GOD'S PREP WORK...LOVE

Blinding flash of the obvious: God-growth means the sacrifice of the personal. 

Still more spiritual growth is ego deflation in depth evolving...the more we resist it, the more painful the process. Then comes the light...the more we try for it, the more painful the process. We will remain blocked and frustrated until we accept that resisting and trying are both personal, both driven by self alone.

Inner growth, i.e., God-growth, comes with the release of our personal wants...we hug them and kiss them and let them go. 

Is there anything harder than not responding in kind to a personal attack? Being purely personal, it is hard to accept the reality that we are dealing with our interpretation of the attack...which most often originates with our perception of what was meant if not factually said. Proving that we really are the source of all our woes.

Reminds me of a vignette in "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment."  The narrator is seeking to love, to discern love in all things, and he tells of having a nightmare in which a hideously ugly and terrifying monster arises. The narrator is frantic to get away from it...kill it, hide from it, just make it disappear...and the monster says, What was it that you thought needed to be loved?

There it is. The basis of the spiritual teaching to love your enemy as yourself, and of Nikka, age 6, saying that to love better we need to start with a friend we hate. 

Face it...Nikka, age 6, was not an aged scholar of the Bible...she wasn't a white man with a long white beard preaching hard stuff that nobody wants to hear. No...she was a six-year-old child saying something that nobody wants to hear...but needs to.

Again we find the hardest thing life is ever going to ask of us is that we change our mind. It helps if we get started by making a decision to be a forgiving person...and then find that cannot be done without plain and simple trusting God. 

There's a boatload of prep work in learning to love which, face it, is sacrificing the personal. Or, the God-news according to Rohr's "Daily Meditation" today: There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. There it is...God's boatload of prep work all ready for us...already.

Thank you.