THE UNREALIZED KINGDOM OF HEAVEN WITHIN

Life moves in circles and cycles. Yours, mine, tulip trees' and rich peoples'. We have accepted that we are the source of all of our woes...and for how long each woe hangs with us. We know that changing our mindset is the way out of our own turmoil. 

Yes, but!...knowing that and living that are two entirely different matters. 

We can seek still more spiritual growth till our face falls off, our mineset is entirely contingent upon our belief that we are right. That mindset gets iffy when anxiety slips in, catches us unaware...we find our self unsure, afraid, scared...and aren't even sure of what. It feels dicey when we do not know the right question much less the right answer.  

We feel as if our God has taken a leave of absence, and we do not know how to get righted. Where's the solid, never-failing God of my grandma's understanding? 

Here again (when will we ever learn?) is God's counterintuitive answer. Pray thank you! Welcome the scary, scarier, scariest for how else do we get passed it? 

There is no peagreen-purple petrified transmuted in a heartbeat to baby blue and cute-as-a-button...why do we still secretly hope for that when we have come to know from our own experience that God has our back, that God goes before us to make the crooked places straight...that we need to walk the crooked places straight as we put one foot in front of the other. 

When we stand there in fear staring at a crooked place, it is guaranteed the crooked place always seems...fearfully...ever more crooked.

Nothing changes until we hold our nose, take a leap of faith, and feel like we're hanging out there in the ether...finally to realize we have landed on the other side, no worse for the fear of it.

None of this can be our truth until we actually prove each of these words in our own experience...not from reading, writing or thinking. but by living them. 

We cannot wholly trust God until we open our self for all our world to see our worst fear and our personally finest hour. That one may be as simple as we once got an A in geometry....without cheating. Which for sure would have hammered home my trust in God.

Humans need spiritual goodness to strive for, to move us upward. Here's my good news...or a BFO, I'm not sure...we will never have unconditional trust in God. The human need for spiritual growth, or God Itself, precludes it. Ah, but that spiritual goodness is within us right now...it is the unrealized Kingdom of Heaven.

Thank you.