dailydatewithgod

When I stand by the ocean I am struck by the consistent rhythm by which the waves move in and out.  There is a steady flow like the rhythm of our own hearts beating again and again.  God speaks to us through the steadiness of the rhythms of our lives. In those quiet and seemingly unimportant spaces in between the beats or the waves crashing on the sand God whispers “I love you.” More importantly, God speaks to our hearts with each steady beat and says, “I AM.  I AM Here. I AM Here with you.  I AM within you.”  Those words become the steady rhythm of our hearts and when we slow down and get quiet we can begin to hear them and let them sink in.  The steadiness of the reminder of who we are and where we come from is what we need to navigate this world.  With this perspective all is seen through the eyes of courage and love.  There is a reminder and a recognition of the truth from which our lives originated and we can rely upon the steadiness of the reminder when we pause to connect with it.

I learned early on about being of service.  In the family I grew up it was understood that as practicing Catholic Christians we were meant to live out our faith in God by doing for others.  I learned the principles of compassion and empathy. In school we did community service and at home we had refugees who came to live with us.  We read and heard the parables of Jesus like the Good Samaritan and the widow with the penny. At school, I gave two pieces of paper to the classmates who didn’t have any even though they only asked for one. I even became and altar server at the age of 10.  Although I am sure my desire to be “on stage” was somewhat the driver, I liked playing a part in a sacred service.  I was rather disappointed to discover, however, that women could not become priests.  The idea of serving others became an integral part of my reality from a very young age and there were multiple avenues in which it was expressed.  I am very grateful to my family and my faith for instilling these ideas in me.  When I got into recovery I came across a similar ideology and learned concretely to practice it in small ways and how quickly it could be the very thing to get me through a rough moment.  Growing up I saw serving others as a way of making myself okay.  If I did it, you liked me and I was safe.  I used it to justify the space on the planet I was not sure I was worthy of taking up.  Sometimes the intention behind a given spiritual teaching or perspective gets lots in translation.  I do not think being a practicing Christian or spiritual person of any kind is asking people to serve others because they need to earn their keep.  As my daily relationship with God has grown, I see it in a very different light. Love moves us to love others.  Just like hurt people hurt people; loved people, love people.  When I am in the awareness of God’s love for me I am moved to be serving because it is a way of living out the love inside of me.  When I was concerning myself with serving because it was what was expected or would make me okay I was looking to get something from those I served, even if I was not conscious of it.  Being serving is about living out the truth of who we are in God.  The funny thing is we think we have to wait to feel it.  The reality is we are always completely and totally loved by God.  There is no time when we are not.  Sometimes when we are serving others and we experience the love within us being shared with others we come to a recognition of how much we are loved.  We are touched in our own hearts when we connect with others.  It is not about waiting until we feel it. It is about doing the action of serving and trusting it is within us to do, but not so that those we serve will say we are good.  They may in their appreciation but the idea is not to do it just because of the response.  True serving is freely given.

We focus a lot in this world on being right or being wrong.  It seems to be the simplest categorization of people.  As if somehow we all do not engage in thinking or actions that are right and wrong.  On my daily dates with God I have opened up to the idea of categorizing by what works and what doesn’t.  It is an individual decision but in some cases can be broadly applied.  Thinking judgmental thoughts does not work for me because it keeps others at a distance and closes off my heart.  Yet, it does work if that is what I am trying to achieve.  It does not work because it is often based on only my perspective.  Unless I am open to a correction in my thinking I am likely to make an error in my judgment.  It doesn’t make me bad that I judge, it makes me human. Acting on it without correcting my perception does not work if my function is to be the person God created me to be.  It is not easy to be open to being corrected, but it is humbling.  I cannot know or comprehend at any given moment all the circumstances involved.  Even after the correction I may still have judgment but I will be in a more loving space to choose acceptance or not.   God is not deterred by our bad behavior the way we are of our own or others.  We can follow God’s guidance to open ourselves up to correction when we notice that it works for our hearts.

As a kid I was not too interested in puzzles as a game.  I understood the concept but tended to recoil from things that took too much concentration. Especially if it was something that I had to look at and determine a pattern or method in order to solve.  I did not like what I perceived as the barriers of having to do it right. I had enough of that pressure on myself as it was.  I was happy to try to solve a mystery by going from one thing to the next and asking questions. That would allow me to talk to people and pick their brains.  I didn’t get the fun or how it was a game to stare at something to find a connection or unscramble words.  I had my fill of puzzling experiences for which there was no information communicated and did not want to add to it.  If I was inquiring about something and got to move forward literally by asking questions, I was all for it. That felt in my domain of control.  To wait for the puzzle to open up in front of my eyes was too much pressure and there was the waiting.  And if I did not complete it as fast as someone else, I was failing.  I would grown when my mother would open up yet another jigsaw puzzle.  She loved them and could sit for hours piecing them together. Her enjoyment of them puzzled me!  Piece by piece it would come together and form a whole picture but she couldn’t ask the picture to tell her where the next piece was.  As we grow, we get to learn how to find ourselves before we have the answer or the complete picture.  The puzzles of our lives is the coming together of all the elements that make up the whole of who we are.  Sometimes we walk around with chunks of scenery missing from our story or our essence.  God always sees the full picture of who we are and knows it is there even if we cannot see it.  We are designed to be puzzled and unsettled by the missing pieces because we are designed in wholeness.  There is a beauty both in the piecing of the puzzle because of the process and the completion of the whole.  Sometimes it is about following a pattern or noticing a color scheme and how it connects with the people and ideas we encounter from day-to-day. At the end of our lives we can see the full picture and until then God is there to help us fill in the gaps.

Our brain’s are geared for survival. Our whole being is set up to be able to exist.  It is the reason we are here.  We are supposed to be here.  Our minds have several neural network systems at play.  From what scientists understand one of those contains all the automatic functions.  All the things we do without thinking about it like breathing and our heart beating.  This network is primarily responsible for our survival.  It is usually our first response to everything that happens in our lives.  In the areas where are ability to exist is not in question, it is helpful to question the first response.  It is where the practice of mindfulness comes in.  Paying attention and noticing our initial response before acting on it allows us to play an active role in our daily existence.  As God has taught me on our daily prayer and meditation dates, it is fascinating to stop and notice so many of the first thoughts crossing my mind.  As I learned to practice this and notice how I could see the idea before attaching to it and decide if I wanted to keep it or let it go,  I felt empowered.  All of a sudden the process of existing is something I can be actively engaged in.  I do not need to be a victim to my thinking.  Don’t get me wrong, this is not easy and there is a reason mediation and mindfulness are practices.  It is exactly what one is doing, practicing over and over.  The power of the relationship with God shows itself when I am uncertain about a thought I have typically held on to. I am not always clear if it is true anymore or  if I just believed it was because I thought it.  Perhaps God’s version of my existence does not even include this element. Maybe it is something I took on at an early age and it has outworn its usefulness.  These are the things we take into further contemplation when God shows me his version of what my existing means.  She wants us to see our existence as an integral part is the universe where love rules.  This requires new eyes.

A fundamental tool of our minds is the ability to question our reality.  Being someone who is inclined to over analyze just about everything I can get stuck in a query and find it hard to get out. I seem to be a questioner by nature and can sometimes drive myself and others crazy with all my questions. It is however, interesting when I look at the things that in my life that I do not question or times when I did not use the tool of inquiry.  When I take on the stance of exploration and learning I am in a place of opportunity to grow.  By querying the things that I do over and over again or situations I find myself in repeatedly I can look a little closer at what is going on.  Things are rarely what they seem and as far as I can tell there are patterns and concepts from which we operate that have been given to us and we blindly accept them.  It is only when we find ourselves butting up against them and in pain from them to do we stop do some querying.  God invites us to look with compassion as God does with all things, at the places and spaces in our lives where our hearts are not aligned with our heads.  We may be able to blindly follow something in our mind but our heart doesn’t buy it.  It may, but the heart seems to only get on board when it senses an alignment with the truth of who we are.  Our ego gets very attached to the known including those passed down concepts and patterns whether they be from society, family, or just repetition.  To even begin querying can feel uncomfortable and scary because our ego sees it as a threat.  This is where God’s gentle hand and kind support can allow us to open up and take a look just to see what is there.  It is the gentle voice reminding us that just because we are querying, doesn’t mean we have to change anything.

Do you ever notice that our goal seems to be relief?  When we are in pain we search for a pain reliever.  When we are worried about a friend, family, member or coworker we feel relieved when we connect with them and find out how they are doing.  When we finish the task we feel a sense of relief that it is no longer hanging over us or on the to do list.  Relief as wonderful as it is has a temporary nature.  Especially given that once we experience it, it does not stay.  There is always something else from which we need relief.  I suppose like the commercial says, we want relief because we haven’t got time for the pain.  Pain whether emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or physical is no fun.  I get it, when I am experiencing pain I want relief too.  But maybe the relief is not meant to remove the pain entirely, but give us enough space to take a look at what it is trying to tell us.  Over the years in my relationship with God I have come to think of relief as God’s nudge of energy to keep us going just a bit further.  Relief doesn’t come to us so we can move on or keep doing what we are doing, it comes so we can pause and have some breathing room to listen to the message of the pain.  Pain can be a loud, clamoring voice and when it is screaming at me I cannot make heads or tails of it.  When I experience some relief, usually temporary, it gives me the space to take a look.  What was the message of the pain?  God, how do you see the pain?  Just like we learn from our shadows and our darkness, we can open ourselves up in the moments of relief to take a closer look at the pain from which we have just been relieved.  Sometimes the answer is just that we are having a very human experience.  Sometimes it is an indication of something more to see.  We can appreciate the relief and utilize it to awaken our sights to messages from pain we would otherwise just glide past.

The hardest time to be a witness to the light and the most needed time to be a witness to the light is when we are in darkness.  It is what we need the most, yet have not the slightest clue how to connect with.  For most of my 20s, until I got into recovery, I suffered from clinical depression.  It was something that ran in my father’s side of the family.  Besides the sense of hopelessness, there was this feeling of constantly being under a cloud of darkness. It was not a feeling of being sad all the time, it was a sense of feeling nothing.  I could see light all around me and I clung to it where I could in any way that I could, but it would not stay.  Each day I found myself back under the cloud.  Looking back on it now, I can see there was a lot in my life that I had not yet faced.  I trust that it was not yet time. By facing the darkness which overwhelmed my mind would prepare me to trust I would be able to face the darkness in my own heart. I remember very distinctly that when I started taking medication, I would get these waves of remembrance of a time when I didn’t feel that way.  It was amazing.  It had sunk in so deep I had forgotten there was a time when it wasn’t so hard to stay in the light.  The medication for me poked holes in the darkness.  The doctor called it a chemical imbalance, but all I knew was that whatever it was doing it was restoring me to some kind of baseline from which I could operate like a normal human being.  It wasn’t such a struggle to take a shower anymore and I didn’t have to exhaust myself being so overly happy.  It was a relief to sense that somehow the light found its way back to me.  I believe in our hearts where God dwells is this very light that is always there and as bright as ever.  Sometimes our minds disconnect from it and forget how to make their way back.  It is like it left breadcrumbs but someone got on the path and ate them.  When God finds a way to help us reconnect with the light within us, we can move and breathe and be in the way we were meant.  My life did not go perfectly after I started taking medication.  I have learned there are very few straight paths in life.  I believe it was a part that eventually would get me into a recovery room where I felt safe enough to begin to open the wounds in my heart that existed side by side with the light (the one’s that hurt the most) but could not see.  We all have experiences of darkness in our lives whether it is a medical condition, an idea, a person, or an experience where we forget how to reconnect with the light we are in most need of and long for.  God wants to help us return to the truth of who we are which is light and love even if the path to do so may not be the one we were expecting.

It is kind of humorous that God operates on such a subtle level.  I sometimes think of God posses this stealth power of being.  Perhaps because the energy of love is so overwhelming it must be transmitted to us in small doses, lest we be overwhelmed.  As my daily dates with God became a regular thing I noticed a shift in how I perceived life.  I began to be on the lookout for signs of God’s presence throughout the day.  I bothered to get quiet and listen for the still small voice that was nudging me in one direction or the other. I also began to notice the subtle communication that seemed to be coming from my body.  A sense to move forward or not, a literal pause before speaking, or a feeling in my gut. As an incest survivor I decided early on that my body had betrayed me.  It was the only way to make logical sense of the sensations I was feeling in them before I had the language and the context to understand what they were.  No one was able to explain to me or even notice I was experiencing anything.  So I did the only thing a child does which is just make it all bad. So as I grew in my daily relationship with God and began to notice these inklings my body was having.  They had been there all along but since my inklings did not match what was happening to me as a kid over and over I concluded they were wrong and bad.  I was basing it on all past experience.  Gratefully, because God is patient with me and surrounded me with people to whom I could begin to share and process the past experiences, I am able to slowly pay attention to the inklings without being alarmed all the time.  In that process, which is a daily one, I begin to know who I am and unveil some wounded parts that are in need of love.  If I were to continue to exclude those inklings I would be missing out on part of the wholeness of the human experience God has in store for me.  We all have experiences which taint our perspective on some of our life experience.  We carry some wounds often in our bodies and those may be the very areas where these inklings towards knowing ourselves and the very essence of love may be hiding.  God presents them to us in inklings so we can slowly step into an adult knowing of the whole of ourselves and know love more fully.

The fun about a mystery story is when we solve it, right?  If that were really the case then we would jump to the end of the book or the movie of every mystery story.  There is an aliveness we experience when we are discovering each of the pieces that unveil what is going on.  The same thing occurs in our spiritual lives.  We think we want the answer to who or what God truly is and why we are here.  Most people go their whole lives in search of this answer.  It is in the discovering little by little God and themselves in the process that we create a life.  It goes completely contrary to the status quo which says we are a sum of our results. This very individual endeavor is what brings us face to face with who we are being in the world.  God invites us to discover who we are as measured by our hearts as fully as we easily embrace who we are in our minds. It takes a little more concentrated effort and step back from all the clamoring.  Yet it is this very patient and persistent effort in the pursuit of discovery of the nature of love’s existence that is fueling our hearts.  It is why over and over again we see people do crazy things in the pursuit of love.  It is a call to awaken the power of discovery in ourselves and inspire others to do the same.  It is what keeps the energy of love alive and awake in the world.