dailydatewithgod

We tend to think of stumbling as failure and something to carry shame about.  Yet anyone who has bothered to try to traverse a different path then they are familiar with will find themselves stumbling.  Perhaps our stumbling is more about how we manage to find our footing once we stumble.  If we get stuck in the shame instead of using the stumbling blocks as building blocks we will end up staying where we are.  Sometimes our stumbling is to wake us up to how we are facing new realities with old lenses.  We are attempting to walk through something new using the usual methods and ideas.  It is when we stumble and get cut or knocked off our feet that we can look at something from a new perspective.  At the very least it is an opportunity to laugh at ourselves.  I remember when I first reached a healthy body weight after being obese most of my life.  Sometimes I would stumble over my own feet.  Me, a dancer, looking like a klutz!  (And actually learning how to dance in a smaller body was an even bigger hurdle requiring a lot of patience).  It was embarrassing but my whole sense of equilibrium had to adjust and it needed time.  This was the part they didn’t mention when they said how fabulous it would be to live in a smaller body. My center of gravity had shifted and I needed to stumble to figure out I did not need to put as much energy behind my steps as I had previously.  If I had not stumbled I would not have learned how to carry myself differently which caused me to see things differently and learn to shift my energy use.

God does not see parts. God sees wholeness.  Wholeness of being and wholeness of humanity.  It makes a lot more sense to our minds to compartmentalize things.  It allows us to digest information when we break it into parts and chunks.  When it comes to how the heart sees things, wholeness is the default mode.  Perhaps it is the reason our hearts feel like they are breaking when we have lost a loved one or are angry.  Our hearts feel as though they are being attacked and will breakdown.  We literally feel like we can’t breathe.  Our minds interpret it as due to the particular separate thing but it is because we are not able to see the wholeness of the situation.  Our heart is not able to function as it was intended because we are trying to place the constrictions and functions of our mind where it does not work.  We are gifted with both perspectives but we cannot simply put one where the other is meant to exist and hope it works out.  Talk about trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.  God calls us to use the lens of wholeness when we find our categories and distinctions are causing our vision to break down and fall apart.  Hint: if we are not able to breathe while using our lens of separateness, it is an indication of our heart’s nature telling us something is amiss.

The blessedness by which we were created is beyond our imagination.  To fully understand what is happening the realm of God’s mind would make us God. One way I am able to get what I would consider a glimpse is when I notice the intricacy of nature.  Nature as in the world but even more so the nature of our human body and its construction.  All the cells which each have their own individual eco system, the networks of blood and electrical impulses that keep us functioning and moving as one being are very elaborate.  In fact we cannot yet get a computer to duplicate the kind of system that operates in our brain to keep us alive.  The apparent sacrosanctity in which we were designed speaks to the profound love and deliberate consciousness of God’s intention. And all of it goes on without us needing to be conscious of it.  This causes me to evaluate the level I am not aware of the sacrosanctity of myself but of other human beings.  Quickly they become the other.  Without effort on our part, the differences and the judgments come into play.  We all seem to be just as unaware of how immediate the lack of sacrosanctity occurs. The difference is in our choice to use the pause we are given with our breath to notice the thoughts before we act on them.  It is as though the unconscious effort to breathe is also a part of this dynamic system. It is calling us to wake up and notice the sacrosanctity view of God.

There are things we come to know and understand as time goes on.  Life has a way of revealing itself. We often think we want or need to know everything all at once.  I think I will be better prepared to handle things the more information and understanding I have.  Over time I have come to see that things are revealed just as they need to be.  I can trust in the value of being present in the moment in which I need to receive the information and understanding that is being given to me.  I never need to fret over the fact that I do not have all I need to do what I need to do because God would not leave me ill-equipped.  Why would a God that love and cares for me leave me hanging?  I may not like what I perceive to be the limitation of information but just because I think I am limited does not mean I am.  God’s level of revealing in retrospect is perfect.  Sometimes it is not the lack of what has been revealed but my resistance to trusting in it which gets in my way.  Or it could be the way in which it is revealed to me. I may not recognize it because it does not match my expectations and I discount the revealing.  Our daily dates help build the muscle of trust so I am able to walk into my day trusting in God’s level of revealing and ask for the courage to receive and accept what is revealed.

When God pours out love into our hearts at our creation, he creates a steady stream of life’s energy.  We can choose to be in the stream or we can block it off.  God keeps the streaming going regardless of what we choose to do.  Sometimes we may think we are not worthy of it but God is not stopped by what we think or feel.  God invites us to continually open ourselves up to the stream of love.  It means letting go of our damns and stop building sand bag walls. The beauty of God is that if we even attempt to take down one brick or remove one sandbag, he will find a way to allow the stream to come through the open channel.  She knows we are not keeping up the walls to block the streaming because we are trying to be difficult.  We have just forgotten that we are actually a part of the stream.

As a life long dancer there is something quintessential about the ability to move that I have felt internally as well as externally.  Most of our movements can be very mechanical. One foot in front of the other, hand to mouth, phone to ear, and so on.  Then there are those movements inspired by something.  We are caught be the spirit of music or the sound of the trees in the wind and we can sense an internal connection with movement.  If we are not worried about what others might think, sometimes we actually allow ourselves to go with the flow.  Letting go of the judgment allows us to be with what we are feeling and be in the movement.  We catch ourselves swaying a bit with our walk, snapping our fingers to the music in the store while in line, or drumming the hood of our car when we are pumping gas.  If you pay attention you can see a certain peaceful expression on their face.  It happens when they allow themselves to engage their inherent movement and sync it with the inspiration they sense within.  The movement becomes an honoring of the spirit within their hearts.  We have all had times when we felt immobile.  For me, the times when I am not able to participate in movement with my whole body cause me to feel less at peace.  There is something about being able to move with the rhythms of nature and spread the energy that are life-giving. As someone who has spent a large part of her life hating and vilifying her body, the continued reconciliation process involves surrendering to the movement of the moment without judgment.  I am grateful for a heart that senses the movement of life and communicates to my body how best to express it in the moment.

We all have things we would rather not have out in the open.  We construct our lives carefully to keep others from knowing certain things about us until we feel we can trust them.  This is not a bad thing unless we determine that no one is ever safe.  As relational beings it makes sense that we want to feel apart of and connect with each other.  The difficult nature of relationships is they often reveal the things we keep in the recesses of our minds about ourselves.  We cannot see our penetralia, we need others to bear witness to it.  One of the great gifts of 12 step rooms is the opportunity to be transparent with acceptance.  In the area I live in, people clap after you share.  The funny part is it doesn’t matter what you say, people clap.  They accept what you share, no matter what, and acknowledge  you for speaking it out loud.  It is a room full of people who know all to well we are only as sick as our secrets.  The opportunity to lay bear the penetrailia of our lives whether in a therapists office or a recovery room opens our hearts to witness the parts of ourselves we have been hiding from ourselves God is not dismayed by our penetralia. She is ready and waiting to take a closer look when we are willing.  He will not open that door without first knocking.  The penetrailia is a knock at our hearts to wake up and see it as smoke and mirrors over the truth of who we are.  There is nothing in God’s mind that can rip from us the innocence and pure love from which we were created.  Believing the publicity of our own penetralia is our way of protecting ourselves from what we think God sees.  God is happy to be the constant reminder of a power penetrating through penetralia to the core of love we all are.

Author J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.”  In a super efficient world where time is money and we do not seem to have enough of either, any perception of waste is not permitted.  Those of us inclined to measure ourselves by our doing love this.  Guilty as charged.  A day when I completed a lot feels like a day well spent.  I can prove my worth because I am not wandering around aimlessly with no sense of direction.  It is like I have the internal White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland running through my head, yelling about how I am late for a very important date. Alas, that is not true (on more than one level. 😉)  We are not human doings.  We are human beings.  Wandering allows us to take in the wonderland that is life.  Wandering makes space to just be in the moment we are in. There will always be another task to be completed or a goal to accomplish.  But if we do not pause to say hello to people on the way or wander in and out of unknown experiences, what kind of life will we have lived?  I am pretty sure I do not want my obituary to read , “Colleen was a lovely woman who completed all her to-do lists.”  God invites us to notice what can happen when we allow ourselves to go wandering in our hearts.  What might we find?  How much love can be unearthed?  My daily prayer and meditation dates are wandering times with my heart.  By wandering into my heart without an agenda of fear or need to protect myself from what I might find, I discovered what God was seeing all along.  Wandering woke me up to the truth of who I am and who all of us are.

Without putting much thought into it we have an awareness of our physical orientation. Our feet touch the ground, our butts touch the seat we are in.  Orientation speaks to our being in relation to other things or people around us.  When we enter a new space we spend the first few moments getting our bearings as to where we are in relation to the physical space around us.  Our orientation is not just physical.  Orientation speaks to an understanding of our beingness in the world.  This encompasses our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual nature.  When we hear a description of someone given to us,  it helps us orient ourselves to them.  If we find we lean towards reacting versus responding it is picked up by others as our orientation.  If we tend to walk around with a smile or a frown on our face people orient themselves to expect that kind of behavior from us.  We can choose to shift our orientation physically and otherwise if we want to create a different experience and atmosphere around us.  If we change our inner orientation, the way others orient around us will change.  God invites us to look carefully at what kind of orientation we have designed for ourselves and how we might be able to bring more love into it.  It doesn’t mean plastering a smile when it is not genuine but looking at how our overall orientation creates or does not create an atmosphere of the love we are at our core.  It is easy to blame others and circumstances for our experiences but our orientation provides the filter for everything we experience.  If we are not in touch with the truth of who we are at our core, we will continue to orient towards something other than that.

God created the universe and all in with love.  God sees the glorious nature of each element of creation.  When we are willing to set aside our judgments and preconceived notions of how things should be or appear, we can get a glimpse of what God sees.  Identifying the splendors of life begins by cultivating and connecting to the energy in our hearts.  It sounds too simple, but God operates simply.  I have made more of a mess out of my life and circumstances by trying to complicate things.  It is the default operating mode of our minds to see the flaws.  It is a protection mechanism and we can beg grateful for it.  I know I am.  The next step is to recognize that God also equipped us with the opportunity to pause before simply going with the default network.  It is called our breath.  How many times do we breathe in and out each day?  I am not sure, but it is a lot. As far as how many of those I am conscious of and use as the pause they provide?  Let’s just say, less than a lot.  Have you ever noticed when you are worried, anxious, fearful, angry, pissed off, frustrated, or fixated on something you are not breathing? Or if you are it is very rapid?  Funny, huh? God is continually opening the window for us to open the eyes of our hearts and see the splendors of ourselves, others, and the world around us with each breath.  We get to choose to take a breath, bring it to our hearts and ask God to help us see the splendor of the person or situation right in front of us or the one we are complicating in our minds.