dailydatewithgod

It is outside our realm of understanding what unconditional love actually is. We talk about it like it is something we should all expect of ourselves or others. Living in a limited bodily experience means we can have moments of it. Just as everything cycles there are times when it is there and times when it is not. The moment we think we have grasped it we lose it. God is the embodiment of unconditional love. Because God is love and nothing else. We get a taste through other people or experiences but to fully know can only come from experience with God. I do not mean a God of our human understanding but something beyond even that. Most of what we carry around in our notion of God is an idea of God in human image. With God, love is like basking in the sun. It is a complete and total experience. It is not something that will wax and wain. It is all-consuming and cannot be turned away from. It is not a human fault that we cannot comprehend the unconditionality of love. It is in the design. As St. Augustine put it many years ago, “our heart is restless until it finds is rest in thee.” We are created to be in a relationship with God. The kind of relationship we will not get anywhere else. The best thing we can do for ourselves is let go of our ideas of what we think we know about God and love and dare to imagine what it would be like to simply bask in the gaze of a beloved being who sees nothing other than love.It takes creativity to set aside what we have hard-wired into our brain based on the limitations of love we experience as corporal beings. But with God all things are possible.

Are we open to creatively exploring what it would be like to bask in the love of God if only for a moment today?

I still remember this commercial I saw as a kid. It was for some kind of pain relief and the lyrics of the music were “I haven’t got time for the pain.” Somewhere internally I recall thinking, good luck with that. Life has all kinds of pain. It is this strange philosophy that seems to exist with us humans that we want to exclude the parts we don’t like. I am not a hedonist, I do not seek out pain or discomfort but it does happen. I don’t revel in it but I have come to terms with the idea that perhaps there is more to it than my limited perspective of not having time for it. Life has a way of directing us to what we do or do not have time for. I always think pain is the great equalizer. No one gets through this life without it and it is one of the things which we can all relate to. It comes in many different forms and in my recovery I have learned to cultivate a different relationship with it. I mean really, if it exists, then it must be in the design. If God created it in the design it is either because it serves some sort of purpose for growth or because God is bored and sadistic. I have had my moments of believing the latter but found nothing but despair and apathy. God invites us to create new relationships with all kinds of life’s experiences. To pause and step outside of the accepted conversation steering from what human’s have decided and take a closer look. Ironically the remedy to pain is not to run from it, but to give it time to tell me why its here. What it is to teach me. After all, it is neither good nor bad, but my thinking makes it so. It may be inconvenient but who said life was supposed to be convenient. Probably the same people who say life is supposed to be fair. Engaging in the relationship with God means opening myself up more and more to how God sees things and how God sees me. I know from my daily dates with God that the loving vision God has of me is much greater than I have of me. God trusts in my strength, my courage, my compassion, my ability to feel and connect, my desire to know all of what life has to offer, and so much more. When I am faced with pain I fall for my beliefs about me. Those are always limited. Strangely the remedy to life’s pain has become a willingness to lean more deeply into God. Not because God will rescue me from it but because wants to reveal to me who God knows me to be deep down.

Are we curious enough to make time for the pain and discover God’s remedy today?

I was reminded recently about the power of clarity that comes from pairing things down when deciphering how to handle a situation. It is something I learned a while back which with practice gets easier. We are such creative beings and we learn through storytelling so it is quite natural when we are sharing an experience or presenting information to elaborate or embellish. It is more convincing if we can provide nuance details about the scene and the mood of a situation. Even better when we present the inner narrative of the people involved and the felt sense or unspoken experience of others who were there. Much like when we read a story it would cease to be a story without those details. No one picks up a book or reads an article expecting a list items. Yet at the same time, what we are reacting to in a given situation is rarely about what is actually happening and more of what we make it mean. The meaning we attach to experiences is based on those filled in details that we create. In order to provide elucidation about why we are having the reaction we are having we need to cut out the elaboration. It is not easy and feels counterintuitive. It is a practice that God invites us into when we are ready to seek peace around whatever it is. Seeking elucidation about our reaction to a given experience is the opportunity to get to know ourselves more intimately. When we are caught up in the elaboration it is hard to see the forest through the trees. As we replay the scene in our mind we get snagged each time we connect to the elaboration which gives justification for feeling the way we feel. When we take the elaboration elements and remove them from the story, we are focusing on what actually happened. It is hard at first which shows us how addicted we can become to feeling the way we feel. Yet it is no different than interpreting tone of voice to a text message or inferring body language from an email. Neither of those things are included in the typed text. Elucidation allows us to discover what thoughts, expectations, feelings and more we brought to the experience. Those are ours to navigate through. With practice we can free ourselves from being victims of a situation created in our mind through our creative elaboration and embark on the path of elucidation which leads to the chance to get to see how we show up and what snags we are carrying with us. Identifying those snags helps us reach the inner part of ourselves that is in need of some compassionate attention.

Are we willing to make a practice of elucidation for situations that seem to snag us downward today?

I am switching things up a little this week. I recently, had a bodily experience of expressing anger (in a healthy way) and afterwards I was prompted me to creatively express it through this poem:

Dare to Feel . . . Just Because

You don’t realize you are carrying it
Until it begins to eat you up from the inside
Despite all the signs
You will deny
It grows in you until it bursts

For some the bursts extend outside of them
catching others off guard
For others it bursts inside of them
seeping out and spreading all around all unaware
nothing to catch off guard
Until it builds up and your tolerance weakens
The way it maneuvers through you is what you cannot stand
Yet still you deny its power
The squashing of the energy
Comes from the influence of fear
The same fear that kicked things off in the first place
You have no voice
You have no say
Someone above you gets the voice and gets the say
You are too little to speak
You are too little to object
Big hands and big feet
Are no match for little hands and little feet

Though you want to run your legs are much shorter than his
So you clamp down and stuff it in
You hold on and clench
You wipe it from your memory
so you can somewhat breathe when he is around
You learn to hate the parts of you that wanted to be there
Be in the fear part
Be in the anger part
Be in the energy part

You wake up having gotten your own set of big hands and big feet
only to realize the little hands and little feet are frozen still
So you learn to breathe
You learn to move
You learn to think
and you dare to feel
Even the anger
Even the hate
Even the rage
Even the fear

You become accustomed to the pangs of fear
that grip you like a movie being replayed through your cells
You learn to discern the signs which initiate the clenching
You breathe and hold yourself
Like the one with little hands and little feet needed to be held
You rock her and rub her shoulders
You tell her you are sorry
You tell her she is safe
You keep telling her until she breathes
You keep telling her until she is willing to feel
To feel the anger
To feel the hate
To feel the rage
To feel the fear
So it is no longer trapped inside your big hands and big feet

It is like fighting to dare to desire another breath
It is a battle for your soul and for the liveliness that you squashed so long ago
It comes from a hope that there will come a time
when the first instinct will be
To breathe instead of clench
To sing instead of cry
To stand tall instead of shrink
To dance instead of freeze
To speak instead of be silent
To feel safe instead of scared
To allow desire instead of fear it

No one wants to hear
No, he does not want to hear
But he is no longer here
and I do want to hear
all of it
I want to free me of it

Slowly, 
every cell that was tainted by the fear
comes to know it is no longer our reality
Our heart spreads the message
What is real is being here
with our little hands and little feet
Walking together in the victory of having changed our reality
The reality where all of who we are is sacred and treasured
Valued and safe
Cherished and beloved
Just because

I presume God put forethoughts into the design of living beings. As much as God is about the moment, God is also about the the process and the journey. I just wonder sometimes given how much about ourselves is hidden from us until, of course the moment it is not. I remember a TV show years ago where a God character would give this teenage girl assignments but only give her the info she needed. She, of course, felt like the hints she got were confusing or missing something. So she asked to be let in on the full plan. The God character reminded her it was not part of their deal but agreed to oblige her just once and let her see the plan. The next scene is her passed out on the floor and her mother is tapping her shoulder to see if she is okay and asking if she fainted. And she mutters, “hints, hints are fine.” It made me laugh out loud because I have had many such a discussion with God. Frustrated and confused because I felt like I was flailing in the dark and did not understand where things were going or what I was supposed to do. I do remember at the roughest times yelling at God with something like, “Listen! I don’t know what you want from me. What am I supposed to do? You are the one with the big picture, here, not me. So if you want me to be doing your will, you are going to have to do more on your part.” I do remember that when I was in college and doing my inner city volunteer teaching work I was in such a place. I remember many a time shaking my fists at God. It was not until my late 20s when I got into recovery and upon reflection I realized what I would not have been ready to do in order to make room for God and take in more of what God had in store for me. I was too addicted to sugar and using my weight as a protection device and self-criticism tool to make room in my heart for more of God’s voice and love. Hindsight is 20/20 and perhaps that wasn’t it at all, but given the what I know understand and do not understand about God, I see how I was not ready until I was. It is a reminder to me that God has a creative sense of timing on things. There are so many levels of things that unfolded when I was ready to face my demons that I did not have all that I needed around me (forms of God with skin on for one) to keep opening up. Now when I am in moments of feeling disconnected from myself, God, others, or wandering around feeling lost I know it is time to reach for the hand of God that is always within me. That was not something I was ready to see before. What I felt like was God’s absence was merely a misperception. God has never been anywhere else and today all I have to do is pause, take a deep breath and connect to my heart. I may not get any kind of divine message but when I get centered with all that is in the moment somehow what happens next does not concern me. I still believe God has a creative sense of time and I may not agree with it but I never wonder where God is while it is all in process.

Are we willing to trust that no matter how much the timing of things seems to suck or how lost we feel we can always rely on the power of pausing and reconnecting with the presence of God in our hearts today?

When I think of luxurious I don’t typically think of my life specifically. My mind goes to what is portrayed in Western culture as lavish. Expense cars, jewels, big house, unlimited spending, staying at a plush resort, first class flight accommodations, and so on. Yet I cannot deny the moments when I have a felt sense of lavishness by what one might consider the most ordinary things. When I a dog playing with its owner. A couple walking hand in hand. The breeze blowing on my skin and feeling the warmth of the sun on my face. All of these things create a lavish open space in my heart that cause me to take a deep breath. These moments of lavishness speak of the simple and yet profound nature of what it means to be alive. My eyes may not see it until my heart wakes them up. In a lavish moment when I catch my breath, my whole body awakens and is generously granted a new lens through which to see my seemingly ordinary life. God encourages us to take notice of the lavishness of the presence of life in and around us while we are busy comparing our ordinary circumstances to someone who is staying in the penthouse suite . Our hearts are willing and courageous enough to show us the lavishness of our lives if we are willing and courageous enough to be open to seeing it.

How many moments of lavishness can we witness today?

I am not sure if it is the power of heat, a general fascination with light, or the mysterious and fierce nature of fire but I fascinated by the dance that fire plays with life in general. Much like us humans, the energy of fire is directly correlated to the air it breathes. No oxygen, no fire. No oxygen, no alive human. The fascination of fire goes way beyond the literal element of fire. It is something that had held the attention of all living beings. We even make a demarcation of time when humans discovered fire. But the kindling that exists within a fire is only one aspect of fascination. Seeing the flames dance and stretch puts us in touch with how we can move and flow with life. Witnessing the destruction hits a part of us that knows if we do not pay close attention to what we do with the fire within us it can destroy us or others. Knowing how to put the fire within out is just as important as knowing how to use to light up. We see a part of who we are in the fire. We know the feeling of being lit up or on emotionally and mentally enkindled and aroused. Paying attention to the fire of our hearts gives us insight into how we respond to the energy of others, experiences, and ourselves. God invites us to learn how to dance to the fire within our hearts by starting with our breath. It is the breath of life which will grow or limit the fire energy which is the spirit wanting to dance through us. Engaging with it can be risky but the real risk is dying with our fire extinguished before it had a chance to find its unique life through us.

Are we willing to risk getting a little burned in order to experiment with the fire of our hearts today?

One constant in life is change. Change we are aware of and change we are not. Life is constantly cycling and evolving and when experience the opposite of that it is usually because we are resisting the flow of what is. On a conceptual level it sounds simple because it is. When we get down the nitty-gritty we come face to face with our ideas and beliefs about life. We tell ourselves something that is happening is not supposed to be happening. We want to develop arguments about why it is all wrong. We believe strongly that things should stay as they are. Things being other people, situations, ourselves, or even a particular event. It is called resistance to change. God invites us to take a step back from our stories. God encourages us to pause before engaging in our default thinking loop and connect with the truth of who we are. Connecting in a way that makes room for an amendment. We fear what we do not know. We push against the feeling of uncertainty. The madness, of course, that its all uncertain. None of us know when the last cycle of change will make an adjust to our lives. None of us can tell when we will run out of opportunities to reside in the flow of life. How do we know if the moment we are resisting right now is the last amendment to our lives or one of a successive amendments? When we pause and check in with our heart, settle into the rhythm of our breath we touch the mystery and the fascination of the uncertainty. In the pause we can step down from the rambling mind coming up with a million reasons to resist and relax into the beauty of the amendment of our physical system happening through the exhale. Our very being is the template for how to deal with the nitty-gritty of everyday life we just forget because it happens so automatically. I don’t know about you but the most recent times I found myself stressed and resisting an amendment to my life I was not even conscious of how I was constricting my access to the very life force I would need to face whatever came next.

Are we willing to pause and tap into the mystery and beauty of our heart and breath which will guide us on how to face the next amendment of our day today?

In the world of work and life there is a lot of language around purpose and vision. There is debate as to whether it is best to go with your sense of purpose and craft your life around your vision or whether to just take life as it comes. We can easily get caught up in the overall greater meaning and purpose of life that we can lose sight of the importance of the life we are actually living today. The only way we or others will know if we are living our purpose or making a contribution is if it shows up in our everyday lives. Perhaps it is the influence of living the 12 steps, but when I got into recovery I realized the power and importance of living one day at a time. In the beginning it was the only way I could fathom stepping into the unknown. After a while I realized its validity in using it for all areas of my life. When it comes to contributions who we are being as much as what we are doing determines the kind of contribution that we make. A work product or a specific action is easier to provide proof of our contribution but when it comes to the contribution of our being that is more subtle. It is kind of like what Maya Angelou said, ” I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” While I take notice with the idea that we actually make others feel things, she was speaking about the impact that we have on each other just by our presence. If we learn to cultivate an awareness of our own hearts and use that to guide our interactions, the contribution we make will far outweigh the specifics of what we say or do. This can work conversely as well. If we are hurting in our hearts part of our contribution will be the in the weight of that on our experience and possibly the experience of others. God encourages us to be mindful of the contributions we are making in the daily little moments of our lives. It is the accumulation of those that we will look back upon at the end of our lives and determine what our real contribution was.

What kind of impactful contribution might we find ourselves able to make by aligning the contribution of our body, mind, and heart today?

It sounds simplistic to say life is a series of moments put together. What else would we call life? A list of things accomplished? The number of days lived? Breaths breathed? What do the days, breaths, or accomplishments even mean if we are not present for them at the moment they are in? How do we really know we are showing up for the life we are living? God encourages us to step outside of our societal and intellectual markers for what makes a life and step into the moments where life is happening. When we pause, take a breath, and connect to our hears we have the lens through which to see the situation of our lives. The reason most of us are afraid of dying is that we have not lived. We notice that it is already halfway through 2021 and wonder where the time went. When was the last time we were so caught up in the moment time ceased to exist? On my daily dates with God, I am invited, as we all are, to settle into a reality where there is nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. It is a moment for my body, mind, and heart to connect with each other in the focus of breath and be with whatever is. It does not mean that my mind does not wander in meditation or that I am zenned out. It means I show up intending to get a taste of what life is about by being in the flow and experience of the moment, whatever it brings. There is a gentle acceptance and surrender of my ideas and agendas. This perspective then is carried through the day and it becomes a living practice. It is a practice of how to be the fullness and truth of who I am in all moments that present themselves. I am guided through the lens of my heart on how to be in the moments I want and don’t want to be in. Whenever my life does come to an end I want to know within my heart that I was able to show up with all of who I am in the moments I was in for whatever life was offering.

What moments are we finding ourselves in for which we believe we are not meant to be in (despite all the evidence of the moment) today?