dailydatewithgod

The first time I heard the concept of kindred spirits was when watching a movie based on the story of Anne of Green Gables. Then I read the books.  I loved the way Anne spoke of kindred spirits and their seemingly unbreakable heart connection.  We all learn who we are related to early on.  Usually we live or near those who are our kin.  As we go through life we make connections with those outside our immediate relations. Often with those we relate to more than perhaps those we are related to.  So how can those we do not relate to be our relations?  It seems to defy logic but only if we hold tight to our concepts of what it means to relate to one another.  For those to whom we are biologically related, we can identify a common origin and way of being raised that gets passed down from one generation to another.  For the kindred spirits in our lives with whom we feel connected without a biological tie, there is a heart connection and a growing together of a spiritual kind that seems to with ease.  Yet those who are our blood relations also bring about an opportunity to connect with our hearts and grow spiritually, but we often do not see it or even experience the opposite.  I have had my own share of difficulties with my blood relations and am in no way an authority on how to create the best and highest good from and for those relations.  I believe in my heart it is possible.  We are literally biologically connected to our relations for a reason as God is a purposeful creator.  It could be simply a matter of choosing them as we do the kindred spirits with whom we relate.  Or perhaps it is about letting go of the labels we have for each other as mother, sister, father, brother, cousin, and so on.  Those titles carry expectations on them that friends do not.  I am continually open to exploring how to play a role in creating connected relations with those I am related to as well as those to whom I relate.  I look to the source of love to guide me on this heart centered path and do the best I can in the meantime.

As a senior in high school I attend a retreat called Kairos (meaning God’s time).  Our group of 40 seniors plus senior student leaders and staff spent 3 1/2 days together at a retreat center away from school and all other activities.  It was a pivotal experience on my spiritual journey and I remember it like it was yesterday.  One of the talks given by a student leader was called, “Love in Action.”  Through the course of the week we moved through the concepts of seeing the truth of who we are, accepting ourselves, understanding God and our relationship with God, and finally how that translates into how we interact with others.  Love in Action is about how we live the knowledge we are loved and cared for by God.  It was a very moving experience attending this retreat which included letters from our parents, fellow students, and close sharing with those in our small group throughout the week. It was a chance to let ourselves be seen and accepted by each other which at that age does not happen too often.  I took advantage of it to the degree I was able to be honest with myself at the tender age of 17.  I know the week of Kairos 75 in November of 1991 changed something inside of me and became a shaper in the relationship I have with God today.  Through the love of the team who guided us, the students back home praying for us and our families letters, I saw how much we were loved.  It broke my heart open because I had no idea anyone even noticed me. They were all love in action for us.  Even more profoundly I saw the power of shared experience and acceptance of one another in our small group.  We were living love in action.  Our action of love in any given day is to stand present in the awareness we are loved completely and fully by God and be that message for others as we let it guide our actions towards them.

The instrumentality of our lives is about being our best selves.  When we are within our instrumentality and not trying to play someone else’s instrument because it is was they or we think they expect, we have agency.  We are designed to be the instrument of love in our design.  God would have created us exactly the same if we were meant to bring love instrumentally to the world in the same way.  There are similarities, but no instrument is exactly the same, nor is it meant to be.  We need each other to create an orchestra and play the symphonies of love but we have been hand strung and carved by the Creator to be the best instrument in the situation we are individually in.  Only we know from the depths of our hearts which note is most aligned in the moment we are in.  When we are in sync with ourselves we will find our string section and the orchestra for which we are meant to play.  We learn how to play off each other and make beautiful melodies when we are part of an orchestra in life.  Plus, when it is time for our solo, if we know how we are instrumental in the whole picture of love, the rest of orchestra will shine because we are able to be ourselves.

After all these years of daily dates with God I find myself opening up to God’s perspective of learning from life.  I have always been curious, we all are, and saw myself as someone who is committed to growing and learning as I go through life.  It is one of the reasons that propelled me into the professional field of education.  In my heart there has always been an awareness of learning as much more than schools and books.  My relationship with God encourages me to look at my day to day experiences as lessons in love.  If I am in a good place I am willing to learn from everything.  If my heart is closed off and I perceive a lack of safety, my mind goes directly to survival.  In those moments there is no room to learn.  Like everything else in the flow and dance of life there is a time and a place to explore.  Deeper than just looking at the day-to-day experiences our hearts, if we are open to listening, will also call us to look at some of what we believe are the darker parts of our lives. Things from our past that we may have shut the door on.  Even being with experiences we do not want to think about let alone contemplate what can be learned about love from them.  Little by little God has opened the eyes of my heart to be willing to consider there may be something to salvage from those dark times.  As an incest and obesity survivor those are not spaces I enjoy reflecting on.  Strangely learning to salvage lessons of love from them brings me freedom.  Maybe it has something to do with our concepts of past, present, and future not being as fixed as we imagine.  Ultimately, it comes down to seeing as God sees.  God has greater insight into what can be salvaged by looking at it through the lens of love.  It is not about staying the past but being able to open my heart to find the power of love even in the dark.  It is about reckoning with my belief that there is no where God is not.  It is allowing God to use me to salvage the dark parts of my life by bringing it into the light of love.

It is easy to figure out things or experiences are generating excitement for us.  It is hard to fool ourselves and tell ourselves that we do not have the titillation we know is present, unless of course we are practiced in the art of self-deception.  Many of us are well-practiced in self-deception because we have lost touch with our hearts.  I know I lived in that space for a long time. When we are titillated it is present in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts.  We are fully attentive the experience, person or idea grasping our attention.  We find it easy to put energy into it because it is as though we cannot help ourselves.  This is how God created the universe.  Sometimes we think God is not interested in every little detail of our lives, but that is our thinking.  We figure God’s attention waned and there could not possibly be any titillation present when God’s thinks of us.  Just because we have lost interest, just because we can’t imagine God being titillated by our presence in her life, does not mean it is true.  God’s desire to know every cellular movement in our lives stems from his titillation of us.  We lack the capacity to fathom the enthusiasm with which God engages with us.  What I have learned over the years on my daily dates with God is the lack of comparison when it comes to my understanding of things and God’s.  My continual prayer is God, help me to see this as you see this.  What would happen if we asked God to help us see ourselves with the same titillation God sees with?  What might we say or do differently?  How might we approach the decisions in our lives or the interactions with others who are seen by God with the same level of titillation?  The possibilities are endless and ever-expanding.  Our hearts invite us to be present to the energy of the titillation of God each time we take a breath.  It is as simple and as profound as allowing life to be a titillating experience of existence today in our breathing.

We may not realize what it means to be created by God.  We cannot fully comprehend what comes with being designed by the Great Designer.  We get a sense of it when we allow our minds to wander and dream.  We grasp it when we are filled with a sense of pride for something we created and see to completion.  We know it when we spend time in the quiet of our hearts, in the stillness of our breath, and in the alignment of the truth of who we are at our core. Our ability to concoct things is tied to the presence of love in our hearts.  Our willingness to explore our inventive capacities can explode when we are willing to play.  We can concoct all kinds of mixing and matching of ideas.  We can contrive a solution to a problem because we are allowing ourselves to explore.  Most of our lives are made up of concoctions of others. Nothing operates alone.  We are all blends and mixtures of creation.  God encourages us to delve into the creative space within ourselves to see what concoctions we design for love.  Maybe love does not have to look the way we think it does.  Maybe love is more of a blend of experiences than a one time star lit moment that captures our hearts. Concoctions of love are limitless when they are driven by our intention to continue to create from a place of love we believe resides within us.

Have you ever encountered a person who walked in the room and the whole room lit up? How about a time when an idea hit you and it is as though your brain just had the lights turned on?  Then there is the relief that comes when we turn on the lights in a dark room so we can find what we are looking for. The brilliance of light in our lives cannot be understated.  According to some scientific studies regions where there is less light exposure have higher incidents of suicide.  There is a reason why our planet gathers its energy from the sun and sees fit to makes its connection to it by constantly rotating around it.  The luminosity in our lives comes not just from the physical presence of light but the energetic light of love God cultivated within ourselves.  We may think we are dark and messed up.  We may believe what someone else told us at some point about how unworthy we are to take up space on this planet.  But the luminosity within ourselves is needed via our presence in this world.  Why else would God have created us?  Who are we to argue with the Creator who designed the whole of the universe?  How can we think we know better than the designer who somehow set in place the capability of the earth to rotate around the sun?  God invites us to notice how our lives would begin to shift if we recognized the luminosity present within ourselves which we are designed to bring to life in a way only we can.  By accepting God’s invitation each time we take a breath to notice the luminosity within us, we can awaken ourselves to how it might be the very thing needed to illuminate the moment we are in for ourselves and others. How might our lives look if we rotated them around the energetic luminosity of our hearts?

There was a time in my life when a request would be made of me and I thought I had to respond yes or no right away.  I felt responsible for giving an answer, even if I did not yet know.  It seemed to be part of the same structure of my life where I felt I had to know things I did not know.  I wanted to be the one people had no problems with.  I wanted to be approved of and if you were waiting on me to have an answer, you might be disappointed.  Unfortunately, it would backfire on me because I would say yes too quickly and then realize I committed to something I did not want to be committed to.  Then came the white lies to squirm out of it or running the risk of really disappointing the other person by not being able to follow through.  Strangely I did not hold the same standard for others when I made requests of them.  I saw others take time to consider their options, ask to get back to me, or let me know when they would be able to provide an answer.  These are things I learned in recovery.  It is what gets reinforced on my daily dates with God.  It is flexing the pause button so when I need to be strong, the musculature is there. When I take the time to pause and consider my heart’s response to a request, I am more likely to provide a response connected to the truth of who I am.  My head will present an answer right away.  It takes courage and patience to utilize the tool of consideration.  However, when I enact the courage of my heart to consider the perspective of my heart, my head has to work much less to come up with ways to squirm out of something I may have misleadingly said I was willing to commit to.

There is much we can learn about how we conceptualize our world by listening to the words we use.  We say things in conversation which have multiple meanings.  We use words that describe things that out of context would make no sense.  We tell someone what they said sounds good. Depending on the context we mean either the sound is good or we understand and agree with what was said.  Either way our auditory facilities were used to achieve the conclusion stated.  Perhaps we both understood the actual sound and liked the sound vibrations of the words that came out of the person’s mouth.  I wonder if also we found what the person said to be sound?  Or did it make us feel sound upon hearing the words or the actual sound?  No wonder we rely on verbal tone and visual cues in conversation to understand what is being conveyed in conversation.  No wonder we think we are talking about the same thing when sometimes we are not.  When we look at our lives, what areas do we find soundness in?  It seems to be of importance to us to convey a healthiness, a solidity to our experience.  When we convey soundness in our living and our being, do we convey it in our words, our actions, our feelings, or all of it? If it is the truth of who we are we can hear it in our conversations.  Our hearts have an energy that extends outside our bodies and when we experience a soundness within the core of who we are we are sharing it with those around us.  If we are troubled in our hearts we will share that as well.  We like to think we only experience things on the physical level but that would be the same as thinking we are always having the same conversation and operate from the same concepts as someone else.  The most important thing is to find the level of soundness within ourselves so it is what lives and breathes in us at the level of God’s conception for us.

If we are willing to be honest with ourselves we can admit there are times when our criterion is a little off.  We find ourselves engaged in experiences or with people with whom we feel we do not belong because we misjudged our place in the situation.  Perhaps we saw ourselves as being something we are not.  Perhaps we were afraid to speak up and say what is true for us out of fear of offending someone else.  Perhaps we wanted so much to belong we figured we could withstand the discomfort of not being with the criterion of our heart.  What does it mean to allow our hearts to be the basis of criterion when it comes to living our lives?  Do we carry judgment that to do so would be unrealistic?  Do we think we will be all on our own?  If we make an effort to connect with the truth of who we are within ourselves how can we really be existing within a criterion that brings us anything but peace?  Maybe until it is uncomfortable enough going against the criterion of our hearts are we willing to do the opposite.