dailydatewithgod

Our world moves at such a fast pace all the time it is easy to get swept up in the fervor and excitement of it all.  Sometimes I don’t realize I have jumped on the fast paced train until the tracks go off the rails.  I catch myself checking a text message while in traffic, feeling like I need to return that voice mail right away, interrupting someone before they finish speaking because I am certain I know how to respond, or just walking really fast for no reason.  Even writing about it makes me want to write faster.  Moving quickly is not a bad thing but when I get caught up in feeling I must respond when I do not yet have a response or worse when the response would not create the kind of experience my heart wants, I become a slave to the thinking of the world.  One of the most powerful tools I learn on my daily dates with God is hesitation. God is never in a hurry to respond as far as I can tell.  Hesitation I have seen as helpful in my thinking even while on our date.  Together we watch the thoughts come and go without doing anything about them.  From it, I realize the power of the pause allows me to take a step back from my first thought or first few thoughts and decide if it is the one I want to dictate my actions.  Must I really respond to the email right away?  Is it vitally important that I see if the message I got is the one I have been waiting for?  Will providing an answer at this point in the conversation really provide what the person who is talking right now needs?  The power of hesitation is one of empowerment.  I am not relying on immediate satisfaction or the hit I get from accomplishment to define me.  I am better able to be present to what is happening by being with it instead of in my head.  It takes practice and consistent effort to remember to use the tool, but I have found it to be more satisfying to my heart and soul than any response I had ready to go.

I am fascinated by how we rely on our leaders (political, religious, parents, teachers, bosses to name a few) to do the right thing in every situation and then we are surprised when they mess up.  How come?  When have any of us done anything perfectly? Life is full of a multitude of choices before twelve noon.  With all the people and circumstances involved is it any wonder that things do not go as planned?  When I think about how God designed us with the rule of love.  Our purpose is to grow in love and live as an expression of love to the best of our ability. Sometimes my ability sucks.  I may find myself stuck in frustration, let down by expectations, in physical pain, too tired to care, or feeling disconnected from my own heart.  In moments like that, the rule is to do what I need to do to get back to my truest sense of self.  I cannot always do this on my own.  I have to ask God for help. God show me how to see this differently.  God, I am in a funk but willing to step out of it, show me what my next step is to be.  God, I hurt, help me feel a little less hurt.  God, I know right now I am disconnected from my heart but I have no idea how to get back and I am not sure I want to go back right now.  We may not be able to make it back into the rule of our design, but we can be honest about how much the power of love is ruling our lives in the moment.  Honesty is the surest step to returning to the rule for which we were made.

When God created us by placing the light of love in the deepest space of our hearts it was done so we may shine with the brilliance of love.  We would be given the opportunity to bear witness to the light of love within ourselves and compelled to share it with others.  By allowing ourselves access to own our brilliance we can encourage those around us to connect with the light of love brilliantly vibrating within themselves.  We know this intuitively to be true because we have crossed paths or witnessed the brilliance of a performer, an athlete, or a greater social motivator.  We are moved by their presence and think it is them.  We want to be near them and hope their brilliance will rub off on us.  What is actually happening is we are stirred by the brilliance present in us.  This space of love is awakened by the recognition.  It is God’s invitation to take a closer look within our own hearts, spend some time there and perhaps clear away the debris keeping us from readily seeing our own brilliance.

I always feel like it is a loaded question when someone asks me what I want.  Perhaps because for such a long time I thought I had to know first why they wanted to know what I wanted or what they would do with the information.  I am not talking about what I want to eat, that’s easy and its clear it is truly about what I want.  But when it comes to what I want in life, in a relationship, in an experience, or when working towards something, it is harder. For a long time I felt it did not matter what I wanted.  It only mattered if what I wanted did not rock the boat, make others uncomfortable or matched what someone else wanted or expected of me.  I learned to downplay what I wanted to accommodate others and lost myself in the process.  On my daily dates God has shown me that acknowledging what I want is not good or bad, it is just an expression of where I am in the moment.  If I am not willing to acknowledge the wanting then I am avoiding myself.  To get to know myself better I can start by paying attention to what I am wanting and even look behind or underneath it.  Since life is about the process not the content, my greatest understanding of myself may come from looking at why it is that I want that thing or experience.  As I get more familiar with this process I can show up with greater authenticity and be who God wants me to be.

The world is full of labels and contexts to our reality.  We like to think we can be unbiased but we are influenced by so many elements, it is hard to separate them from what we really think or feel.  The opportunity we have to do so is by getting quiet and checking in with ourselves and with God.  It is easy to get caught up in the passion and excitement of others but we do not often pause to check in and see if we are equally as passionate or just hitching a wagon to what they see as important.  The voice of Spirit is soft and quiet and knows we are connected to all things in and around us.  To move from a space of integrity requires identification coming from our heart.  There in the solitude not barraged by outside noises can we see who we really are and with what we want to be aligned.  We scoff at this process of identification because it takes time to pause.  Yet I can think of times when I did not pause to check in with my own sense of identification and the time and energy needed to unravel it afterward far outweighed what it would have taken to pause even for just a moment.  The more I practice pausing and checking in with the identification of my heart the easier it comes.  Like God has shown me on our daily dates, the consistent practice of showing up to spend time in heart space puts it more at the forefront of my consciousness.  Pausing to get present in the moment does not mean never making mistakes but when I do at least I know they are truly mine.

We are made in the image and likeness of God.  We exist as reflections of love and its ultimate power.  Our lives are a testament to the infinite possibilities that love makes manifest.  I don’t know about you  but that is not what I see when I look in the mirror or when I look another person in the eye.  Sure there have been moments but it is beyond the comprehension of my mind to even touch the phenomenal nature of our existence as designed by God.  So the simple prayer of asking God how God sees things becomes paramount to us reflecting the truth of who we are for ourselves and others.  In the moments when all I am in touch with is my darkness and I feel the need to shut down my heart, I know I am not reflecting the truest essence of myself but it is where I am in the moment.  God does not condemn me.  God waits for me to reach out and ask to be reminded  what it means to reflect the truth of who I am.  Sometimes I even look myself in the eye in the mirror and say: God, please help me to see you reflecting through the light of my eyes today.

We are asked to align ourselves with any number of people or groups when we are present to them.  Some of them align with the truth of who we are and others don’t.  Sometimes it takes a while to know whether cooperation with a particular philosophy, idea, group or person will allow us to maintain our fidelity to the truth of ourselves.  There is room to grow and make mistakes in this process.  Having the insight to give ourselves space to explore is what God offers us in the pause of our breath.  We do not have to make a final decision until we do.  Others may become impatient or circumstances may call upon us to choose, but ultimately it is up to us.  God is a stand for our fidelity.  On our daily dates I have learned what this means when I find God present on each of those dates.  God does not enter a new day thinking, maybe I feel like showing up for my date with Colleen.  Yet I might feel too tired or busy in my head to show up as my best possible self.  God is not scared away by anything I am being in the moment even if it is not the best version of me.  She wants me to know all the parts of myself good and bad.  His desire is for me to determine which are the best match in the moment for the fidelity of my true self.  Being faithful to my growth in love, whatever form that comes in is the goal God has for me and for all of us.  The more time I spend with God on our daily dates the more easily I can determine if participating in something outside of me is faithful to the best version of me or not.

My prayer for us is the willingness to see how God is a stand for our fidelity to the truth of who we are even as we are learning to explore what that means for ourselves today.

When I find myself feeling separate from another individual it is usually because I have placed some definition or made some decision about who I think they are.  It could be based on how they are acting, what they say, or how they are dressed.  My mind will do this so automatically and it is hard to catch.  It is only when I return the engagement with them that I notice it.  My heart feels a bit more closed off, I sense there is something about them I need to protect myself from, or I am simply not open to really hearing them.  At that moment I need to expand my range past what I am perceiving to what God is seeing.  I cannot extend the range on my own.  I need not expand it just for expansion sake but if I am not careful my closed heart will be with me throughout the day and effect everything I see.  It then becomes about my effectiveness to live as I truly am, a beacon of God’s love.

The awareness and recognition of who we are in God’s eyes comes from the practice of letting go of our fixed ideas about ourselves.  We live our lives with perceptions and labels for ourselves of which we are not aware.  Typically when one of them begins to cause us pain do we take a closer look and examine it.  As an incest survivor an easy way to handle the situation was to blame myself.  It is a common response of a child in an abusive situation, I am not unique.  What I didn’t realize until I got into recovery from my own self-destructive habits was that I took the idea and ran with it.  It became a catch-all for many things in my life.  If there was no explanation, then it must have been my fault.  I should have known better, prevented it from happening before it did, acted as expected, etc.  Many of us have experiences like this.  The content is not important but the process is.  I began to notice in recovery how often I apologized for myself.  I often used the word afraid to describe other feelings like disappointed or sad.  The process of detecting how this child philosophy was integrated into my every day life took patience.  My earliest inclinations were to hear myself say something and then give myself a hard time for doing so.  Not the best path to choosing another option.  The things we detect about ourselves require the discovery process because it is a default mode that we do without thinking.  By learning to bring God into it ask again and again: God how do you see me here in this situation? What am I meant to learn from this? God come between me and this perception of myself and how you know me to be. If I am willing to be a detective of myself I can then decide what it is I am still practicing that stands in contrast to who I am in God’s eyes and ask for God’s help in letting it go.

In the Catholic Christian church there is an area around the altar known as the sanctuary. It is where the Eucharist (thanksgiving) prayer is said, and the reading of scripture takes place. Many churches have some kind of space known as a sanctuary and for years there has been a practice of claiming sanctuary.  Anyone for any reason can enter a church and claim sanctuary for protection and be granted it.  God provides a sanctuary around our hearts.  When we are brave enough to face and enter the sacred space He created within our own hearts we can experience safety. She invites us into sanctuary with our breath.  It is a place of resting in the knowledge of the heart where we connect to our true selves.  It is the sacred space formed in us before anything outside of us brought us harm or distress. The sanctuary of our hearts remained unchanged by the experiences of our lives.  No matter what happens we can return to this sanctuary space through the simplicity of our breath and be reminded of who we truly are.