dailydatewithgod

We like to find the solutions. Who wouldn’t?  Sometimes there is nothing more painful than coming up against a bunch of locked doors but not having the right keys.  As someone who has been accidentally locked out of my apartment or gotten to work only to realize I don’t have my keys, I know what a tough spot it can be.  Keys to unlock doors are more easily remedied than unlocking hearts but both require some time, patience, and connecting with others.  The difficulty when it comes to hearts is we often do not realize the door is locked and even if we do we may have a hard time identifying the right keys to unlock them.  Getting into recovery I realized I had spent many years under the guise of protecting my heart and inadvertently locked it up and threw away the key.  First there was some thawing that needed to occur to get to see the lock,  It was a lock I saw after the ice around my heart thawed.  It was my best thinking for my life thus far.  It was a no longer effective process of heart protection.  It had worked well for so long, I stopped noticing when it wasn’t working until I thought I would break.  The keys I picked up as a kid did not work as an adult. Walking into a 12 step room, provided some badly needed warmth, in the form of safety and complete acceptance, I did not realize I needed or wanted.  From there I began to thaw.  Thawing hurts and it was not a blissful process but my soul and the kinship of fellows kept me in the game.   Soon after accepting God’s invitation to a daily date, the warmth penetrated below the surface.  The dimly lit candle within my own heart began to grow and extend the warmth outside of myself.  These were the keys I did not imagine were the ones I needed. Nor did I think other people would be a key component to guide me into a willingness to unlock my fixed notions of what it means to be safe to love.  The finding of the unexpected keys to my heart has opened my eyes to how keys to unlock other doors in my life may be  not the ones I am expecting or currently have.  The evidence in my life has shown me I can trust God will guide the light within my heart to find the keys I need when and how I need them.  It is a humbling and surprising process sustaining me and makes me less reluctant to freeze or lock my heart again one day at a time.

There is a sense of relief when we feel like we have found where we belong.  It settles a fundamental part of our nature because it assures survival.  If we fit into the groove of people we will not be left to fend for ourselves.  If we match the groove of the way others think we will not be considered too strange to belong.   This primal nature drives us more than we realize. Our grooves may extend outside the group we belong to but provide a connection point from which to grow.  Unfortunately many of us end up experiencing grooves as ruts.  We feel like it is something we are stuck with because we were born into it.  The perspective of being stuck in some cases provides an easy excuse not to explore and in others a reason to rebel.  Our hearts find us somewhere in the middle.  What if the grooves we were born into were only meant to provide an initial training ground from which to grow?  What if we were never meant to stay put in our grooves but branch out and discover new ones?  What would it look like to value the grooves we started with and use them as a springboard to grow in our hearts and minds by carving new grooves for our lives and the lives of others we have not yet met? Our lives are not predetermined and we can create new grooves if we choose.  It takes courage and commitment because the challenge of carving and forming new grooves will come from within ourselves and those who belong to the groove we started in.

When we are reading or watching a fantasy story the creator counts on the audience’s suspension of disbelief when telling the story.  As human beings we are not usually willing to delay or hold things back especially if they rub up against our sense of what is right and true.  Doing so brings up the fear of being made a fool and experiencing possible shame because we fell for something we should have known not to believe.  Yet in the context of a story we oblige because we get to explore and take a ride to see what is possible and lies outside our boundaries of what we know. Plus when we do it collectively there is less chance of experiencing shame.  Our hearts encourage us to engage in a suspension of belief when it comes to interacting with others and ourselves.  So often we approach things from the mind that knows and can make decisions about ourselves and others automatically.  This is very helpful to get through life and inherently a good thing but it has limitations.  What might it look like if we listened to the heart’s call to pause and hold back or delay what we know about another person to discover them with new eyes?  How might something we believe we know about ourselves have a chance to be explored if we suspended our belief about whether or not we were capable of it?  With suspension comes rooms for curiosity and possibilities which are the realms of the heart.  God designed us with the capacity to grow and change.  We stop ourselves when we do not suspend our beliefs about things we know for sure and take a chance on seeing what we might not have seen before.  We get stuck in fear for the same reason we fear speaking in front of an audience, we do not want to chance looking like a fool and feeling shame. How many people who suspended their beliefs about what was possible with themselves or others were not first called crazy?   Pretty much all of them.  It is only now we see the wisdom in their ideas and inventions.

We learn early on about cause and effect.  It the language of our behavior it is phrased as actions and consequences.  We often are not aware of the effect of our action (cause) until we witness the consequence(effect).  Sometimes we can predict based on past experiences the probable consequences.  This is used to modify our behaviors as the focus is usually on preventing negative consequences from occurring.  We do our best as we cannot always prevent negative consequences.  Regardless, this focus gives a lopsided view of consequences.  When we think of someone of consequence it is usually a positive thing.  They are taking action and making things happen.  A person of consequence is mindful and intentional.  We are all people of consequence.  We all matter and we all have an effect on each other.  The question is how much time and energy do we put into our heart’s intention to be a beneficial consequence in our lives and the lives of others?  Instead of focusing solely on our survival mind which wants to prevent bad consequences, we can balance it out by focusing on how we can create good consequences by being a person of consequence.

The first time I heard the concept of kindred spirits was when watching a movie based on the story of Anne of Green Gables. Then I read the books.  I loved the way Anne spoke of kindred spirits and their seemingly unbreakable heart connection.  We all learn who we are related to early on.  Usually we live or near those who are our kin.  As we go through life we make connections with those outside our immediate relations. Often with those we relate to more than perhaps those we are related to.  So how can those we do not relate to be our relations?  It seems to defy logic but only if we hold tight to our concepts of what it means to relate to one another.  For those to whom we are biologically related, we can identify a common origin and way of being raised that gets passed down from one generation to another.  For the kindred spirits in our lives with whom we feel connected without a biological tie, there is a heart connection and a growing together of a spiritual kind that seems to with ease.  Yet those who are our blood relations also bring about an opportunity to connect with our hearts and grow spiritually, but we often do not see it or even experience the opposite.  I have had my own share of difficulties with my blood relations and am in no way an authority on how to create the best and highest good from and for those relations.  I believe in my heart it is possible.  We are literally biologically connected to our relations for a reason as God is a purposeful creator.  It could be simply a matter of choosing them as we do the kindred spirits with whom we relate.  Or perhaps it is about letting go of the labels we have for each other as mother, sister, father, brother, cousin, and so on.  Those titles carry expectations on them that friends do not.  I am continually open to exploring how to play a role in creating connected relations with those I am related to as well as those to whom I relate.  I look to the source of love to guide me on this heart centered path and do the best I can in the meantime.

As a senior in high school I attend a retreat called Kairos (meaning God’s time).  Our group of 40 seniors plus senior student leaders and staff spent 3 1/2 days together at a retreat center away from school and all other activities.  It was a pivotal experience on my spiritual journey and I remember it like it was yesterday.  One of the talks given by a student leader was called, “Love in Action.”  Through the course of the week we moved through the concepts of seeing the truth of who we are, accepting ourselves, understanding God and our relationship with God, and finally how that translates into how we interact with others.  Love in Action is about how we live the knowledge we are loved and cared for by God.  It was a very moving experience attending this retreat which included letters from our parents, fellow students, and close sharing with those in our small group throughout the week. It was a chance to let ourselves be seen and accepted by each other which at that age does not happen too often.  I took advantage of it to the degree I was able to be honest with myself at the tender age of 17.  I know the week of Kairos 75 in November of 1991 changed something inside of me and became a shaper in the relationship I have with God today.  Through the love of the team who guided us, the students back home praying for us and our families letters, I saw how much we were loved.  It broke my heart open because I had no idea anyone even noticed me. They were all love in action for us.  Even more profoundly I saw the power of shared experience and acceptance of one another in our small group.  We were living love in action.  Our action of love in any given day is to stand present in the awareness we are loved completely and fully by God and be that message for others as we let it guide our actions towards them.

The instrumentality of our lives is about being our best selves.  When we are within our instrumentality and not trying to play someone else’s instrument because it is was they or we think they expect, we have agency.  We are designed to be the instrument of love in our design.  God would have created us exactly the same if we were meant to bring love instrumentally to the world in the same way.  There are similarities, but no instrument is exactly the same, nor is it meant to be.  We need each other to create an orchestra and play the symphonies of love but we have been hand strung and carved by the Creator to be the best instrument in the situation we are individually in.  Only we know from the depths of our hearts which note is most aligned in the moment we are in.  When we are in sync with ourselves we will find our string section and the orchestra for which we are meant to play.  We learn how to play off each other and make beautiful melodies when we are part of an orchestra in life.  Plus, when it is time for our solo, if we know how we are instrumental in the whole picture of love, the rest of orchestra will shine because we are able to be ourselves.

After all these years of daily dates with God I find myself opening up to God’s perspective of learning from life.  I have always been curious, we all are, and saw myself as someone who is committed to growing and learning as I go through life.  It is one of the reasons that propelled me into the professional field of education.  In my heart there has always been an awareness of learning as much more than schools and books.  My relationship with God encourages me to look at my day to day experiences as lessons in love.  If I am in a good place I am willing to learn from everything.  If my heart is closed off and I perceive a lack of safety, my mind goes directly to survival.  In those moments there is no room to learn.  Like everything else in the flow and dance of life there is a time and a place to explore.  Deeper than just looking at the day-to-day experiences our hearts, if we are open to listening, will also call us to look at some of what we believe are the darker parts of our lives. Things from our past that we may have shut the door on.  Even being with experiences we do not want to think about let alone contemplate what can be learned about love from them.  Little by little God has opened the eyes of my heart to be willing to consider there may be something to salvage from those dark times.  As an incest and obesity survivor those are not spaces I enjoy reflecting on.  Strangely learning to salvage lessons of love from them brings me freedom.  Maybe it has something to do with our concepts of past, present, and future not being as fixed as we imagine.  Ultimately, it comes down to seeing as God sees.  God has greater insight into what can be salvaged by looking at it through the lens of love.  It is not about staying the past but being able to open my heart to find the power of love even in the dark.  It is about reckoning with my belief that there is no where God is not.  It is allowing God to use me to salvage the dark parts of my life by bringing it into the light of love.

It is easy to figure out things or experiences are generating excitement for us.  It is hard to fool ourselves and tell ourselves that we do not have the titillation we know is present, unless of course we are practiced in the art of self-deception.  Many of us are well-practiced in self-deception because we have lost touch with our hearts.  I know I lived in that space for a long time. When we are titillated it is present in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts.  We are fully attentive the experience, person or idea grasping our attention.  We find it easy to put energy into it because it is as though we cannot help ourselves.  This is how God created the universe.  Sometimes we think God is not interested in every little detail of our lives, but that is our thinking.  We figure God’s attention waned and there could not possibly be any titillation present when God’s thinks of us.  Just because we have lost interest, just because we can’t imagine God being titillated by our presence in her life, does not mean it is true.  God’s desire to know every cellular movement in our lives stems from his titillation of us.  We lack the capacity to fathom the enthusiasm with which God engages with us.  What I have learned over the years on my daily dates with God is the lack of comparison when it comes to my understanding of things and God’s.  My continual prayer is God, help me to see this as you see this.  What would happen if we asked God to help us see ourselves with the same titillation God sees with?  What might we say or do differently?  How might we approach the decisions in our lives or the interactions with others who are seen by God with the same level of titillation?  The possibilities are endless and ever-expanding.  Our hearts invite us to be present to the energy of the titillation of God each time we take a breath.  It is as simple and as profound as allowing life to be a titillating experience of existence today in our breathing.

We may not realize what it means to be created by God.  We cannot fully comprehend what comes with being designed by the Great Designer.  We get a sense of it when we allow our minds to wander and dream.  We grasp it when we are filled with a sense of pride for something we created and see to completion.  We know it when we spend time in the quiet of our hearts, in the stillness of our breath, and in the alignment of the truth of who we are at our core. Our ability to concoct things is tied to the presence of love in our hearts.  Our willingness to explore our inventive capacities can explode when we are willing to play.  We can concoct all kinds of mixing and matching of ideas.  We can contrive a solution to a problem because we are allowing ourselves to explore.  Most of our lives are made up of concoctions of others. Nothing operates alone.  We are all blends and mixtures of creation.  God encourages us to delve into the creative space within ourselves to see what concoctions we design for love.  Maybe love does not have to look the way we think it does.  Maybe love is more of a blend of experiences than a one time star lit moment that captures our hearts. Concoctions of love are limitless when they are driven by our intention to continue to create from a place of love we believe resides within us.