dailydatewithgod

The immensity of love God has for us is beyond our comprehension.  God has the eyes through which to eternally witness our wholeness and purity.  No matter what we do or say can erase her perspective of us.  None of the things we imagine taint us are seen by him in the same light through which we see it.  We have developed the filters of the world which blocks us from seeing the purity and wholeness of ourselves and others.  There are some whom we put on a pedestal or experience when we first fall in love with someone or a newborn baby in which it is still seen by our eyes.  We seem to experience a fogging of lenses when it comes to the person next to us in the elevator or the driver in the lane ahead of us or even our own family members.  God encourages us to spend time with her where he can share her vision our own purity with us.  Then over time we will begin to notice a shift in our own eyes and see other’s purity and wholeness.

My daily prayer and meditation dates have taught me the value of turning things over in my life over which I have no control.  I communicate with God throughout my day but if there is something or someone niggling at me that I am holding on to it shows up in my inability to be present on our date.  I realize when it reaches that point I have exhausted all my options.  I cannot, no matter how much I read or write or talk or process see the goodness of the situation or person.  God offers throughout the process to take it off my hands but when I see how I am struggling to deal with it as hindering on our special time together, I am defeated and willing to let go. God does not see it as defeat.  God sees it as an opening to understanding the goodness of all.  God recognizes the ways and means I have attempted thus far but reminds me it need not be a struggle.  If I am wiling to let go of how it might happen, I can be open to goodness unseen.  It rarely unfolds the same each time and I suppose that is all part of the mysterious process of love as well.

If we know who we are in God it alters the course of our lives.  Claiming our origin and our connection to God not only allows us to step into our power but it keeps us from falling prey to the false beliefs about identity in the world.  We are men, women, sons, daughters, spouses, employees, bosses, Italian, Mexican, White, Black, Asian, and all the various labels we have for ourselves.  There is nothing untrue about claiming those origins and labels.  But they only represent part of the picture.  No one cultural line or role in life can define you.  No racial identity speaks of the magnificence of your spirit.  More often than not, it can be limiting.  We make assumptions about where we are supposed to be and with whom or how we are supposed to act or places not to go based on the world’s definition of us.  God does not live by limits.  God wants us to expand our horizons past the limiting perspective of the world and open ourselves up to experience love and growth in ways outside the confines of what is culturally or genderally acceptable.  Claiming our connection to God is the first step in this direction.  In the declaration of our hearts speaks the relationship of truth so we can love past the limits of what our world tells us defines love.

The beauty of a relationship with God is in his awareness of what we need before we know what we need.  She has the insight to our hearts and encourages us to speak from them.  What we often perceive as our needs is simply a different perspective from what God sees as needs.  We look upon ourselves with a level of deficiency   We presume there is something missing.  God shows us our neediness as what is missing from our perspective.  Our perception of what we are lacking is the perception that we can lack anything.  God reminds us we are connected to her and can therefore lack nothing.  Our intrinsic nature wholly connected to God will never be changed by our not believing in it.  God invites us to be in relationship with him and experience our neediness as the longing of our hearts to be closer to her.

From my daily prayer and mediation dates with God I have broadened and deepened my understanding of blessings.  I always interpreted the meaning of blessings to be good things.  I was focused on the end product only.  So when I experience frustrating and irritating people or situations I don’t think, “oh, what a blessing!”  Are you kidding me?  My immediate inclination is to hope it goes away quickly.  If my head is in a rough space to begin with, I start to go down the road of fear of how it’s never going to change and it’s all my fault.  Quickly it can turn to me wanting to completely check out and stack up protection around my heart.  Thankfully on our dates God has shown me the power of the pause.  By taking a breath, drawing my attention to my heart, and checking in with the One who knows my true self, I don’t have to go down the painful path.  God reminds me  there is always a blessing present, it just may look different from I was expecting. I see my willingness to stop and pause as a blessing.  I recognize my courage to feel whatever comes up as the situation unfolds as a blessing.  I can feel my heart open and breath into the whole of my body when I picture the person I am dealing with as the innocent child they are in their own hearts.  The blessings become less about what happens when it is all over and more about what is going on in the process of facing what looks like anything but a blessing.

Recognizing our ability to choose where we focus our attention and thus our lives is a gift of autonomy.  As I grew in my relationship with God my relationship to my thoughts and feelings deepened.  Perhaps it is in part learning not to take myself so seriously.  More fundamentally, however, it is the space between the thought or feeling and the action.  On our daily dates I learned to notice and accept the various thoughts and feelings as indications of where my attention was focused at the moment.  When all I was doing was sitting with them, there was nothing to fix or make go away or conclude as right or wrong.  I noticed that when I breathed through them they would often leave and another one would come up.  I could then choose whether or not to hold on to them.  The autonomy allows me to bring God into every thought and every feeling and choose whether or not to jump on the bandwagon.  I do this very imperfectly but it is a muscle that grows stronger with the breath.  The moment of pause cultivated on our daily prayer and meditation dates has shown me the power of living autonomously from things I thought I was a victim of.  In the autonomous breath I can notice that I feel anxious and not claim that I am anxious. I can recognize feeling something without being it.

Most of us know our familial roots to some extent.  We identify as belonging to specific family groups, cultures, races, historical backgrounds.  We label ourselves by the characteristics of our cultures. Even our mannerisms and personality styles are attributed to these familial lines of heritage.  Our greatest heritage is of God.  Yet we struggle with identifying the familiar faculties we embody that are like God. When we engage in relationship with God and begin to notice the ways in which she is present in our lives our familiarity grows.  We notice how he moves in and through us in the same way that our human family does.  Our familiarity with our culture or family comes from the amount of time we spend in the presence of those people.  God invites us to get to know and claim our familiarity with her by doing the same.  He lets us know he is ready to be with us as much as possible and is delighted to do so.  It is up to us to accept the invitation one moment at a time.

Our encounters with the divine in ourselves and others brings us to our home space.  When we recognize the home connection with share with others all other labels and separations between us begin to fall.  We are then more likely to open our hearts to receiving the message others have to share.  We can be witnesses to the good brought into our lives within our home space because it is the dwelling of God. The presence of love means we are home. Being the presence of love for other people gives us the opportunity to bring home to them.  The idea of a home space can be a troubling label for some people but the home of God opens our hearts and thus our minds to a new experience. If we are willing to put aside for a moment our original experiences of home and open ourselves us to a new home we will walk into a new reality. God’s version of home is one that knows no bounds, has no conditions and flows endlessly in and our of our own hearts.

In the moments of inner turmoil the hardest battle become that of our own minds.  God encourages us to reach out so we do not have to carry the burden of our angst alone.  Yet when we are faced with the churning and uncomfortable elements of ourselves and our reaction to life the last we think is that someone else would want anything to do with us. We push people away and we try to muddle through closing off our hearts.  God senses the division we have with our sense of who we truly are at our core and waits patiently for our return to reality.  A reality that holds the presence of our love and innocence as our true selves and nothing else.  It is a battle of the mind and the heart and all the heart wants is to extend a hand of warmth.  Yet our tightened breath makes it harder for the blood to reach our brain.  So God gently does anything possible to draw us to our hearts and take a deep breath.  The inspiration of the breath gives us a wiggle space to release the angst just enough to be open to another possibility.  God reminds us that even our angst can be used to bring us back to the space of our breath which connects us to our heart giving it more strength to reach our mind.

We are an extension of God.  God leads and we follow like an outpouring of the heart of the universe.  We follow God’s lead because it is what is marked on our hearts.  We are designed for the outpouring of love and compassion in the moments we are in.  This is what we are called to be.  It has taken me a long time to understand that my life is determined by who I am being in it than what I am doing.  The doing feeds from the being. When we are on our dates in the morning I get to practice very little doing and much more being.  I am acutely aware of how much of that can be in contradiction with the rest of my day.  In a world that values us as human doings more than human beings it can almost seem counterintuitive.  I think our intuition does know the space of our hearts that are expressed in the outpouring of being.  I just became numb and deaf to the voice of my heart.  It hurt too much for a long time to listen because I had grown accustomed to the layers I placed out of a need for protection around my heart.  God slowly and patiently has provided the safe space to let go of those layers little by little and invite me into a more vibrant way of being one moment at a time.