dailydatewithgod

God is in all.  God is with all.  There is no place or space where God is not.  We can choose to see God present in each moment if we are willing to open our eyes.  If we are willing to let go of the mis-perception of reality created by our minds.  Most of the time we are not even present in the moment, we are simply reliving the past.  Our breath has the power to bring us back to the moment.  Right here, right now is where the eternal crosses the physical plane.  The present moment in all things is where God is.  If we want to spend more time with God, we can practice returning to our breath in the moment.  It is the simplest way to return ourselves to love.  We nourish our bodies, our minds and our souls with our breath.  God designed it in such a way that we cannot go long without needing to take in a new breath and let out the old.  Maybe God was trying to tell us something through this.  We cannot go long without needing to connect with Spirit (respiration–re-spiriting).  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to embrace the moment where God is by taking as many breaths as we can. Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

God always IS!  God never goes away. God endures.  The apostle Paul wrote to the community in Ephesus to remind them that love endures all.  We sometimes have a hard time imagining this because as human beings we lack the discipline to hold on and endure through things that are uncomfortable. We want a solution, we want the fix, we want it to be over so we can back to things as they “normally” are.  But what if God demonstrates for us the power of endurance because it is a quality that we also possess?  Perhaps it is not about us being able to hold on and not abandon ourselves when things get really tough on our own.  God is the enduring one and we can ask for the courage to do as God does. We can acknowledge that we need this power that is greater than ourselves to remain in love.  It seems to me that so much of my recovery has been about not abandoning myself.  Because of many challenging experiences growing up, it was not safe to be in the moment.  But I am not there any more.  I am here now. I have learned to reclaim myself by modeling my behavior after a being that loves me beyond reason.  I am willing one moment at a time to stand with myself because God demonstrates to me over and over that no matter what happens, God would never want to be anywhere else but with me.  God’s endurance has shown me that I can hang on a little longer than I think is possible when I tap into the willingness to not do it on my own.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to take a chance on relying on the enduring nature of God’s love for us.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is clear.  God does not waver.  God never goes down a different path.  God is always a stand for love and all it encompasses.  We can rely upon the firmness of God’s love.  Anything we encounter that stands in contradiction to love, crumbles at the face of God.  When we experience fear and uncertainty, we can stand firm in the shadow of God to keep up from being taken over by them.  Life will hand us a number of challenges. As far as I can tell, we are all here in this physical experience to walk through something that asks us to let go of our ego and embrace the love for which we were designed.  It is all part of the process.  We are not wrong for experiencing fear.  It comes with the territory and God knows that.  In the Hebrew and Christian scripture it says many times,  “Be Not Afraid . . . Do Not Fear . . .”  God knows it is part of our experience and so God firmly reminds us over and over again that we need not go along with it.  God does not admonish the experience it, it is expected. God, however is not daunted by it.  God doesn’t buy into the lies that fear tells us.  God knows the experiences we have of fear do not define us.  For me, it starts with noticing and accepting the presence of fear, not trying to run from it, squash it, make it wrong, or out do it.  Once I acknowledge it I can hand it over to God and say, What do you suggest I do with this? Please remove it or show me how it is useful in returning me to love. God firmly smiles and if I am readily giving it over to him, miraculously takes it from me and leads me back to love.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to take whatever it is that is not love in our experience and turn it over into God’s firm hands of love.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is in all.  There is always enough because God is enough.  In our limited mind’s eye we see limitation.  In God’s unlimited eye there is no limitation.  When we are focused on lack and thinking that one thing existing takes away from another’s existence, we have gotten off track from God.  We are living in dissatisfaction, discomfort, and dis-ease when we are off track.  We find ourselves beginning to think that life doesn’t work for us.  Some of us wonder what we did to cause this.  Perhaps we drive ourselves harder and faster to compensate for this lack that is living in our hearts.  We try valiantly to overcome the dissatisfaction of life in ourselves by painting over it and wearing a mask, all the while suffering on the inside.  I know when I was in the depths of my disease there was little satisfaction with life because it held no value. I didn’t really understand gratitude except as something that I thought about on Thanksgiving or maybe on a retreat.  I began to think that God saw me with the same dissatisfaction that I did and figured since I thought that, it must be true.  Only when I was at the bottom of this place of despair and lack of hope, when I had exhausted all my possibilities and could no longer fight the physical reality of my experience, did I become willing to approach things in a different way.  My path back into satisfaction began with the admission of defeat and the living of the 12 steps.  I had to face the reality that my thinking and being had become so dis-satisfactory that I weighed over 300 lbs and I was toking out on sugar like a heroine addict.  Strangely enough, admitting defeat almost 13 years ago and reaching out to God in a way I never had before has brought me to a place of freedom in mind, body and spirit that I never knew was possible.  Today I remember to reach for God-satisfaction and am not limited by my definitions of freedom and love.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to admit to ourselves the areas of our lives in which we see dissatisfaction and ask for God-satisfaction.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Our Grand Designer has put forth the plans of how to make love manifest in our hearts.  The Great Architect of All That Is knows our hearts and our minds and encourages us to step into the plan of love.  We by ourselves cannot undo the design of love that is within each one of us.  We can ignore it, we can downplay it, we can become numb to it, but we cannot make it not so.  One of the gifts of the human experience is that of loss of control.  I have not yet met anyone who likes this gift in particular and I suspect that it is not on the top of anyone’s Christmas list.  When I get to the place of inability to overcome an experience in my life I often feel defeat.  I feel lost and with that comes feelings of anger, sadness, and frustration.  All I want to do is close off from God and others and hide away.  Somehow it is in those same moments that if I stop listening to the mind which is super loud and chattering a mile a minute, there is a quiet still voice of Spirit that is singing a song.  It sings the song that is in our hearts.  The song of love and of complete power.  The song of the manifestation of love that is waiting to awaken in me.  When I feel defeated and at a loss, I am open to hearing the song of my heart because my head has run out of solutions.  There God sits in that song, the sweetest melody that exists, playing over and over again of the triumph of my heart.  God does not see defeat or inability to handle life.  God sees an opening to the connection to All That Is.  God sees the pathway to design of love that has always been present.  God invites me to let go of my limited sight of defeat and inability and see the greater design of love through all things.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to embrace those moments of defeat as the portal to stepping into the design of love in our hearts. Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God knows all, understands all, is with all.  God created us all as energy of love.  Our very existence down to the cells and atoms conveys this message.  We go along in our lives and we layer all kinds of stories on top of that knowing.  Some that carry this same message, some that carry the opposite message.  Whichever story lines or agreements that we make that carry the most energy are the ones that stick.  When they stick they create a groove which then becomes our being.  The eyes through which we experience our reality then becomes this familiar story played over and over again.  In fact, when we experience something different we manage to rationalize it to fit the story.  The unfamiliar is uncomfortable because knowing and being familiar is what we like.   We do not have to be present and the ego can just run on automatic pilot when we stick with the familiar.  People and situations sometimes known as angels in the flesh will present themselves and cause us to wake up.  The waking up ignites this unfamiliar feeling and we often push it aside because we interpret unfamiliar as wrong.  These experiences that present themselves are a call to be present which is where God is.  God is calling us back through the unfamiliar to our hearts.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to sit in the unfamiliar just long enough to see back into our hearts.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God of All Love is attentive to you and has been from the beginning.  God does not create and disappear.  God creates and lives in the creation.  All of God’s creation is a manifestation of God’s love.  This is yet another way that God is clearly a power greater than ourselves.  One of the most creative things I did as a kid growing up to deal with the chaos of my experience was to disassociate from my body and make it wrong.  In other words, abandon the present moment.  At the time it was a great coping skill and it served me well.  It no longer serves me today.  I have many more options and resources at my disposal and so growing up has been a process of being present in the moment with God.  I know that God is always attentive and present.  Given that I am a child of God I can step by step begin to trust that it is okay for me to be present in the moment no matter what I am feeling or remembering.  The mind is very creative and always set in its ways.  I ask God for a new perspective and sit in the unfamiliarity in the meantime.  I know that in doing this I create new experiences and new neural pathways.  Then more and more I am able to be present and attentive to the good and the bad in my life today.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to allowing God to grant us the courage to be attentive to the life we have this day, no matter what we think or feel.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

The Great Creator designed us with full thought.  There was nothing left to chance. Every angle and possibility was considered.  The Mind of All That Is considered every possible scenario when it decided what each one of us might bring to the world through our presence.  Each one of us is a gift of love to the world.  We may not believe that about ourselves or other people.  But just because we cannot conceive of it, does not make it any less true in God’s eyes.  God wanted to share love with the world and so God created.  We were created for nothing less than the fullest expression of love.  It is our mission, our birthright, and our greatest capacity for living.  When we are mindful of our purpose given to us by God and own who we truly are then we are able to be our truest selves.  We get snagged into other thinking along the way and forget who we are.  This is why I need God, to remind me of the gift that I am and the gift that you are.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to see with the mind of God the gift of ourselves and the gift of others in bringing us all back to LOVE.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God of All That Is created all that exists. God sustains our very being through all time and space.  There is no place or way of being that we can go or experience where we cannot find God.  Sometimes we have this notion that there are places and experiences that God would not want to be a part of, but that would mean that we know better than God.  It usually means that we see only darkness in that place and get something out of keeping it in the dark. Our ego’s nature is all about separation so when we are stuck in this thinking, we are entrenched in the ego’s perspective.  To begin to open up to God’s perspective we need to be willing to acknowledge that perhaps there is another way.  A way that allows the light to come in, even bit by bit and eventually dispel the darkness.  Our greatest fear is that we will have to be rid of whatever we keep in the dark and since our ego needs that for its identification it will resist letting go.  When I am faced with a dark aspect of my life, something that I am not too proud of, it can quickly develop into shame if I keep it hidden. First, I acknowledge it to myself and honestly as best as I can admit if it is still working for me or not. Then, I need people I can trust to share it so that it doesn’t build up more of a story inside of me.  When I have done that me , God, and someone else are witnesses to my courage to dispel any darkness or fear and love rushes in to provide support.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to poke some holes in the darkness and begin to dispel the story of it being a place where God could never be willing to go.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God of All Creation longs to be as close to us as possible.  God’s desire for closeness to us is embedded in our own hearts.  The longing that we feel for love and to be love comes from this fire within us that calls us to the Divine.  This calling that is in our nature is by design.  We find fulfillment and purpose when we are aligned with our true self which is who we are in God.  It is easy to forget this because for most of us it has been a while since we have been pure energetic spirit.   When we take form there is a disconnect because we find ourselves simultaneously this grand spirit trapped in a physical body that is limited. But our hearts and our souls know our true selves are not limited.  The heart and the spirit knows that we are no further from God than we ever were, it just feels that way.  When we experience a reconnection with God we know it.  We sense the divine spark within us light up. We know it when we see it in others and we are inspired by it.  That is the work of the Holy Spirit–Inspiration–to remind us of who we are connected to.  But sometimes we get lost because we think it is the form that we want or that will enable us to keep that connection. In my dates with God as I sit in my meditation chair, as I write down my thoughts and turn them over, and as I reflect on the words in spiritual books I am slowly calibrated back to an understanding that I am connected.  There are times when I feel that in that specific moment, but other times it comes out of nowhere.  Sometimes all I have to do is stop, breathe, look at the clouds in the sky and sense the soft comfort that God is trying to wrap me in.  I have always had a relationship with God but it is only in the years that I have dedicated consistently to showing up each morning to meet God for our date that I have noticed this entire shift in my perspective.  There are no words to explain but I hear God in the whispers of the wind and the light of the sun.  It is as though I see God’s hand reaching down to my heart and beckoning me: Come to me now .  So I do my best to open my heart and let myself be touched by the presence of the Almighty because there is nowhere to hide and nowhere to run.  The miracle of it all is that I don’t want to anymore.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to take the time to be calibrated by listening to the call and allowing ourselves to open our hearts to the Divine.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen