dailydatewithgod

I am very grateful for God’s view of who I am. I am grateful to know that no matter how lost I get in my own thinking about my circumstances God is ready to remind me I am more than what I am feeling and experiencing in the moment.  God isn’t about rescuing me from my thinking and feeling which I wanted him to do for a long time.  She is about standing with me in the moments of distress from my thinking and feeling as the presence of the alternative.  He wants me to know I cannot erase what he created in me and through me.  No thought or feeling will destroy the interior reality God constructed within me.  I may get lost in how to find and connect with it.  I may spend too much time in my head trying to figure it out.  But when I have had enough, am in enough pain, or a little willing to believe there is another option, God is the next thing I see.  She guides my hand to my heart, encourages me to take a deep breath, and see what she sees within me.  He recognizes I may need to spend some time in the interior space soaking it up before I can walk forward in trust of it.  God is just happy when I let go of assuming I must figure out and do it entirely on my own.

In know one of the greatest tools I have learned in my recovery is to pause.  When I was entrenched in my disease I had no sense of what it meant to pause.  If it had anything to do with an agonizing space of silence I would avoid it.  I was not someone who would necessarily react quickly.  I was much more the type to stand back and wait, but the pause I did not have was the one within me.  As a survivor I learned how to make myself invisible and unseen or at least I thought that was what I was doing.  Just keep quiet, no one really cares what you think or feel, just disappear.  I blotted out as best I could my sense of self by keeping quiet in the public arena while destroying myself with my thoughts and my habits on the inside.  I never shared what I was really thinking because you would think I was disturbed and when I did let it seep out I would cover it up with humor.  The learning to pause gave me some space between a thought and a belief.  I assumed because it was a thought running through my head, it must be true.  Once in a while I would earnestly seek out God’s guidance but God always seemed to take too long.  I determined it was quicker to get some relief even if it was harmful to my body or my psyche.  The recovery process taught me to pay attention to my thinking and I learned key expressions like, “Thanks for sharing” when talking to myself.  Little by little God was guiding me to sit in the pause like I sat in meditation each morning on our date.  I realized I could pause, take a breath, and question my thinking instead of taking it as gospel.  I learned the pause provided the badly needed boundaries in my internal life and consequently they showed up in my outer life.  Pausing and breathing is the one thing I can do when I don’t know what else to do.  Over time I have learned to hear the angels tell me to hang on to my heart in those moments and take another breath if needed.  Anything that needs to be answered will be brought to my now more open mind since I paused to put some new breath in there.

In the Hebrew scriptures God tells Joshua of the plans He has for him.  They are expressed as plans to prosper him, not harm him, plans for hope and a future.  Earlier in the story, God told Joshua that He knew him before he formed him in the womb.  Clearly God has had his eyes on Joshua.  The wonderful news is it is not just Joshua.  An abundant, prosperous, hopeful life with a future is there for all of us. God will not harm us.  It doesn’t mean that harm will not come to us.  It does mean that God will not be the one doing the harm.  Many of us have experienced harm in our lives and we blame God for it. I certainly did for a long time. So when we read about plans for a hopeful and abundant future, it doesn’t correlate.  In the Christian scriptures, Jesus conveys the same message.  Many times he tells his followers that he did not come to condemn them, he came so they might live abundantly. It made me wonder, how does this work? In my date time I have begun to see things differently.  I realized I had bought into the idea of God as being some sort of rescuer, he is called a savior, right?  But maybe what I need saving from is not reality.  Maybe what I need saving from is only seeing things through the eyes in my head?  When I shut down my heart to rescue myself from harm, I cut off the main valve of access to God.  No wonder the idea of abundance completely baffled me.  Only after a breakdown of my reality and slowing letting God in close enough to shed light on the darkness around my heart, did the ice and steel begin to melt.  Then I could begin to entertain the idea of abundance.  It is a daily process starting with curiosity and a little willingness to consider that things could be different from what I thought they were.