dailydatewithgod

I am not sure what it is about waiting that seems so painful.  I am clear it is a perception as it is not the actual experience of waiting that causes discomfort.  It is the jumping jacks that go on in my mind while I am waiting.  Experiencing an interval is a natural phenomenon.  Somehow when it takes place in a day to day context it seems unnatural.  We look for the shortest line to stand in.  We try to find the fastest route so we do not wait in traffic. We get fast shipping so we don’t have to wait for the items we have ordered.  We bemoan the processes of life that take a while to occur because we do not want to wait around for them to manifest.  All of this speaks to the resistance of being.  Our minds are constantly telling us life has somehow stopped because we are waiting and we fear at a core level not being in the flow of life.  But the idea of waiting meaning life has somehow stopped is our misperception.  The moment we are in right now is not okay.  There is something wrong with waiting.  Strangely, I often find God telling me to wait.  God does not often use the term wait.  I have experienced the sense of “not yet” from God.  God will point to the myriad of things happening at the moment while I am waiting for something that is calling for my presence.  In God’s mind, there is no such thing as waiting, there is only life.  It is always in motion.  I choose to focus on thing or experience that has not happened yet.  I suppose in many ways God waits for us to clue into the fact that at this moment there is nothing to wait for because we are exactly where we are supposed to be. This is a hard one for me, especially when I am wanting something other than what is. Whatever it is we want to come to will happen when it happens and not a moment too soon.  Stepping out of the construct of waiting means trusting in what is right here, right now.  Our hearts speak this language well as they do one beat at a time.  Our hearts may experience longing but it is not waiting. Our hearts allow us to be in the longing as its own experience.

We have an interesting relationship with time.  We act as though it is fixed the way we measure it with numbers but our experience of it is not so fixed.  Time is relative and according to Einstein so is space.  There is a strong relationship between the two because often our understanding of space and time is as one unit.  It is hard for us to gauge exactly how to experience time because we view it mostly in comparison to something else.  We talk about how time passes as if it is a thing.  We say we wish we had more of it as if we could possess it.  We see it fly by like a bird or move slowly like a pot waiting to boil.  We speak of waiting in time or speeding it up as if we control it.  We use the concept of time to convey our ideas and experiences of what it means to be living and breathing in this world. We see time in a clock or on a stopwatch in terms of numbers but it is not numbers that pass it is our life experience.  The deeper question is how much of our life experience is about the time it takes for something to happen or what it means to be in the moment.  We forget the value of the moment we are in because we are busy searching for and worrying about what comes next.  So much so that we are not in the moment we are in, we are in the next moment.  The funny thing is no matter how much we worry, get excited, or think about the next thing, it is still the next thing.  Looking back on our lives how many nexts would we want to trade for nows.  I try and remember that when I catch myself pushing to get to the next thing or thinking about the next event.

Sometimes we are not aware of how much things matter to us until we no longer have them.  Sometimes we do not know what we think or feel about something until we are agitated.  Unfortunately, when we experience agitation our first maneuver is to try and get rid of it.  We do not like feeling uncomfortable.  We do not like to have to think about something which is for all intents and purposed yelling at us to pay attention. It is easy to understand that we summarily choose to get rid of the agitation.  We assume it is the thing or person needing to go away in order for us to get comfortable and return to an experience of calm.  While it makes sense from a survival perspective, most of what we experience as agitations are rarely something which would impede our survival.  Our minds interpret the discomfort as a threat to our survival but the fact that we are agitated actually says more about our state of mind that what is actually happening.  And if we are really honest with ourselves if we always just get rid of agitations, there may not be many things left in our life. You know what I am talking about if you have ever had one of those days when everything seems to get under your skin.  Besides, there is a big difference between being agitated versus being in danger. Our reaction may be similarly automatic but here is where the power of the pause comes in to play.  If we can take a breath and notice the state of agitation we are in.  In the next breath, we can notice what seems to be causing the agitation. On the third breath, we can notice the degree of agitation.  All of these practices of noticing when we pause bring us closer to not just reacting.  The pause takes us into the realm of learning.  Maybe there is something inside of me trying to get my attention and it is doing so by causing me to feel agitated. If I rush into reaction and get rid of the agitation I may lose what it is here to teach me about my experience, about my thinking, about my heart, about myself.  Life can be our greatest gift if we pause when agitated and allow some breathing room between stimulus and response.  We can move from being someone who reacts to someone who responds to life, all of life.

There are so many wonderful things and experiences in this world it is hard not to want to partake of them all.  There are also many not so wonderful things and experiences of this world that it is hard not to try and keep from facing.  The funny part about all of this is depending on who you are, where you are, the context in which something occurs this can be the same thing.  How is it that one person’s joy is another’s misery?  How is it one person’s junk is another person’s treasure?  It boils down to how we identify ourselves, how we perceive ourselves, and what we make it mean that we are experiencing what we are experiencing.  There is this funny little experiment we can do to get another perspective. We can remove ourselves from the equation.  How might I view this experience if it were not me involved in it?  How might it be different if I removed the judgment about what was happening?  What could I learn from this if I experienced the removal of connection to the outcome of this experience?  How might my experience be enjoyable if I did a removal of the outcome?  In recovery, they talk about being able to live life on life’s terms.  Not my terms.  Not your terms.  Life’s terms.  When I look around at how life works, how the natural world functions, and remove myself from the equation, I see everything.   Everything comes and goes.  Everything is important at the moment and not important the next moment.  There is an ebb and flow that occurs for which I do not play a role.  When operating from a place of removal of my thinking about who I am and what I should or should not be experienced and just be, it is a whole different world.  Our minds are attached to who we think we are.  Our hearts invite us to play in the removal of our thinking and see what might be there for us to discover in life.  Then we can discover who we are being in our hearts one breath and at a time.

When you hear people’s stories about the turning points in their lives they are told in such a dramatic fashion.  The idea that one could experience a capstone without such a sharp turn does not seem likely.  The reality is most capstones while appearing to be a dramatic turning point began with a little niggling.  A sense or hint of something needing to change.  Often it is when we ignore them and they pile up that we awaken to the opportunity to make a turn. It is not a good or bad thing to wait for it to get loud enough. Pain is a great motivator.  The question remains how many of these were capstones of our heart before we recognized them in our mind.  Our hearts are much more sensitive to the energetic vibrations in our lives.  Our hearts do not have all the language to get through like our minds.  The appearance of dramatic capstones is what we witness with our eyes.  They are dramatic because they are a powerful accumulation of our heart’s whispers to turn and look at something new.

Have you ever wondered why colors are the colors they are? Or why it is we chose the letters to mean a color? I once saw a movie where a sighted kid was helping a blind kid learn what colors looked like based on feeling.  He took rocks and made them different temperatures.  Blue was cold. Red was hot. Green was room temperature. Greenery does have a way of bringing a neutrality to our experience.  The way being in nature grounds us is something we cannot avoid.  It reminds us we are a part of this earth.  Even the way we unknowingly interact with greenery through the exhale of carbon dioxide and how the greenery exhales oxygen.  It becomes this interplay between the two of us. We have a similar system, though it physically operates in different colors with the heart.  In the chakra color system in easter philosophy, the heart is the color of green.  Maybe those old wise ones were trying to tell us something. Maybe our heart operates energetically in green but we only see the blue and the red. If we spent time connecting with the idea of all we need to bring us home and center us was already within us, how might we live?

We live in such a loud world that when we encounter silence we tend to feel uncomfortable.  We think it is awkward when it happens during conversations with others.  We worry when it goes from loud to silent all of a sudden.  We run from the idea of experiencing it within ourselves. We bemoan it when we sense it from God or we give up on God when it happens.  Like most things, I have a mixed relationship with it.  Perhaps as an introvert who garners energy from her alone time I have found a place of peace with it and even chose it at times.  I know I appreciate it in contrast like when leaving a noisy room.  Most of what we call silent would actually be quiet.  So rarely are we around no sound.  I would describe my morning daily date with God as quiet which I love.  The silence I sometimes sense from God is not so easy to sit with.  When I feel I am not getting any sense of guidance from God, just like when a conversation with someone stops, I go into my head about what is wrong.  Did I do something?  What am I doing?  Maybe I need to be different.  What I am willing to do is notice what loud noises or stories my head latches onto when experiencing this kind of silence.  Maybe it is some room to breathe.  Maybe it is not about me.  Maybe it is an opportunity to go deeper. Gasp!  The kind of deeper invitation where you sense the darkness you may be wandering through because it is unknown territory.  It is in those moments where I ask God for the courage to remember even in the worst moments when I felt God was the most silent, I simply could not see the new ways God was showing up in my life. I have experienced abandonment of others, but never abandonment from God even when the silence screamed it in my head.

One of my most influential mentors, when I got into recovery, said something to me repeatedly which lets me know it is important.  Even if she had not repeated it, I still would be recalling it today. While I do not remember it verbatim, the essence of what she said was, “you won’t risk what you can’t recover from.”  There were so many things I did not believe I could recover from in life that I was not willing to risk. When I was in my disease and busy self-loathing and trying to blot out my existence little by little, everything felt risky to me.  I lived in so much fear I was unaware of how much it had become incorporated into my way of being.  There were many things I simply did not know how to do in life, so my choice was to bide my time and hope somehow it got better. Deep inside I knew there were more options.  My belief and relationship with God provided experiences to show me otherwise but they didn’t stick.  My heart was so closed off there was no space for it to land.  In my mind, there were some things I was willing to risk but not if it involved potentially disappointing you or going against what I thought was expected of me.  I was afraid all my stories of who I was on the outside were true of the inside so I could not risk settling down long enough to explore the truth of who I am.  Bringing oneself to a breaking point of discomfort and pain has a way of putting things in perspective.  As I moved into my journey of recovery and developed an open relationship with God through our daily dates, I began to see through the smoke and mirrors.  My actions changed which changed my perspective. Slowly I began to see I was more than who I told myself I was, who others seemed to think I was and that I was not my circumstances.  The heart invites mystery and risk.  As I learned to open my heart to God, get to know the truth of who I am, and stop looking to the world outside me to define me,  my willingness to risk increased.  I could chance to let others in closer.  I could try things out and make mistakes without believing I was a mistake.  I was willing to risk doing things that might make me look like I didn’t know what I was doing or a fool. There was a space in my heart where I was no longer trying to house food and self-loathing.   In this space, my understanding of God in a variety of forms provided the belief that I could risk discovering who I am and who I am being. It is a risk I take in big and small ways every day trusting that no matter what happens I believe God and I are strong enough to recover from the outcome.

We do this funny thing when life does not meet our expectations.  We look for someone or something to blame.  We think maybe it is ourselves, the weather, the actions or attitudes of the other people involved or some universal lesson we are being asked to learn.  Do we ever consider that conditions are what they are because it is what they are?  Maybe there isn’t someone or something to blame.  What if the conditions we are experiencing are the conditions we are experiencing.  Nothing more, nothing less.  I read a saying on the wall of the dentist office when I was a kind which has stuck with me for years: Life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it.  We think life is the conditions we are faced with.  Really life is what we do with those conditions.  How we react, what we make them mean, and who we become as a result of facing the conditions, is how we shape a life.  My perspective for many years while I never would have admitted it, was of a victim.  I just could not seem to cut a break.  Life was unfair.  I followed all the rules. I was a good person. I worked hard not to disappoint people and color outside of the lines.  I believed in God. How come bad things still happened? Before I got into recovery and was able to take an honest look at how I had been living my life, I used to want a God who would rescue me.  Isn’t that what it means to be a savior?  Not that it was a phrase I used often, but I was familiar with it.  Only when I started on my daily dates with God did I begin to shift my perspective.  Life is not about the conditions.  Life is about who I am becoming.  I do not need God to rescue me from the conditions of my life.  It is my life.  It is why I am here.  I need a God who breathes life into me when I am walking through the conditions.  I need a God who stands with me as I develop the courage to face the fear conditions or the joy conditions. I need a God who does not define me by my conditions but by the depth and breadth of my heart.  I need a God who reminds me of who I am at my core.

We all encounter situations and even people we find perplexing.  There is some confusion or something we find troubling.  We may feel anxious or uncertain.  Yet, rarely do we stop to ask ourselves why we feel uncomfortable when we are faced with quandaries.  Life is full of mystery.  In fact, there is actually more in our day to day experience of which we do not know than the reverse.  We like to convince ourselves and we fall for the illusion that because something is familiar it is known.  We are applauded for being right and able to demonstrate how much we know. We get letters after our names and are impressed by others who have letters after their names.  Yet, if we are really honest with ourselves, we recognize it is the discomfort and the desire to not have to take full responsibility for our lives which leads us away from quandaries.  Instead of embracing them we look to others to tell us what they are about.  We think all we need is to know the answer. All we are getting in their response is their version.  Imagine what we could discover about ourselves and how we see the world if we chose to take hold of our quandaries.  Life is about growing.  If we are not learning, we are dying.  Literally, our minds will shut down an area not being used to incorporate something new.  Thankfully our lives are full of opportunities to use these quandaries which come to us, which we do not necessarily seek out.  If we opted to look at them as an invitation to engage with the very essence of being alive, we might not be so anxious.  But maybe that is why we are anxious.  Rarely do you hear the story of someone on their death bed saying they wished they had stopped living life to the fullest.  Usually, they regret not making as much time to be involved in with others (who are full of quandaries). I am not interested in my gravestone saying she had all the answers.  I want it to say she lived in the questions.  We all get to do that when we listen to our heart’s invitation to step into the mystery by facing the quandary of the moment and discover more about ourselves in the process.  Our minds balk at the notion of unknowing and see it as a defect.  Our hearts see quandaries as play places and opportunities for new breath and new life.