we might be described or describe ourselves. In the same way, we can acknowledge the various sides, we see the potential to choose our perspective.  Often we do not see a choice.  We experience something strike us and it feels like we have been hit and are down for the count.  We experience a strike as a way of standing out against something.  We acknowledge that at first what seemed like a strike against us because it felt like a hit in the head, ended up impacting our hearts and changing our lives.  We have all heard people say that what seemed like the worst thing to happen to them turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  The different strikes we come across in our lives we can choose to see as a positive, negative, or neutral impact.  Acknowledge our first experience of a strike may be different than how we see the strike after the fact.  Much like strikes in a baseball game, they are a part of life. It is all in the game.  It is what we do with them that matters.  Do we take the impact made by the strike and change course?  Do we use it to increase our determination?  Do we stomp our feet in protest insisting we have been wronged?  Do we try so hard to get everything set up so we can avoid strikes?  Sometimes we need to be hit by life to get the impact of what it means to be alive.  In my disease, I put up a lot of layers of protection, especially around my heart.  I learned about betrayal and confusion as it relates to love early on and I wanted to avoid any more of it.  I chose to numb out in protest and ended up putting up steel doors around my heart.  When I got into recovery and starting spending time on my daily dates with God I learned to let the doors open a bit.  With time I came to see the false nature of the supposed safety I had created by avoiding any further strikes.  Today when I do my best to keep my heart open I still have strikes.  But these strikes, good and bad impact me deeply and enable me to grow.  Strangely, I have come to see strikes as a gift.  It may not be my first reaction but over time I see how the strikes of life are designed to strike open my heart and allow me to breathe in the beauty and madness of this game called being alive.

How many times have you found yourself caught up in an idea or upset by something that someone else does?  It just gets you going and you all of a sudden are focused on the idea or the behavior and lose track of an essential question.  How is this relevant to me?  What pertinence does this have in my life or to me personally?  We can equally go the other direction and determine that many things are not pertinent in our lives because they are too overwhelming to think about or we feel above them.  Again, we lose sight of an important question, is this relevant in my life today?  Pertinence is a multilevel decision.  Rarely are things black and white.  If we approach the question of pertinence in our lives we can not do so just from a thinking mind.  We are also invited to do so with a feeling mind, the one called the heart.  If we find ourselves emotionally hooked into something and feel it is relevant to us simply because we have an opinion of it is one layer.  The deeper layer is investigating why we got hooked by the thing or idea in the first place.   Maybe there is something in that person’s behavior which we are so bothered by that reminds us of us.  Maybe we care more about this person than we realized. Our hearts call upon to take a closer look at what is coming up for us in the experience we have now made pertinent to us.  Equally, the things we find overwhelming may still be pertinent to us but we need to go within and determine what kind of role we can actually play instead of just choosing to dismiss its pertinence in our lives.  These are the quandaries we can bring to God.  When we pause, take a breath, engage our hearts readying ourselves for a deeper conversation with these pertinent aspects, we can ask God for help.

So often we jump to conclusions before we have the full picture. The reality is we can never fully have the full picture. There will always be something outside our vision or perspective which will prevent all the angles and background from making it into our view.  The best we can do is surmise based on the info we have at the time.  Our ego likes to tell us we have the full story and it is humbling to admit otherwise but it can also be engaging.  We are on this planet and in relationships with so many people.  Why do we think we were created to have the full view just with ourselves?  It does not make any sense.  When surmising a situation about our lives it is helpful to converse with others to get a sense of how they see things, especially if it is a decision that involves them.  In the same we are not on this planet alone, nothing we do just affects us.  To make for better surmising requires an attempt to connect to others and to God.  It does not mean we are required to do anything with their input, the conclusions are still ours.  The longer I engage in this daily relationship with God the more thankful I am to not have to know everything.  As a child, I thought I was supposed to know how to do and be in ways I had no clue about.  We think it is humiliating to admit we don’t know before surmising, but what if it is intelligent and courageous?  I appreciate being in relationship with others at work or even in the everyday world who can acknowledge their surmising was based on what they knew at the time but are aware that there may have been some angles missed.  God placed the desire to grow and love within our hearts.  This prompts us from our core to engage with others and learn from each other.  Surmising does not mean I have the right answer or all the perspectives, it means I came to the conclusion for the moment with what I had within and around me.

As human beings, we have a lot of thoughts.  A lot of thoughts that we often take seriously.   We are inclined to think it is true simply because we are thinking it.  It is coming from inside of us, so it must have some merit, right?  It wasn’t until I started going on my daily prayer and meditation dates with God that I began to develop a new relationship with thoughts and thinking. I came to realize the multitude of thoughts running through my head are not only not necessarily true but they are often about the same thing.  It is like there is some sort of machine inside of me that loops over and over with the same series of thoughts.  When it comes to things we are to ponder further there is usually some emotional energetic component behind it.  Pondering requires a pause to examine what is behind the uptick in energy and if it has any merit.  Again, just because I am feeling or have thoughts, does not mean I am meant to go from being to doing.  Both are indications of something.  Something may be a reminder that I am alive and have the capability to think and feel all kinds of things.  The something could be an indication my heart is calling out to me to step in and do some pondering.  As I practice looking within to my heart, I take a breath, turn to God, and ask, “How do you see this?”  Are the eyes of my heart seeing something that my mind and body are also communicating with me?  Will you ponder with me and guide my thinking?”  Inviting God into the pondering allows for a greater perspective and a reminder I need not ponder alone.

When we step outside the accepted norm we risk ruffling some feathers whether our own or others.  If we never deviate from the norm we are left wondering if we lived our lives or the ones we were told we were supposed to live. We fear being labeled deviant but really it is simply another word for different.  There are inherent biological constructs that make us want to belong and fit in. But if we do so at the cost of living the truth of who we are, what does it matter if we belong?  I know I have found great peace in connecting with others with whom I consider my chosen tribe.  I tried on many levels to fit into my family and culture from which I was raised.  It was taught valuable things and learned important lessons and hold with great respect and those who played a role in my upbringing.  It matters little at this point if the circumstances of my learning were the result of positive or negative experiences because like everyone else, the curriculum of life provides both.  I was not looking for a deviation when it came to the trajectory of my life, but I seem to have found one.  I spent most of my time trying to fit myself into a box not meant for me.  It is hard to accept one’s own deviation as much as it can be a struggle to accept others.  For me the longer I am in close relationship with God and get to know the truth of who I am, the more I see it is only by living this deviation that I can best honor where I come from.  Society and families place all kinds of expectations on us and we take those in.  We want so much to belong we lose sight of the power of deviation in providing a road towards inclusion with a tribe of our choosing. Life is about lessons and we do not get a grade.  We simply get the chance to grow our hearts one step at a time and the deviation versus the expected may be the path with our name on it.

We are all a vehicle for love.  We are set forth in this experience by our Creator who desired to spread love as far and wide and as multifaceted as possible.  The way for us to come to an understanding of this is through knowing the instrument we are.  It is about tuning into the core of who we are so the frequency that radiates from us is in alignment with our greatest purpose.  Instruments get out of tune and so will we.  Instruments have various parts as do we.  It is about making peace with our whole selves and accepting the instruments we have been given as the best way for us to be the vehicle of love we are.  We may not like our instrument whether it is our physical body, our attitude, our life experience, and training, or even the capacity of our hearts as we can see.  Learning to face all these elements of ourselves and see them as God sees them is us learning to play.  There is never an ending to the possibilities of how we as an instrument can be used for the greater good.  The more we recognize our role in the orchestra of life and the beauty of the tune we sing with our being, the less time we will spend wishing we were a different instrument or in a different section of the orchestra.

We like to think life will move along our expectations.  It is why we often experience being let down. There is a saying in recovery rooms that expectations are set up for resentment.  Depending upon how strongly we expect things to happen or people to behave, we can experience a sense of loss and frustration or worse due to the supposed aberration. We get caught up in the supposed idea of a thing and falter when things deviate from what we consider the norm, which we describe as the thing that is supposed to happen.  Many things have shown up as an aberration and ended up being exactly what I did not know I wanted or needed. As much as we like to think we know who we truly are, most of what we build our self-knowledge on are how the world defines us.  We are our name, our role in family and society, we are our gender, we are our looks, we are our job, we are our level of intelligence.  All of these are elements of ourselves but none of them are the truth of who we are.  Have you noticed all of those things are in constant flux?   How can we stand in a truth of who we are that shifts with the wind?  Perhaps these aberrations are merely life’s way of reminding us not to take ourselves so seriously.  Perhaps aberrations are invitations from our hearts to go with the flow.  To connect with the flow, we are invited to let go of the norm and the expectation and sit with the deepest part of ourselves. Within each one of us is a true sense of who we are which our heart invites us to get to know.  Only when we are in some cases forced to let go by experiencing aberration, do we stop seeking the answers in our head or outside of us.  An aberration becomes the unexpected invitation to look within at who God created us to be and assess how it matches up with how we and the world see ourselves and our expectations of normal.

The moment we think we know what is going on or we know what the answer is we get ourselves in a bind.   We become wedded to what we have figured out and breathe a sigh of relief that a resolution has been found.  It is nice to know. The fear in us quiets down because of the certainty we feel we have obtained.  However, all it takes is a little rotation of ideas or circumstances to upend our sense of security.  The reality is within each known are multiple unknowns.  The greatest security can be found in the awareness of rotations present in any given experience.  It is also freeing to know that if we reach a point of outgrowing the level of certainty we have always had we do not need to go very far to see things from a different angle. The rotation of all things while unsettling to the mind allows for the flow of life known by the heart.  When we reach the point of recognizing we are not sure if it better to breathe out and then breathe in or breathe in and then breathe out, we can begin to play in the joy of rotation.  In fact, if you ever want to experiment with how to rotate your mind’s perspective start with alternating your breath between your two nostrils.  Rotate between holding the breath in or out or using strong or soft breaths.  All these simple little rotations can create a different mindset prompted by the heart which needs fresh oxygen ongoing throughout the day. Rotation allows for adaptation and growth and this is what the truth of us seeks out all the days of our lives.

When I look at the pattern of my life, I see one steady advance after another is what has created change. I often think a change would come easier if it happened all at once.  Yet experience has taught me that while I did not know it at the time each steady advance on the path towards change was somehow necessary.  I could not know or predict which step might be most valuable and so taking the next indicated advance in front of me is what I chose to go with.  Even in moments when it seemed like a step back, it was actually an advance because it was a point of growth which facilitated a step in another area of my life which I did not know I would need.  I cannot determine if something is an advance by my judgment alone.  I need God’s help with how I see my life. I have spent a fair amount of time bemoaning that I wasn’t as far along as I thought I would be or pushing away the idea that I was back dealing with the same thing.  If I judged advances solely on their forward trajectory it would not work.  In my mind, life moves in a linear fashion.  God has shown me on our dates that life and nature are cyclical.  Even the long view of history shows us how life and cultural move cyclically. not just on the linear timeline where we see events.  The question is not why am I hear again but how did I advance within myself so I know how to keep living through this kind of experience?  Can I show life and myself that I have advanced as a person from the last time I was here?   The joy of growth and expansion of the heart is what makes whatever we are facing easier.  The shortest distance between two points might be a straight line but am I looking for the shortest life or the heart expanded life?

One of the benefits of my daily dates with God is the practice of halting.  By making time each day to slow down and connect with my inner life I get a chance to peak at what is going on without reacting to it.  This halting of reaction gives me space to look at things from a different perspective.  I can notice what is happening and not be enveloped by all the things attached to it.  The practice of halting from judgment, halting from belief, halting from identification with the thoughts or feelings gives me space to discover who I really am.  By the halting, I give myself the power to wonder who is it that is thinking those thoughts and having those feelings.  By halting I can ask God to show me how to see them through the eyes of my heart. By halting I can stay grounded in the truth of who I am without feeling obligated to play along with the thoughts and feelings.  All my life all I really wanted was a sense of sovereignty.  I never knew I could get it from halting the stories of who I am and what I am supposed to do.  God wants us all to learn to get to know ourselves.  God desires for us to open up to the real vision of who we are in God’s eyes.  If we are busy jumping on the train of whatever thought or feeling without first halting to choose whether or not we want to be on that track, we cannot begin to know who we are at our core.  The practice of daily halting and getting curious about who I am being gives me a sense of peace aside from all the things I or the word tell myself about my life.  I get to choose which version of myself I most want to align with, my own, the world’s, or God’s when I practice halting.