dailydatewithgod

For as much color there is in the world we have a way of seeing things in black and white.  Black and white are not actually colorless but rather the degree of the reflection of light through which we see and perceive color.  Being open to color or grey simply about being in the midst.  When we are open to color we do not have to depend upon an extreme of all or nothing in order to function.  We make space for breathing, for mistakes, for learning, for the mishmash and the synchronicity of life.  The degree to which we are willing to show up for the in-between is the degree to which we will witness and experience the color of our lives.  God created a beautiful pallet of colors through which we can embrace life if we choose it.

Why is it only when things break we are able to see what they are made of? We could find out ahead of time through investigation but we don’t .  We accept things at face value and presume it is the whole picture that matters. When things break we view them as flawed because the are no longer whole. But if the parts make up the whole, who says witness the brokenness is of less value? What if we gain a deeper appreciation of something because we are not able to see all the wondrous elements that compose the whole thing? God invites us to bear witness to our breaking and brokenness of others in the same way.

Listening to coaches in business and sports there is a lot of language around upping one’s game. It’s about going to the next level, striving to get better, and see what one is capable of accomplishing.  While I would not call God a coach because it seems a little two small of a role to place upon God, she does encourage us. In God’s world, upping one’s game is not just about actions, it is about being.  We look into our hearts to define ourselves and acting from a place of truth. Upping our game is not just reacting to what happens but taking it and being the truth of who we are despite our initial inclinations or expectations of the world around us.  Upping our love, upping our compassion, upping our level of forgiveness towards ourselves and others.  Showing up with the core knowledge resonating from deep within us and being who God designed us to be.  Sometimes we get fatigued and it feels hard.  Sometimes we find muscles we did not know we had.  Sometimes the outcomes are not what we expect.  Upping our games means we are not competing against anyone but ourselves.  How can I up my kindness today?  How can I extend forgiveness where I was not able to extend it yesterday?  What would it look like to up my level of self-compassion?  What is a possible way to be the truest expression of my heart today when I find myself afraid?  Upping our game in God’s world calls for us to rely on God to remind us who we are and trust that God knows what God is talking about when we sense the whisper of our hearts: I know and believe in the truth of who you are.

There is a way of seeing things on the outside of us that we can easily see as other.  While outer does not mean other we tend to think it does.  We perceive something as separate from ourselves as merely interacting with us but not being connected to us.  On the surface this is obvious.  I am one person in a body and unless we are embracing we are not connected.   Yet each of these outer interactions are interpreted by our inner point of view.  We are much more connected than we realize.  To other people, to situations, to ourselves.  It is convenient to label something as other simply because it is physically outside of us, but the real awareness consists of looking at where we can grasp the thing outside of us as a vehicle to provide information of the inner side of us.  We react to what someone says to us we think because of them.  Yet it is our interpretation of them we are reacting to.  Think of any time you have read a text message from someone and been offended by the tone.  What tone?  Even if your phone was able to put a voice print to it, it would not sound the way you played the tone in your head.  Or how often have you been bothered by one person who said excuse me and another person who said it you took it as them communicating effectively in a crowd?  The outer experience if we use it to its fullest capacity becomes a learning tool or awareness of our inner experience.  God invites us to take all these outer occurrences and use them as lessons of the moment.  What kind of space are we in internally when we interpret things with a grain of salt or manage not to take it personally?  How might we create more of that internal experience so we are not feeling as though life is jerking us around?

As people are motivated to live and grow they are looking to establish a name for themselves.  We look at what we stand for and what is important to us.  We work within the parameters or outside the parameters of what is already established and choose to follow along or go against the grain.  God has established the template of love in all elements of life.  It is clear that the light of love is what underlies all of existence.  When we opt to operate in a way establishing ourselves in alignment with love we have the backing of all of life.  When we choose to operate from the viewpoint that all things are a demonstrate of love’s presence or the call to love, how we conduct ourselves becomes clear.  We either want to operate effectively within the realm of life by cooperating with the established system of love or not.  On the path of establishing ourselves as players in the game of life designed by God or players in another game.  God does not withdraw the established inheritance of the presence of love depending on our choice. That would imply that the establishment is unreliable.  However, God does not force our hand.  We can decide what we want to be establishing in ourselves.  God is ready to show us how we can can be the effective in the world.  Aligning ourselves with the established nature of life allows us to be in the flow of creation and seek out many possibilities.  Establishing our role in the game of life, begins by getting to know the truth of who we are.  When we are ready to stop running from what we fear we might be and get quiet, God is there to receive us with the elaborate established nature of the power of love.  Establishing ourselves in the truth of God’s world enables us to find the peace and joy our hearts know as our truth.

The thing about surrendering the way we see things to God and opening to how God sees is it’s too simple.  We think in order to let go of our imaginings and envision something more we have to reconstruct our lives with the flip of a switch.  Our whole lives will be altered in a single moment never to go back to what we were seeing before.  Envisioning is about being in possibility.  Envisioning is about hoping.  Envisioning is about heart.  Our minds tell us we must know all the minute details and have it all figured out before we can engage in possibility.  Seeing as God sees allows us to play by envisioning what could or might be.  It engages our hearts and our spirits to puts around and see what it can come up with.  God not only invites us to begin envisioning what the heart sees around us, but trust it will happen.  We are afraid if we let go of whatever certainty we claim to have the bottom will fall out from underneath us.  We forget that God is there holding the spaces of imagination. When we step like a child into God’s playground, there is not room for fear only learning and exploration.  Envisioning allows us to hope and peek at what is possible.  Envisioning allows us to breathe and be touched by the moment.  Envisioning makes room for what is sometimes unspoken out of fear.

There are times in our lives when we find ourselves crying.  Sadness, grief, and even joy can cause this liquid to run from our eyes.  For some reason we often feel the need to apologize for it.  What exactly is it we are apologizing for?  Being human? Having feelings?  This natural way our bodies let go when we are weeping is cleansing.  It allows us to let go from the inside out and make room for something new.  God created our bodies with this mechanism to help clear out what we are letting go of.  Weeping is a beautiful example of something we do not have control over and are given a chance to allow as a genuine expression of where we are in our hearts, minds, and bodies. Like most things it is not what is happening that is good or bad, it is our determination that makes it so.  We have nothing to judge unless we give it the meaning of something. Which are we choosing, our meaning or God’s meaning? If we criticize weeping, what other God-given natural capabilities are we criticizing or working to prevent from happening?  If we apologize for it are we apologizing for God? Being in acceptance of who and how God created us opens us up to be the messengers of love we are designed to be.

God’s viewpoint far surpasses our understanding. We stand at the edges of it and try to wrap our minds around it but seem to fall short.  We get stuck thinking we need to grasp the vastness of love and being of God. The closest we can come to it is when we return to our hearts.  When we rest and let go of the mind’s need to grasp at vastness it can be present in our hearts.  Love is about allowing, not grasping.  In the moments we pause and take a breath into our hearts we sense the vastness of love present within us.  God did not create it out there.  God did not make the presence of love only available in grand gestures and significant spiritual experiences.  God places the vastness of love in the everyday moments of heart connection. If we want to touch the vastness of God’s love we simply need to pause and breathe into our hearts.  If we start to see it there, we will see it everywhere.

It’s hard to imagine why we need to obscure things from ourselves. In general, we tend to think we know ourselves pretty well. The truth is the most of what we know falls into two categories: things we know and things we know we don’t know.  A much larger chunk of reality exists in a third category: things we don’t know that we don’t know. In other words, what we are not aware of as something to be aware of. Here is where the obscuring works the best. It is not intentional on our parts to be obscuring but it happens simply by nature of reality.  We cannot know what we do not know that we don’t know.  This is where our engagement in relationships with others is our greatest tool.  We are designed as humans who are purposed to grow and learn in love to spend our lives discovering all the places and space we could not imagine love would be present.  Ultimately the obscuring is how we manage the uncertainty of living life.  It is comfortable to stay in the knowing what we don’t know. If we were able to be fully present in every breathing moment, we would be enlightened masters.  But we are in these temporal bodies and many of us have turned off our awareness of the information they provide as to our emotional and mental reality.  We can easily be consumed by the realities of what it takes to get up and move through life physically that we never get to those deeper layers.  Until our physical experience causes us to stop and take notice.  What is happening physically can be obscuring the emotional, mental, and spiritual capacities if we let it.  Or, we can choose to stop taking the physical experience and reality as all there is and go deeper. Pause and see what it is obscuring. Step out of the knowing what we don’t know part.  Enable ourselves to discover some of the things we don’t know that we don’t know.  Those mysteries provide insight into how we can grow our hearts.  The eclipses and veils of a physical ailment or difficult interaction with another human being, can be touched upon below the surface if we are willing to open our hearts and see versus just using our eyes.  Obscuring if understood as a mechanism through which we can know there is always more to know is not a bad thing.  It is entrusting that when we need to know, the obscuring will fall away.

The only problem with our thinking is we default into believing everything we think is true.  We have this false sense of security that if we thought about something or are thinking of something the truth will come to us.  We would not believe this about other people.  The idea of everything another person thinks is automatically true is laughable.  No one is 100%.  The challenge is that we go from there to the extreme of lying.  We think truth versus lie.  Maybe there are some grey shades in between.  There can morsels of truth in what we are thinking without the whole of what we are thinking being true.  Just like our feelings, our thoughts provide us information about ourselves.  We become aware of our perceptions through our thinking.  The idea of truth is not automatic because our perceptions are not the same as others.  How is it possible for both perceptions especially if they are opposing are true?  The thinking of someone else therefore appears to be intruding on ours.  Maybe all that is happening is the gift of a different viewpoint.  Maybe it is helpful to have someone else’s ideas intruding on our own.  Are we interested in getting to the whole truth or are we interested in being right?  The reason it feels intruding when someone insist upon their perspective based on their thinking is because we are concerned about being right.  If it does not matter who is right but that we get to what is right, there is no intrusion.  God invites us to engage with others in relationship and like all things, learn how to grow in love.  Instead of viewing others as intruding on our rightness, we are offered a chance to pause and see things from someone else’s perspective.