dailydatewithgod

When I think about things I have been given I find myself wondering how well I received them.  Did I handle it differently if it was something I asked for versus someone else choosing to give to me?  Gifts are a funny thing and come in wrapped in all kinds of packages. Some of the best things I have been given came not in a form I would have requested.  When God gives to us it is because of who God is. God does not give out of obligation or responsibility.  The Great Creator simply creates out of love and the gifts we are given are an expression of love. They are the gifts our souls need to create room for more love in th world.  We can facilitate the growth of the gift by receiving the gifts we have been given and using them to best and highest good despite the packaging they come in.  We are given gifts to use them.  The gifts I struggle receiving the most are the ones I judge as not being gifts at all.  Who wants to be given the experience of being an addict?  Since when is the experience of being an incest survivor a gift?  Who wants the experience of being made fun of in school?  We all have our versions of this.  I have learned on my daily dates with God that we have the capacity to accept what we have been given when we look to God as to how to use it.  I know with God’s help my path of addiction led me to the spirituality of the 12 steps which has become the guiding path in life that I never knew I wanted and needed to be the key to freedom.  With God’s help I have learned how to survive a confusing and frightening childhood experience and find space in my heart for greater love and forgiveness than the world believes is possible.  I have learned what real love and acceptance are from the gifts I have been given in the worst packages.  I am grateful for my courage to receive them and the willingness to turn to God to ask how to use them today.

It is easy to identify areas of our lives that are amiss.  We are usually acutely aware of what is wrong with a situation, person, or ourselves.  Our minds have this unique capability to seek out and find trouble.  It is part of the design to keep us alive.  Living is not about avoiding problems, but it is also not about focusing exclusively on them.  We are a balance of good and bad experiences.  We vacillate between feeling a mess and feeling whole.  We walk the line of freedom and slavery to our mind versus our heart. The blood is flowing back and forth between each.  Our breath comes into our head and makes it down to the heart area and then back up again to go out.  There is a communication going on between these elements.  If we stay in the troubles our mind perceives in our heads without bringing them into our hearts for a  different view we will never see anything but troubles.  The dance between our hearts and minds are part of the mystery of life. It calls upon us to not jump at what our head is telling us but let the heart weigh in as well.  When we take a breath we invite the pause and the opportunity to engage our hearts in addressing our troubles. We will know if our hearts are troubled equally by what we perceive in our mind and then know to take them back to our mind to determine the next step.  God does not design us to avoid or escape troubles.  She invites us to evaluate them fully before becoming absorbed or fixated.  He gave us breath allowing us to embody the process of acting in life.

When we stand back and take a look at our lives we get a sense of where our dedication lies.  How we spend our time, what we fill our minds with, and the ways we choose to grow all speak of our dedications.  Some are obvious on the outside, but not all of them.  If you were to evaluate the conversation in my head before I got into recovery you would think I was dedicated to self-annihilation through judgment and insult.  If you looked at how I ate and abused my body you would see the same dedication.  I would not have described it as self-destruction.  I saw it as self-preservation.  I think we are dedicated to what will preserve our survival.  It is part of our design.  It is a blessed part of our design but as incest survivor my instincts went awry. We hold on so tight to the ways we have learned to survive because we are certain it is the only way to go.  It had to get really bad before I was willing to consider another option.  The reality is I was not aware that my dedication to survival was the cause of my pain.  My mind was stuck in a time frame and series of circumstances that no longer existed.  I had learned early on to adapt and just never stopped.  The breakdown of my survival mechanisms of food and body hatred ended up being the best thing for me. This recovery path has been an enlightening and harrowing process that continues to move forward.  God knew within me existed a dedication of my spirit to my wholeness.  The breakdown allowed for some new light to come in and see the innocence within my own heart.  She is dedicated to my survival as a vessel of light and love.  He understood the importance of leading me gently away from my version of survival to a place where I could dedicate myself to the survival of love through me.

I love watching little kids when they are exploring.  By the time they figure out they can grasp things with their hands and get a closer look they are all about reaching for things.  The part that makes the adults watching them nervous is how they may not account for the other parts of their body and the various obstacles which stand between them and their reach.  I remember as a child getting scolded by my great-grandmother who only spoke Italian. I had stood up on the couch next to the bookshelf to reach and get the silver coasters I wanted to play with.  I did so successfully but turned around to the chair bound woman on the other side of the room waving her hands about and speaking louder than normal as she looked at me very sternly.  I, of course, saw no issue but promptly told  my mom who was int the kitchen that I had upset Nana.  We typically think of reaching as going for something outside ourselves. We reach for a goal to attain.  We reach to hold on to something lest it come loose from our grip. We reach out to other people.  We reach our destination.  But what about reaching inside ourselves?  What about tapping into a reserve we often forget is there? The benefit to exploring what we can reach for within is in its availability to us because it comes from within us.  We can reach for others, but they may not be available. We can reach a destination but it may have changed by the time we arrive. We can reach for a goal but it may not matter in the future they way it does now.  When we reach for a feeling or a thought motivating us to keep going in our travels we can continue to walk the path of our live which has many destinations.  When we reach for a feeling of comfort to still our minds we can relax and make it through a moment when a friend is not available.  When we reach for a sense of satisfaction in the moment we are able to stick with the process of moving towards a goal.  Reaching within provides the resources to show up today that are not dependent on what others and circumstances provide.  It is not about being so fiercely independent as to not need others, it is about reaching and engaging the power of who we are by cultivating their use in the balancing nature of interdependence.

The gift of letting go comes when we realize it creates a space for love to enter in.  When we are opening ourselves up to the possibility of love by letting go of our limited definition of love the world explodes with joy.  It is not easy to be willing to be open because during the space of opening ourselves we feel vulnerable and unsure. It is the in between space of just having let go and waiting for a new experience.  God does not disappoint   God knows the tenderness of our opening space and honors it.  He comes to us with gentleness and a joy that surpasses our understanding. She knows the possibility for fear to creep in during and opening of our hearts but encourages us to remember who God is and not fall for it.  Opening ourselves up to love as God would have us experience love allows us to get in touch with the truth of who we are and live from it.

All I want for Christmas . . . so begins many a famous Christmas song.  I remember as a kid always wanting the doll or the toy I saw on TV or in a magazine.  The pure excitement over what it would be like to have it and the joy of finding it under the tree.  I also remember that within a few days, I did not seem to want it so much any more.  The specialness of the things I wanted so much seemed to dissipate.  As I grew up I it took me a while to learn from this experience.  It is easy to get hooked by something we see and are certain we want.  There is an impending feeling in our chest that vibrates in our system and we are certain it is caused by the thing or person or experience.  These days, I notice when I get hooked into wanting something and I can pause and ask what it is I really want.  Usually what I am grasping for is a feeling.   I believe in my mind that the thing, person, or experience will cause me to feel what I want to feel.  I want to feel joy, satisfaction, wonder, hope, safe, in awe, confident, sacred, happy, powerful, engaged, connected, and most of all alive.  God wants these same things for us and not just at Christmas time.  God is wanting all the variations of the life experience for us even when we are disconnected from our wanting.  He also knows we will not ultimately find the feeling of being fully alive from anything outside ourselves.  God placed within our hearts the very things we want most.  She invites us to take the time to get to know this truth of who we are.  Perhaps the power of Christmastime is in its gift of permission to reawaken our desire and wanting of aliveness.

The beauty of the way God designed the world is in his instructions of how to be.  All throughout nature is the blueprint from which we can begin to look at who we are meant to be.  The movement of the trees, the dawning of a new day, the sharing of resources between the bees and the flowers, the living and the dying of leaves, the blowing of the wind, the cleansing rain, the shaking of the earth, and the flight of birds in a flock.  All are examples of the design for living.  As beings who walk and talk we sometimes imagine ourselves as separate from nature because we can think and perceive ourselves.  Yet it is our thinking that usually gets us in trouble.  Don’t we stand a better chance of making a contribution to the world when we take a step down from our head, take a breath into our hearts and use it as fuel through which to see ourselves and the world?  God instructs us through the experiences of our lives. Some of my greatest experiences are when I woke up to realize I was not following the instructions of my design for living. I had become like an IKEA product I put together incorrectly because I did my own thing instead of following the instructions.  I was a lopsided bookshelf or a table that falls apart because its missing a part.

The things that matter so much to us do not seem to matter to God in the same way.  God does not see us as the circumstances we come from, the problems we deal with, and especially our beliefs about who we are and what we deal with.  Those things are immaterial according to God’s perspective.  When we take a breath and open ourselves to seeing things as God sees them, there is a greater depth and width of possibilities.  The things we find so material to our definition of ourselves are immaterial to God because God knows us as more than material.  To embrace ourselves as immaterial is as much about letting go of our stories of ourselves and our circumstances as it is about embracing the truth of who we are which is not limited by our physical form.  Jesus did not define himself by his circumstances: conceived by an unwed woman, born in a stable with animals, belonging to a culture ruled by an overpowering government, coming from a history of exiled people or being a simple carpenter.  When he owned the truth of who he was, he spoke up, he extended compassion, and he found a way to see the innocence and wholeness of others despite what they presented to him.  He is an example of what it means to embrace our immaterial nature and see ourselves as God sees us.

Purpose is one of those buzz words these days.  What is the meaning and purpose behind what you thinks, say or do?  What is the purpose of your relationships?  What is the purpose of your career?  It seems like the pressure is on to figure out our meaning.  A sense of purpose is the thing that carries through the times when it is difficult and it does not seem worth it.  Yet I have experienced times when what I thought my purpose was turns our not to be the case.  At the end of the day or the beginning of each new moment we have a chance to connect to our greatest purpose.  God’s purpose for us is to be workers of light and love.  We are all called to be present to the life we are in and create and grow the power of love.  It is in our very essence.  If we do not have a sense of it we are going to struggle with how we are to make it happen.  Struggling is not what God has in mind.  Growing, yes, but struggling comes from resistance.  If we are open in our minds and hearts to who God would have us be, do and say in any given situation then we are living our purpose.  Sometimes, God’s plans are different from mine and I get wedded to mine.  I may not want to let it go so i work to make it happen and it is exhausting.  I see this a lot when I look back on my life and realize how much time and energy I spent trying to meet other’s expectations.  I was certain if I just worked hard enough to make other’s happy with me I would be okay.  It was my purpose.  I even thought of it as being spiritual in nature because I was not pushing my agenda.  And yet, I was.  God did not create me for other people’s purposes.  God created me to fulfill the purpose of love and light in a way that only I can.  It requires getting quiet and tuning in to my inner most knowing where God dwells in acceptance and joy.  When I take the time for our date in the morning I have a greater chance of staying aligned with a purpose that flows from me without struggle.

We long for a sense of certainty in our lives.  In fact when we feel we have achieved it, we do not want to let it go.   It is why the question, Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?, makes people laugh with identification when they hear it.  We all know times when we are holding on so tight to an idea because we are certain is the right answer only to find out it is not.  We are embarrassed or ashamed depending on the gravity of our insistence that we know.  What is it about knowing something?  What is it about identifying ourselves with a philosophy or perspective?  It is the certainty that we are okay, we are accepted, and we are in the know.  If we are certain we can relax.  We do not have to fight for our survival.  Our brains do not have to work hard to figure every piece of our identity from moment to moment.  It is why confirmation bias get in the way of being open to new ideas. We fight to hold on to our sense of certainty and think those who admit they do not know are less intelligent.  Yet, there is so much we do not know and even more that we do not know that we do not know.  (There is a tongue twister for you.)  Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is admit we are not certain.  We can hope, we can suppose from previous experiences but so much is changing all the time, the sense of certainty we long for is not part of the human experience.  I just like everyone else fall prey to thinking all is well when I am certain of something.  Yet I do not know when it will change.  I suppose the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty.  My daily date with God is practice in sitting with uncertainty.  Ahead of me lies a day of profound possibilities some of which I think I am aware of and most I have no idea.  What I can do on our date is turn to the one who has known me in times of certainty and uncertainty and be present to who I am despite what may happen.  I am not even certain how God will show up in my life, I am certain that God will show up.  Well, at least I am certain of it right now.