dailydatewithgod

Have you ever noticed that restored things are held in high regard?  We marvel at restored museum pieces, classic cars, family heirlooms, or even trends in fashion or language that make a comeback in culture. Why is it that we do not have the same reverence and regard for restored human beings?  People who have experienced trials in life or overcome a defeated way of living are not marveled for what they have overcome in body, mind, or spirit but are often kept at a distance.  Their restoration is not embraced but held behind the memory of the darkness they once were.  We struggle in our western culture with the idea of restorative justice.  We think more in terms of just completely ridding ourselves of the bad elements of our personalities or physicality instead of restoring the view in which they are held.  Perhaps these opportunities for restoration are invitations from God to see ourselves and the world as one big lesson in what works and what does not.  Without an opportunity for restoration of our hearts, we would never know how to get back to the truth of who we are.  If we know that restoration is possible we still have hope.  God never sees the light within us go out.  God never views us from the angle of our dark parts.  God’s eyes have a knack for seeing the restorative light that with his help can become our reality again. She wants us to know no matter how dark our sight of ourselves or others gets, there is nothing that cannot be restored to its fullness and wholeness.

Without realizing it we often carry around these ideas of how we have messed things up and made mistakes that are irreversible.  This creates a division between ourselves and how God sees us.  God does not look upon us by our mistakes.  God never sees anything less than the glorious creation God designed.  God is still real with us.  If there is something we have done to sever ourselves from our hearts then God is the first to encourage us to mend it.  Built within our hearts is this knowing that something is off.  We have somehow missed the mark when we make mistakes.  Which is probably why the Hebrew and Christian scriptures use the term sin which means to miss the mark.  When we feel that nudging from inside our hearts and souls then we know things are working as designed.  Not to condemn us but to wake up to how and why we are ill at ease with ourselves.  Most of us, me included, do more than an adequate job of condemning ourselves.  I am ready to do it way before anyone else will.  God views us as never having lost touch with the true essence of ourselves which is love.   It is the forgiven view.  The invitation from missing the mark that we feel is the design by which we can come to reconnect with the forgiven view through which God sees us.

We encounter God in the most profound and mundane experiences.  God is present for it all, even the things for which we do not want to be present.  In those moments when we would rather not be there and we show up anyway, God is able to work through us.  We are not left to our own devices to figure it out. I used to think I could not attempt anything unless I knew exactly what was involved and I presumed I had to know about it before.  I was so afraid of failing that I boxed myself in to a life in which I was safe or so I thought.  There were elements of rebelliousness but most of those fell under ways in which I harmed myself.  I would push past little fears but always with an impending sense of doom and the moment something went wrong, I figured it must be my fault.  It wasn’t until I really began to walk daily on my dates with God that I became open to being present and seeing what God could do through me.

There is an experience we have all had on some level where we feel ourselves connected to something much greater than ourselves but we can’t seem to hold on to it.  For those who have had such experiences often called spiritual or enlightenment experiences it can be beautiful and wondrous.  None of them catapult us out of reality entirely unless they happen just before we breather our last breath.  But those people are no longer physically present and able to tell us how it may or may not have continued after that breath ended.  We presume it must have gone on forever, but we do not know.  Some people believe this is all non-sense and though they may not know the rational reason why we have those moments, clearly we could come up with something more practical that a God-thing to explain it.  It matters little to me how someone defines it.  I am more interested in how these experience of surpassing the reality we rely on day in and day out alters our perception of the day-to-day experience.  I have not, nor many spiritual people I have met or read about figured a way to completely sustain this other worldly experience.  It is though it surpasses our reality and launches us into a different dimension but then we still wake up in a body with feelings and a head full of thoughts that lack awe, kindness, peace, or joy.  Is the surpassing experience meant to hold us or simply shift our thinking so we can approach the day-to-day with greater peace, joy, and awe?  Perhaps it is not about obtaining or maintaining the experiencing but learning from it.  How does the feeling of being comforted and loved by someone or something greater than me make it a little easier to smile at the person on the train at rush hour who is standing closer to me than I would prefer?  How will getting a glimpse of a space where only peace and awe exist make it more likely for me to remember to breathe before I respond to the person by whom I am irritated? I know from my daily dates when I have shared with God in a surpassing experience, I am able to see and deal with the rest of my day from a lighter and gentler frame of mind.  Maybe that is what it is all about.

Asking God to see things as God sees things provides us with a holistic perspective beyond what our own minds can comprehend.  It also opens the door to our hearts where our understanding and God’s understanding are united.  Living from our hearts is a different reality than living from our minds.  Our hearts can inform our minds and broaden them if we are open to it.  Our reality can become infused with a hope and a compassion that may not extend from a purely logical understanding.  There is much of nature that can be understood and held with great amazement.  Something else happens though when you know the heartfelt experience of being pierced by the beauty of a flower in bloom, hear the sound of a bluebird’s call, or feel the gentle touch of the leaves that overhang the grand tree that has been alive longer than you.  Those realities are in our hearts and register on vibration levels which have no meaning to our minds until our heart’s provide interpretation.

As we cultivate a life worth living that speaks to our hearts and allows us to be the love we are created to be, it might be good to be present for it.  We tend to think that bumps we experience on our path are steps back.  But maybe they are less about steps back and the things that propel us further on the path.  Maybe we need these setbacks so we can see how far we have come in our lives.  It can give us the energy and concentration to be present in the gratitude of the life we have created.  It does not make sense from traditional western success mentality, but every process of the path is important as it makes the path we are called to attend to.  Our hearts wants to be there for all the elements. God does not define the good versus the bad, God is there for it all. God invites us in our breath to be in attendance for whatever moment of our path is occurring right now.

If we know and trust deep down who we truly are we find we can walk in this world with greater confidence and sense of safety   We are able to conduct ourselves in a such a manner that we are not thrown off so easily by other’s responses to us because we have firm bearing from which we are present. As an incest survivor I had constructed a bearing based on a lot of assumptions about myself and the world that were not true outside the circumstances of my experience.  It all had to fall out from underneath me so I could begin to seek out a true solid bearing on which to live.  In my relationship with God I find that solidity and safety I always longed for.  I began to learn what true safety is not a manufactured reality that provided a twisted sense of safety through control and withholding.  On our daily dates I get the opportunity to reaffirm my relationship with God and with the truth of who I am.  God stands firm in the trust and faith of the truth of who I am and invites me to do the same.  With daily practice I am a witness to God’s belief in the true bearing upon which to approach my day.

I thought for years that being harsh with myself was what motivated me to get things done.  I was certain if I could just give myself a harder time that I  could be more successful and produce more results.  I would somehow measure up.  Recently I came across a quote that asked, “When you are at war with yourself, who wins?”  I found out the hard way that beating myself down with harsh words and criticisms just drove me further and further away from myself and others.  It was not until I found myself winning the war with myself by losing myself that I began to look for an alternative.  On our daily dates, God shows up with a forgiving gentleness with fierce confirmation of the belief of my wholeness despite how broken I feel.  Day in and day out, I learned to sit in the presence with my breath-taking in the gentle nature of God’s love.  I realized by the mere fact that I could breathe meant I too had some of this gentleness within me.  A little at a time I could fan the flame of the gentleness an cultivate a fierce presence of love in me that would extend out to others.  Gentleness does not mean being weak, it means being connected to love from which I was created one day at a time.

It is hard to imagine that anything lasts forever and yet there are many things we treat as though they will never end.  Why is it so difficult to believe that there is a source of love that withstands everything living and dying?  All of nature cycles through birth and death.  The night goes dark and then the light dawns.  We breathe in and then out.  Generations of families pass on genetic and behavioral information.  Life is every evolving and growing just as the galaxies are.  The force of being seems to keep going despite all we do in this world to bring about destruction and death.  In the movie,  A Winter’s Tale, there is a conversation between Lucifer and one of his demons.  The demon, Pearly, admits that because of hope, he and Lucifer are losing.  No matter how much darkness they create,  they are losing “one bright star at a time.”  Perhaps our reluctance to believe in an everlasting force is because it is beyond what our minds can grasp.  Yet our souls know it deep down and our hearts sing its song with each new breath because hope is alive in them always.  Maybe God is inviting us to see everlasting hope.

As we walk through this life it is easy to get stuck in the muddiness of it all.  Everywhere we turn we see messages of death and destruction and that is just the morning news report.  We come across people whose hearts are closed off out of fear.  We wake up and realize our own hearts are closed.  How is it possible to believe that a God who is love created us out of the same pureness of love’s energy?  How can this be true if we seem to lack evidence of this reality?  Perhaps it has something to do with the lens through which we are viewing life.  I remember when I was deep in the depths of my addiction when I was resigned to what I thought I was defined by the dark and muddy spaces inside myself.  I felt defeated and was struggling so hard to reach for the light I sensed somehow existed somewhere even if not in me anymore.  What else could that willingness to not completely give up be other than God?  The pureness of God’s presence in our lives remains there whether we are aware of it or not.  The essential of nature of God will not change based on our circumstances or feelings.  God will always be the beacon of pureness emanating from us when we are connected to it.  When I find myself in moments of not being able to see either my own pureness or someone else’s I know I need God’s help. God, how do you see me? God, how do you see this person, event, circumstance?  Show me what I need to do to open my eyes.