dailydatewithgod

As we close out this year and ready ourselves to enter into a new one there is a heightened awareness regarding where we have been and where we are going.  This time of reflection isn’t just about the list of top tens of the year but a chance to look at who we have been over the last year.  God calls us each day to be aware of who we are being.  Not just what we are doing or what we have done over the last year.  This is not to diminish the importance of accomplishments but the true measurements of the quality of our lives is in how we spend our energy during the doing.  We are human beings, not human doings.  I can achieve many things throughout the course of a day, but if I shut down my heart and my essence to do so, what have I really brought about?  God designed us out of love to be love for the world.  When we are motivated by that essence of ourselves we can attain the impossible but not because we force things or operate super efficiently like a machine.  Each date with God begins for me with a letter and in that letter I ask God to help me accomplish what He would have me accomplish this day.  It is a simple surrender or at least attempt to surrender my ideas of what is important.  I trust that whatever I am able to do that day is exactly what needs to be done given that I stay focused on God and who I am being.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to trusting that we can do more than we thought possible if we focus first on who we are being instead of what we are doing.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

There is the experience we are having on the surface of our lives.  What things looks like, what things we are holding, the conversations that are taking place, the things we own, the titles we have, etc.  Behind and beneath all that is the energy we embody, the subconscious thoughts and conversations we are having, the way we are being that pervades all the rest of our experiences.  The more we begin to pay attention to the layer beneath the obvious one the more we can actually shift the experience we have the surface layer.  The underlying factors are where the work of the heart and the spirit occur.  The surface layer is the one where the ego thrives.  One is not better than the other, it is simply a choice.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to living from our heart layer for some part of our day and just notice how our experience of being differs from the rest of our day.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

A light that shines in darkness is the brightest of them all.  A light that dispels the darkness is the most powerful.  A light that rekindles other lights is magical.  We all have a Great Light that is within us.  It is this light that connects us to All That Is.  Sometimes things happen in our lives that cause us to question whether there is any light left within us.  All we see around us is darkness and we think that our outer world is a replica of what must be happening inside.  And yes, what we see in our world comes from the mindset that we are carrying at the moment we are looking.  However, it is important to remember that just because we feel like we lost the connection to our light, does not make it so.  The Light Within Us comes as part of the deal.  It is the Light of God that we can never be separated from.  I remember many years ago when I was in one of the darkest times of my life. I was facing some challenging circumstances in addition to dealing with a broken heart after falling in love for the first time.  It took a new friend who saw the light in me for me to realize that it had not completely dimmed. She came to my window as it were and showed me the light of the moon inside of me.  By her pointing out to me the light in me and sharing her sight with me, I came to believe that it still existed. The light in her that she was connected to allowed her to see my light.  Slowly I became willing to look within to find more light.  By helping me rekindle my light with hers, both got brighter.  Though we have since moved our separate ways, I will never forget her or many of the other people (Angels) whom God placed in my life to remind me of the Light and rekindle it within me.  We have the opportunity each day to either remind someone of their light or their darkness. Sometimes we think that by acknowledging the light in other people it takes away from ours, but it does just the opposite.  The light builds and the brightness extends because it comes from God.   My prayer for us today, just as a little child of light was born into darkness many years ago reminding shepherds in a field of their light, we choose to remind someone too.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

We all have within us the capacity for great love.  It is when we are living in that capacity that allows us to feel fully alive.  When we embrace God, that which we know and that which we don’t, we get a glimpse of the spark that ignites all of life. In the Christian tradition this night is one of the holiest of nights. It is told that angels were singing with excitement at the birth of a newborn in a nearby stable.  He was foretold in the scripture as the King of Kings.  The strange part is that most kings are born in castles and grand palaces, not in barn yard stables with the animals still in it.  Nothing about the beginnings of this child speak of the grandeur of which his titles were placed.  So maybe that is how God works.  When we are busy looking in palaces and temples, God is hanging out back in the stable while the angels are singing in the fields.  God is beyond expectation.  God awakens in the deep recesses of our hearts in a way that can be missed unless we are looking in the right place.  This doesn’t happen just once a year, it happens every day, multiples times during the day, every time we take a breath.  My challenge is to remember to find God in the most unassuming places of my heart and mind and thus my outer experience which I filter through my heart and mind.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to searching for God in the spaces and places that we would least expect God to be and who knows, maybe we will hear the angels singing.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

This time of year in United States people are buzzing with excitement and anticipation.  It is hard not to pick up on it.  All the people in Santa hats. signs of good will, and blessings in a new year.  Whatever the reason that people have for involving themselves in one of the many traditions around Christmastime, it has the potential to bring the energy level up. Or we can look at this time of year as craziness and excess, inconvenience and unmet expectations.  It is entirely our choice how we want to see it.  I think deep down it comes from our hearts that want to feel connected. We just sometimes lose sight of the fact that we don’t have to have an outward reason to connect.  We are capable of these things all the time.  The sacredness of this season is the power of a collective group of people who are chosing to take time out to do so.  When more than one person takes action in a specific direction energy shifts in that direction much quicker.  My prayer for us today is that we chose to jump on the band wagon of good will for our own lives so that we may contribute to the good will of all those who feel on the outskirts because they don’t think they are part of us all.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Our hearts and our spirits are our greatest assets.  Living in a physical material world we rely mostly on our minds to guide us. But our minds guided through our hearts and spirits is what will bring us to a fuller living experience.  We tend to rely only on those things that we can prove or see but it is the Unseen that creates much more of reality than we can even touch upon with our physical senses.  Deep down, however, each one of us knows of an experience beyond the physical, beyond the provable.  It is easy to forget or to push it aside but it is those unexplainable occurrences that wake us up to the movement of Spirit.  There is no rationale reason why we are moved to embrace someone.  There is no evidence to support the decision of a mother who rushes into a running building to save her child.  God spends all the energy of creation to form us where nothing was before.  Why wouldn’t God then invite us to live in the realm of all the energy of creation, seen an unseen?  There is a line from a song I heard over 20 years ago that has always stuck with me: “Sometimes the very thing we’re looking for is the one thing we can’t see.”  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to ask God for the courage to see some of the unseen in our own lives and be open to what will be present itself.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

One way that we can know and experience God is in the stillness.  It is in the stillness of a moment that our hearts and minds can be opened to listening for and receiving guidance.  This is part of my date time with God each morning.  It happens early enough before a lot of the world is going but even more so, it happens before I check my phone or computer.  I have learned that the first one I want to get any messages from is the Eternal One.  It doesn’t mean that every morning I get direct guidance as though some angel appears.  God is typically much more subtle. Whether it is in the quiet moments or through reading a spiritual book, I get a sense of what God’s message is to me for that day.  One word or idea jumps out at me or a picture forms in my mind during meditation.  I can then carry that with me throughout the day to remember our special time together in the morning.  The reality for me is that I desire to know God’s Presence in all the moments of my day, not just the beginning.  Over the years I have noticed my desire for connection with Presence has grown and I attribute it to the date time in the morning.  Similarly to developing muscles, it starts with the time at the gym every day but it is not in the gym where they matter.  They are most useful to me when carrying things at work or dancing or whatever it is that I am doing in my daily life.  My connection is most needed when my head gets loud, when my ego starts on me about how I am not doing enough, and when I feel lost and unsure.  It is in those moments that I can stop and breathe and remember that the Presence I started my day with is still with me.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to how it might be best to embrace the Presence of God in our day-to-day lives in a way that is real for us.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

God is always who God says God is. God takes care of all that the Creator has created.  Without me doing anything the tidesroll in and out, the trees grow, the flowers bloom, the sun rises and so on.  God has created all these things and somehow they continue.  They are taken care of.  Would not God take care of me in the same way?  Why would God act differently with his creation of me than of anything else?  God would not.  The moment I recognize that all my fretting about and fear of not being taken care is a construct of my mind based on an experience of human beings, I am restored to peace.  God does not act the way that humans act.  This is what makes God a power greater than us.  God is not limited by human thinking and human constraints.  God creates what seems impossible because it is outside the constructs of my mind.  I need to remember this because when I get stuck in a place of feeling stuck or frustrated and I want to throw in the towel, I forget that I can rely on God’s power to carry me through.  It is only my ego mind that resists relying on God.  My heart and spirit look forward to connecting with The Great Creator who can transform the limited human experience I am having.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to accept the idea that the feeling of stuck does not mean that God has disappeared but that we have reached the end of our limited mind.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

Before us stands the greatest moment of our lives–our next breath!  We have no idea of it will come or not, most of us assume it will, but there are many for whom today the last breath they breathe will be there last.  When I think about the idea that all I have is this moment, all of sudden my life comes into razor-sharp focus.  The things that are not so important fall to the waste side and I am acutely aware of the fact that love is all that remains.  So how come I cannot seem to keep this kind of focus throughout the day so that the most important things are ever-present in my mind and I can focus on them instead of getting caught up in the trivial elements of life?  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that God sees these trivial moments of life as just as important on my path of life as the “really important” things.  God is all about the present moment and being awake in that moment.  Tuning into the subtleties of the experience of this very moment, breath in time.  Within this moment is all the love, care, joy, heartache, power, and grace that is needed to survive. And if I stick close to God, I can have that same experience in the next moment.  Just because things are not physically close to me (like family and friends) that I hold so dear does not mean that I cannot be present with them when I am present in the moment I am living in.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to experiencing life fully awake in the moment we are in for as many breaths as we can handle and see what gifts God has in store for us.  Make it a great one! Peace~Colleen

Faith is ultimately belief in action.  It is taking the thoughts and ideas that we have repeated over and over in our minds (belief) and putting them to the test.  Faith sounds all nice and good when things are going well, but when we become challenged, it is harder to hold on to.  It is not something we can see or touch but an inner knowing of the heart.  It is trust in the unseen.  We develop the muscle of faith when we encounter experiences that require us to use it.  But I need God’s help with this because sometimes at the first challenge I want to throw the faith out the window.  How can I at a time in which I need some palpable experience be devoid of any sense of what is real?  How can I continue to believe when everything around me screams that it is not true?  It is then that we are called to a quiet space with God to reside in His presence to sit with the unknown.  It is uncomfortable at first, but by embracing that discomfort our spirit grows stronger.  Our connection to the Great Unseen grows.  God does not ask us to carry out our faith on our own because part of that faith is a belief in the connection to something greater than ourselves.  I have experienced countless times over the years when God did for me what I could not do for myself.  It came because I was willing  to be in my ego’s discomfort of not having the answer but still holding on to whatever little faith I had.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to hold on a little longer, past the point of discomfort, and see if God is really who God claims to be.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen