dailydatewithgod

At the end of my first ever relationship, I remember a pivotal conversation I had with God. I informed God my heart was closed and moving forward I did not want to connect with anyone until I met the person I was supposed to marry. I laugh out loud and have a great deal of compassion for that young woman who was sure the only solution to the pain (aside from the food I was already using) was to shut down my heart. I did not understand until many years later, I was asking to turn off all links to love with anyone including myself.  We have ideas about what love is and what it is supposed to look like and when it does not show up that way, we don’t see it.  It is much the same way when we approach our relationship with God. The reality is we are far more connected to love than we can see.  The links to the presence of love are deep within us.  It is part of our makeup.  We could no sooner disconnect from those links than turn the planet to move in the reverse direction. On my daily dates with God, I continually encounter the subtle and profound ways God chooses to introduce the links of love present in my life.  When I stand in the courageous space of my heart and hold the open breathing space of possibility, I see with the links with the eyes of my heart as much as the eyes of my mind and body. I would share some of those love links with you now but I do not want to taint the options your heart wants to show you of your love links.

As I walk through this experience of facing the world as it is I am constantly surprised by how palpable God’s presence is.  When I was willing to step outside my knowns of God and get connected the deepest part of myself my whole world opened up.  Palpability of God is not a constant experience but it is a consistent one. On our daily dates with God, I have learned to let go of my ideas of how and what God is supposed to be and find God in all the wrong places.  The palpability is not always a literal touchable experience although I have had those.  The unexpected palpable experiences of God are the ones I sense internally.  It sounds all woo-woo and bizarre but it is as real as a handshake.  It is the moments when my heart skips a beat.  It is the time I find myself smiling unexpectedly because I am touched emotionally by something or someone.  It is the rush of gratitude when provided a new perspective on how to see a troubling situation.  The palpability of God is only limited by my willingness to experience God as touchable.  My prayer becomes, God how are you touching me in this moment?  God, how are you making your palpable presence known in my life right now?  

Simplistically speaking there are two general modes of operation when it comes to how we approach life.  Most people tend to either want to be prepared or just take it as it comes.  We do no unilaterally follow this pattern but we lean towards one or the other.  I trend towards the prepared approach.  There is an equation of safety that I feel is present when I am able to be prepared.  I recognize it as a childhood construct that directed much of my choices and interactions with others.  As a mature adult, I see the illusion of preparedness of safety because I can only prepare for the knowns.  I cannot project all the quandaries which come my way when I show up having done all my preparation.  I used to think I wanted a God who would protect me from quandaries.  I thought it was best to know the right answer and to be what others wanted me to be.  That led to exhaustion, self-annihilation, and addiction.  I do not recommend it. I cannot undo the quandaries I experienced as a child, but I can use the resources I created to navigate around them.  The reality is we all do the best we can.  Every quandary we encounter whether we could have foreseen its presence or not is a chance to see our own courage.  I do not want a God that shelter’s me from quandaries.  I want a God who stands with me and provides an open avenue to be reminded of the truth of who I am.  My mind will always be inclined towards the safety I think I get from avoiding a quandary, but my heart knows it is the quandaries in life which open me up to a new and previously unknown experience of the capacity of love.

So much of our survival skills are slated to keep an eye on what is wrong.  It is a much-needed survival mechanism to be able to detect problems and prevent possible danger. Given that we live in a world where our very survival is much less under threat, this inclination to focus on the wrong and the bad gets misplaced. It is still built into our psyche and I am grateful that it is but when we find ourselves turning it inward it can become harmful.  Just a few days ago when I was in yoga class, I could hear the conversation in my head about how I wasn’t doing the pose right or the best way possible.  So much for practicing something towards peace of mind.  My mind was busy beating me up.  Yet in a moment of breath, I heard an alternative in the form of some questions:  “What if what I am doing is correct?  What if how I am going about this class is precisely the way I am meant to participate in it today?” Now I got why in class there is always a reminder to stay with the breath in our movements.  It was the breath that activated the space in my heart to provide an alternative to my mind’s perspective.  It was the breath that gave me enough pause to ask a question and explore other perspectives. My doing it precisely the way the teacher set up the exercise and the way the other students were doing it had no bearing on my survival.  My mind was simply doing what it knows how to do.  The heart can engage a different conversation and present options.  It is not an either-or thing, sometimes it is fitting to hold the space for both to be true but harassing myself is hardly the way to go about it. So I took another breath and decided that how I was practicing in yoga class was precisely as it was meant to be in that moment.  Sure, I could go harder and stronger but bludgeoning myself into submission was not the way to get there. And I did find myself able to go past what my mind had decided I was capable of, but first needed to be where I was.  I needed the moment I was in to be precisely as it was meant to be.

We all have routines and systems we use to navigate through our lives and our days. Some of them are intentional, others are an automatic result of being a part of a greater system.  Over time we develop patterns and harden our methods of navigating those patterns based on familiarity.  God invites us to look at the methods we use to navigate our lives and determine if they resonate with the truth of who we are. Some of them are patterned after watching those around us and we don’t even realize we have adopted them.  I’ll never forget the time I saw my brother do something in his kitchen when he was cooking and realized I did the same thing.  It was something we had watched our mom do and while there was never any discussion around it, we both adopted the method when preparing food. On my daily dates with God, I am encouraged to notice methods that awaken my heart and connection to the truth of who I am in any situation.   The more often I can stay connected to my own core, the more my life reflects what I value and why I am here. When I detect those methods I can make use of them intentionally to connect to my heart and be the person I know myself to be in word and deed no matter what is happening outside of me.  Taking the time to pause and reflect is a method that anchors me back into the moment.  Inserting a question into an experience or thought inside my head allows enough pause to breathe and awaken my heart.  Looking up, literally looking up, is a method I have adopted when I need to step out of my head’s ideas about what is happening or what the next step is. When we use our own methods to bring our heart’s perspective into the conversation of our lives, we become the embodiment of the truth of who we are.

One of the core realizations stemming from the humility of choosing to walk a daily engaging path with God is how much I do not know God. The ubiquitous nature of God is outside my capability of presence so I can never fully grasp what it is like to be God. That is not what I am searching for, after all, who really wants that kind of responsibility.  The way I see it my purpose as I walk this path one day at a time is to be open to the ubiquitousness of God. The best I can do is not close off any idea or concept of how God might choose to show up in my life.  It becomes an element of surprise and curiosity that awaken my heart and opens me to learn more about love.  God can show up in the dark or in the light.  God can show up in the person I can’t stand and in the person I admire.  God can show up in the tissue I need when I am crying and in the empty box of tissues, I find when I really need one to wipe my tears.  God’s ubiquitous nature is outside my realm of possibility but being open to it allows me to expand my knowing of love and what awakens the truth inside of me.

I sometimes wonder if my heart had hands what kind of picture of my life it would draw. How does the vision of my heart coincide and differentiate from the vision in my mind?  More importantly, if my heart were to describe my life how would that be different than the words I might use. On my daily dates with God, I have noticed that certain experiences in life evoke an aliveness in me that is experienced in mind, body, and soul. It is those captivating experiences that draw me into a deeper desire to connect with what it is that moves this aliveness.  Knowing I can draw on such an experience because it has sketched itself in the memory of my heart is part of what draws me to spend time each day on a date with God.  The simple but not always easy commitment of daily prayer and meditation has opened up layers of life that my mind cannot conceive of.  The picture of my life drawn by my heart stems from the draw to connect with the truth of who I am.  It grows from the willingness to trust that how God sees me is truer than any conception I can have of myself.  If I am willing to set aside my version of what and how things are supposed to be for just a moment by taking a deep breath, I draw my heart into the conversation to provide an avenue to connect to God and experience a different angle.  In my mind, everything falls short and is not enough.  With each breath, my heart gets exactly what it needs to play in the game.  I cherish the ways I am willing and able to draw my heart into the conversation about the measurement of my life because having more than one version available to choose from opens me up to seeing and being more of the fullness of who I truly am.

One of the defining characteristics of God is limitlessness.  In stands in stark contrast to our human experience of limits. We live in a world defined by lines, boundaries, time and space.  We operate in bodies encased by a physical structure of skin and bones and all other kinds of dense matter. We move in a particular direction and come up against a restriction or block. All of these show up as interference between our reality and who we are at our core.  In the moments we find ourselves transcending time and space we get a glimpse of how God operates.  We feel it in our hearts when we are touched by something which cannot be bound in a physical experience.  My daily dates with God have opened my eyes and my heart to limitless possibilities.  They are always there for us but because of interference often from our rational mind trying to find a matter of fact way of understanding everything we live in limited options.  It is why I have found making a concerted effort to reach for the hand of God and ask, “God, how do you see this? or “Allow me to see what you see here in this moment.”  Those requests create interference in the form of pausing and questioning my thinking. We get glimpses through the interference when we let go of our limitations on possibilities and are willing to be present to something outside of what our minds’ can conjure up. Using the principle of interference to our advantage is a way of putting limits on the automatic inclination of our mind to run interference for what is possible.  We do not have to dislike or get frustrated with how our mind’s system operates. We can choose to make it work for us. Using interference with our own minds provides the pause needed to bring the heart online.  Using interference makes it possible to remember to reach for God’s insight when we find ourselves lost in our limitations.

Our lives are measured by what we show up for and direct our attention. We attend to the things our lives which we have determined are a priority.  Even when we choose attendance at or for someone or something outside of us, it is still our choice.  How often have we shown up for something we agreed to attend only to not bring our full presence with us? Our choices about attendance work well when they match up with the truth of who we are.  We can gauge the level of worth we hold for ourselves by noticing how much we are in full attendance with whatever or whomever we are choosing to direct our attention and intention.  Do we attend because it is what is expected?  Do we attend because we want to be perceived in a particular way by others?  Do we attend because it is in alignment with who we believe ourselves to be?  All these layers of attendance bring notice to whether we are making our choices from our minds and our hearts or just our minds.  If attendance in life was simply about being present physically or with part of our physicality like our eyes, we would get credit for showing up all over the place and in some cases more than one place at a time. If attendance is measured by our intention as well as our attention then it might be a different story. God encourages us to notice how much of the truth of who we are is choosing our attendance in life.  If we are open to stretching ourselves through the discomfort of growth through learning to align our intention with our attention,  we might notice the changes to our attendance.  The heart and mind aligned when in attendance send a powerful message of presence for ourselves and those with whom we share the experience.

We see what we are made of when we find ourselves in places and situations we were not expecting to face. We do not realize how much of our experience is simply an altering of our expectations. The truth is we do not know how something is going to go or how someone is going to behave but we create ideas and set ourselves out to expect it or them to be what we have conceived. In come the puckers and we are disturbed because we did not incorporate them into our expected scenario.  We blame the wrinkles and irregularities that get folded into our experiences because they are not part of the design in our expectations.  How might we be less rattled or disappointed by life if we factored in the puckers or at least the possibilities of unknown puckers? God invites us to look for the puckers, to celebrate the puckers, and to find love in the puckers.  Our minds will push back on this because the mind is wedded to its own creative ideas.  Our hearts have the capacity to be more open if we let them guide us through and around the puckers. I get countless chances each day to embrace the unknown puckers if I am open. God reminds me of God’s capacity for a multitude of possibilities whatever happens.  On our daily dates, I am reminded that no matter what is puckering in my world it does not change who I am.  This opens the door to release the fear that comes up when facing unmet expectations. If I opt for the perspective of facing unknown puckers with curiosity instead of fearing them as potentially changing the truth of who I am, I am one step closer to walking in God’s view for the moment.