dailydatewithgod

We all have times when we wonder if there is anything to this God stuff.  Sometimes it is a moment, sometimes it lasts years.  I have had both times in my life.  The times when it lasted the longest are when I have let myself get fixed on my idea of how God is supposed to be.  God had stepped outside my definition or expectation of God.  At the core is a letting go of the obvious expressions of a power greater than me being present.  I creep into those spaces when I take the obvious things for granted.  Having a body that functions well, air to breathe, food to eat, feelings to feel even if they are crappy. All the obvious things that let me know I am alive and someone or something gave me that life. It is the willingness to go back to the obvious demonstrations that seem too simple yet bring me back into the space of the God stuff.  When I am willing to do be in gratitude, it is the portal which helps me hold on in the spaces of disbelief.  I don’t think God expects us to be a machine that never fluctuates, but hopes  we ride the wave all the way to the shore and find our grounding again as all waves obviously do.

One of the first key ideas presented to me in my path out of darkness is acceptance.  Sure, I had heard the word before but it often sounded like a defeated position.  Just accept things how they are.  Accept that it is not going to get any better. Don’t bother fighting it, accept the consequences.  I suppose like most things in my life at that point, it was tainted by my reality of feeling stuck and defeated myself.  I understood the victim mentality though I fought it as best as I could.  It showed up in my passive vocabulary and my desire to make sure others were happy with me.  It showed up in the way I kept hurting myself with food and speaking to myself with vicious language.  It seemed as though the only thing I let happen was bad stuff.  It seemed that way but my vision was eschewed   Right in front of me and all around me were examples of me letting good things happen. I learned that letting things happen, accepting things is not a defeatist attitude if what I am doing is reconciling myself to life on life’s terms.  There is freedom and power in not needing circumstances to be different.  As I grew closer to God on our daily dates, I began to see that my being and essence was not dependent upon circumstances and outward appearances.  As long as I know in whom I am grounded and loved, I am letting the truth of who I am come through all the circumstances and experiences.  It is not about the outside world reflecting who I am.  It is about me accepting the truth of who I am and letting it shine.  It is about not apologizing for not being what someone else wants or thinks they need from me.  It is about being the truth of who I am and loving them as they are.  Letting myself be who I am in God’s eyes is powerful and loving.

We start with the first step, the first thought, the first feeling, the first insight, or the first notion.  It is a beginning.  Even when things end, there is a new beginning.  With every night closing a new day is dawning.  We live and breathe and have our being in this cyclical experience of life where there is a beginning at every turning point.  Just when it seems like all is lost and there is nowhere to turn we find a bend in the road that takes down a new path. We find ourselves on a beginning we had not imagined. The experience of beginning is fresh and unworn.  It is the evidence of hope’s presence in life.  When C.S.Lewis tells us, “relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing has yet been done,” he is conveying God’s message of hope.  The invitation on each of my daily dates with God is an opportunity to believe again in the power of love and hope.  There are so many beginnings going on around us but we don’t see them because we haven’t opened our heart to their presence. We forget to take in a new breath.  Our bodies are designed to remind us to be in the beginning by taking a new breath.  No matter how much we get stuck in our heads, our bodies call us back to our hearts through a new breath.

My prayer for us is to embrace our bodies call back to a new beginning by being with our breath today.

When we show interest in something we are invigorated.  The verve that is generated by being able to focus our energy in a direction that we feel is drawing us in can be electric.  We notice the verve when it comes to getting a new thing whether it is a car, a smart phone, a relationship, a job, or an award.  How long does the verve last?  Often not as long as we would like.  It is interesting that when the verve dies down we look to the next way we can get an enthusiasm hit, but the car, the phone, the relationship, and the job do not go away.  What do we do when the newness is not enough to sustain the verve?  Do we not focus on it?  Do we wish it would go away?  Do we just bide our time until it can be replaced?  Given that most of our life is lived in the spaces between new things and experiences, at least the obvious ones, it sounds like a terrible way to live.  It puts us constantly at the mercy of outside forces.  My daily prayer and meditation date with God each day has helped to cultivate a verve for life I never knew was there.  By connecting to myself and my Creator, I am always in the flow of the verve of living.  Gratitude practices for small things builds the capacity for verve. If I have a reason to be grateful for something, it is a similar feeling to seeing it new again and the verve is reignited.  If I look through the eyes of my heart and ask God to help me connect to the verve of what it is that I am witnessing I become one with it.

Sometimes we find ourselves tangled up in situations or encounters with people and we wonder how we got there. Words are exchanged, gestures are made, and we are left with an odd feeling that it was not the interaction we intended.  The question is do we choose to run with the tangled situation or do we choose to pause and take the time to unravel it?  In some cases, we may choose to pretend it is not there or intentionally ignore it.  An awareness of what is happening internally often makes it not as plausible that we will ignore it.  Over the years, I have become keenly aware of my internal feelings and thoughts.  I presume this comes from the practice of mindful awareness that I developed during my daily prayer and meditation dates.  It is not always comfortable being aware of the internal process.  It either provides insight or makes one want to get rid of it.  Engaging the breath makes it easier to walk through but I have learned that comfort is overrated. Growth is not comfortable. I learned the hard way that opting to numb out or ignore does not actually lead to freedom.  A willingness to take a closer look and unravel the experience is what sets the stage for freedom.  The 12 steps taught me the principle of taking ownership of my thoughts and behaviors at the exclusion of others. I cannot do anything about what others do or say, but I can do something about my reactions to what they do or say.  If I find myself entangled by an interaction with another person, I am the one who is entangled.  It is up to me to choose to unravel it or not.  The beauty of a relationship with God which is focused on growth is I no longer have to spend my time making myself wrong for being entangled.  Staying in the conversation of me being wrong only hinders my willingness to unravel the experience.  God reminds me it is about unraveling so I can find the love hiding beneath the surface.  The courage to unravel a situation ultimately provides the freedom to live and to love with compassion and strength.  My daily date with God serves as a grounding in the truth of who I am so I don’t get tangled and twisted up in thinking the experience is me.

When we notice the presence of something in our lives whether it is a person, a thing, or an experience, we are taking note of its form.  The assess its impact we will need to move beyond its form into meaning.  The distinction is important because we often confuse the two.  We think noticing the form gives it meaning.  But the meaning is not inherent in the form.  There may be accepted meanings about the form, but that does not mean the form itself means anything at all. Our power comes in the space between noticing the form and making meaning out of it.  Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% what you do with it (i.e.-what we make it mean).  My body has no specific meaning until I place meaning on it.  By itself it is simply a physical form on which I have placed a name and a personality.  How many forms of things do we have in our lives upon which we never take a second look.  The cabinet door or the steering wheel in a car.  We notice the form that works on a hinge to open and close or the round shape that is placed on the driver’s side of the car, but we don’t make meaning out of the shape or the placement of it.  So how do we determine which forms have certain meanings?  Can we change the meanings?  Why does what I think of the form determine its meaning?  What happens when we think differently of a form tomorrow?  The idea is to open ourselves up to embracing the pause between form and meaning about anything in our lives.  We do not find ourselves in painful circumstances because we notice the form of our body.  We find ourselves in painful circumstances when we decide that the physical form of our body makes us more important that someone else whom we do not notice.  God invites us to take a step back from the meaning and begin by noticing the forms.  This leaves us room to possibly change the meanings and thus see the form in a new way.

One of my all time favorite songs is “I Still Haven’t Found What I Am Looking For” by U2.  I think our hearts are designed to search for love and our souls are designed to search for freedom.  Our minds are designed to search for information, yet sometimes it seems that mine searches for fear potential.  I have often described my brain as one of those beachcomber machines that search below the sand for metal instead my brain is searching for what is wrong here.  Our minds are designed to keep us alive, thank God!  Because of this it defaults to an operation based on noticing what could potentially cause us harm. This is a very good thing. However, given how we are less often faced with death the way our ancestors were it seems to be an overactive mechanism. The power of mindfulness and meditation is shifting the focus of your brain when it does not need to be focused on death prevention.  No matter how much you train your brain, we will not be able to remove the survival mechanism.  At least scientists have not yet figured it out.  Again, more good news.  During my daily prayer and meditation dates with God I have the freedom and opportunity to bring my survival focused brain spitting out a million things to be afraid of to check in with my heart.  I can take a deep breath and ask if part of what my mind is searching for aligns with a search for love. I can also ask God what she would be searching for in this situation as he guides me through the breath into my heart space.  Sometimes I find myself asking God if there is anything to be searching for at all or if it is just a matter of seeing things differently. After years of practice, I find I am more easily inclined to search for what is going well as well as being aware of what is going wrong in any given situation. This allows for more breath and a taste of the peace and freedom of which my soul shows up searching for.

My prayer for us is the willingness to take what our mind is searching for and see if it matches up with the searching of our hearts and souls today.

 The eyes through which we see the world create our understanding of the world. However our eyes do not perceive like a camera. Everything the comes in through our eyes gets filtered through our brain. Each image immediately comes in and is assessed based on the information in our brain. Does it look familiar? Do we have a name for it? The last time we saw it what happened? What category does this fall in? Do we need to let any other system in the body know what has been seen? Our minds automatically formats the information in such a way that we actually aren’t seeing what is outside of us. We are seeing what our mind is creating based on information already present in our brains.  You may have heard or read the saying attributed to Anais Nin and others, “We do not see things as they are but as we are.” Many years ago, I learned two simple prayers, “God how do you see this?” or “God help me to see this differently.” They have become my go to mostly when I am distressed by what I am seeing. Yet I am aware of their power to open my eyes to what I am really seeing whether it distresses me or not. I cannot know all of what is possibly present for me because I have so many preconceived ideas about what I am looking at. My daily prayer and meditation time with God has opened my mind to the idea of multiple possibilities beyond my own thinking. Our date time has opened my heart to want to see more of the world through its lens and embrace God’s seeing more fully.

I was relatively young when I started using the expression “Random!” when things outside the ordinary would occur.  Certainly within the definition of the word it was an easy catch phrase to indicate that whatever I was experiencing was something that defied any rational explanation. I like things that make sense.  I like for their to be an answer to the question, especially a right answer.  It makes me feel safe. As a mixture of maturity and sobriety I have come to understand that so many things defy rational explanation.  I am in acceptance most of the time that not everything is going to make sense and there is not going to be a right answer. Some things are just random.  It reminds me to embrace the mystery of life, be surprised by life, and just relax.  As long as I know where my true safety lies, I can be open to the randomness.  Designs are unsymmetrical, certain paths are crooked, and there are all kinds of pattern which do not match.  As I build and strengthen my relationship with God, I am willing to open myself to the beauty of randomness, of the other, of the outside the box perception.  The openness allows my eyes to shift and see it may not be random at all.  Maybe it is all as it is supposed to be. Life would be very boring if there were no randomness.  We would laugh less, have less to inquire about, and become shut in by our expectations of order. We would default to only relying on our intellect because it would have the answer to everything.  Sounds kind of bland and lifeless.

We write TO DO lists to check off.  We have a check list in our mind of what is considered appropriate in certain situations. We design check lists for flying a plane and performing surgery.  We formulate a must have check list for our partners.  We live in a government that works from a system of checks and balances.  We even give Santa Claus a list of children so none are forgotten. There are multiple areas of life which function by checking on them.  It allows us to create a sense of accomplishment.  Our brains thrive on getting the task done and checking it off the list.  We get a hit of dopamine when put a check mark next to the item. But what about our spiritual lives?  Do we have a way of checking on it?  Do we have a check list for God?  Does God measure up to it?  How often do we check in with ourselves, our body, our thinking?  We can mobilize our brain’s system of thriving off of checks by putting it towards empowering avenues.  How might we approach the difficult situation at work if we first stopped to check in with ourselves about how we felt about it?  Would we respond differently if we first checked in with where in our body we noticed the tension when we read the text or email message?  Might we enlist God’s help to remind us to breathe if we were checking on where God is in that moment of our lives?  My daily date with God, my devoted time of prayer and meditation, is a checking in with God and myself.  Before I go out into my day, checking on what my mind, body, and heart are aligned with allows me to be more effective, compassionate, curious, and it reminds me to breathe. If I cannot check off the breathing part of my being, no other kind of check list will help. 😉