ASK GOD FOR NOTHING...AND RECEIVE GOLD

I awoke one morning very aware of just how hard it is to regret telling a bald-faced lie when one feels no real regret for the lie (because it was for the benefit of another...it was justified!) but instead feels only fear of being found out, like being pilloried in public.

I remembered my commitment to ask God for nothing...probably because I didn't know what to ask for. I clearly couldn't ask him to bless a lie, or to not count this one because it was justified...whose lie isn't justified? At any rate, I simply started repeating the holy name. I then went into my quiet time, and my very first reading quoted Pema Chödrön on the practice of tonglen. (I personally never heard of tonglen, but from this reading, we can figure it out.)

The following is what I read and is from The Practice of Tonglen by Pema Chödrön:

"....begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can’t name what you’re feeling. But you can feel it—a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness, or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in—for all of us and send out relief to all of us.

“. . . [You] can do tonglen for all the people who are just like you, for everyone who wishes to be compassionate but instead is afraid, for everyone who wishes to be brave but instead is a coward....

“Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.

“Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.”

I love most of all "use what seems like poison as medicine." Paradox again.

What a perfect message to receive in answer to my silent repetition of the holy name. God is so good to us.

Thank you.