OTHERS...TO DO FOR OTHERS

Your Father knows your needs before you ask. -- Matthew 6:8

To me, on that sentence hangs my peace of mind. On that promise, we can build our trust...for we have already come to believe that God is Love and love is purely good. Because he already knows our needs, we can trust they will met with love...and laughter. 

To trust God utterly and completely and without holdback, we must learn, utterly and completely and without holdback, to pray not to get peace, love and joy, we pray thank you...and we have peace love and joy to give. Whether we know it or not. 

Comes the light...we must first do it to know it.

With our eyes opened, our reasoning mind is appeased...others is our need, the necessary receptacle to receive our gift of peace, love and joy. There's our stairway to Heaven.

What we have come to believe is solidly affirmed: To do for others, it is our self that must change...made easier now that our perspective has opened. We accept, with love and laughter, that since others do not perceive themselves as we do, we can and we want to love each and all as we perceive them to be. 

Or, as six-year-old Nikka said, "If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate." That'll change our perspective for sure.

Love...God...meets us where we are. So must we...with love...meet us where we are. Then pass it on.

Thank you.

WE HAVE OUR MIRACLE ON CALL

We need not be a "believer" to have a miracle come to us; yet, having a miracle visit itself upon us does not necessarily make a believer of us. It probably ought to make us jump-up-and-shout believers, but...there's that reasoning mind. 

Some of us are too stubborn to change our set-in-concrete mind...I'm right, why change my mind? Others are too scared...what if I'm wrong? I'll look/feel like a fool. 

Then there are those of us who believe...or, as sincere as we can be, want to believe...but we've boxed ourself in with, among other things, our idea of meditation. We kinda, sorta, secretly believe if we meditate right, and daily and without fail, that will bring us...what? A miracle on call? That'd be a miracle that frees us forever from worry about health, physical and mental; money, honey; and perpetual, positive spiritual growth..."Am I doing it right?" gone. 

Here's the thing: We already have that miracle on call. The holdback is...oh my...our reasoning mind.

The miracle lives in the promise given by Buddha, Jesus the Christ, Allah, Mother Mary, the Black Madonna, et al.: If you do as we did, you will get what we got. 

The non-secret is, what they did, they did for others. Ah, and still do. That is it, and that is all. 

Thank you.

PROGRESS NOT PERFECTION...AH, PEACE

Again this morning I ponder the fact of God within me...within us.

I believe God's hidey-hole is in our thinking, and ego, spiritual bane and fool's gold, is God's roommate in that hidey-hole. We must be willing to get over ego to be freed from reliance on our reasoning mind, and willing is way more than want-to...want-to can't even get off its duff here.

Comes a deeper awakening to willingness. Willingness, we come slowly to realize, means complete surrender. Crash and burn. Defeat in a word. Ah, but with a joy following that forever changes that dreaded word...a feeling of inner relief aborning. Oh my, I believe this is peace of mind.

This then is the experience of peace, love and joy that surrender, a.k.a., losing, brings. We are opened not only to the need but to the desire to cease fighting everything and everybody.

Give over, give up, give in and find joy everlasting...with occasional breaks for the human condition to have its say. Progress not perfection is the purely practical word...for which we are grateful.

Thank you.

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. 

THE ONLY NECESSARY WEAPON...LOVE

The following  paragraph, from Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation" today,  evolved itself in my mind from applying to the church, then to our Country, and then to ourself. To me, it describes how the worst case of crash and burn becomes our pearl beyond price:

A church that has been humbled by disruption and decline may be a less arrogant and presumptuous church. It may have fewer illusions about its own power and centrality. It may become curious. It may be less willing to ally with the empires and powers that have long defined it. It may finally admit how much it needs the true power and wisdom of the Holy Spirit. That’s a church God can work with.  

Substituting "country" for church: A church [country] that has been humbled by disruption and decline may be a less arrogant and presumptuous church [country]. It may have fewer illusions about its own power and centrality. It may become curious. It may be less willing to ally with the empires and powers that have long defined it. It may finally admit how much it needs the true power and wisdom of a Higher Power. That’s a church [country] that the Higher Power can work with. 

Then,  personalize it...as in, substitute "person" with all the appropriate pronouns: 

A person who has been humbled by disruption and decline may be a less arrogant and presumptuous person. We may have fewer illusions about our own power and centrality. We may become curious. We may be less willing to ally with the empires and powers that have long defined us. We may finally admit how much we need the true power and wisdom of the God of our own understanding. That’s a person God can work with. 

Evolving unto evolved in each case begins with ego...religious, national or personal...specifically, the need for  ego deflation in depth via the power of love through praise.

Today's "God Calling" has the quiet word: Remember that Love is the power which transforms the world...Drive fear and depression and despair and a sense of failure out with Praise....Learn as a child learns to say "Thank you." 

As Meister Eckhart taught many centuries ago, If the only prayer you pray in your life is thank you, that would suffice. 

 

Thank you.

AWARE OR UNAWARE...WE ARE GRACED

My thank you prayer revisited: 

Thank you, God, that I want your will done in my life more than I want my own will done in my life no matter what. Open-ended. Knock yourself out, Lord. Do your thing. You've got the power, use it. 

You are nothing but good so nothing but good can come from you no matter what it looks like to my eyes. You'll make it clear to me when it needs to be clear to me. 

Whether I consciously know it or not, I am graced with gratitude and blessed with love. Best part: This is true for each and every soul in the universe; we each do our part to ensure it...again, whether we are aware of that or not.

Amen

Thank you.

NEVER LIMIT OUR LIMITLESS GOD

With our realization of a defect, it is God-lifted...ours then is to make living the new our life. -- blinding flash of the obvious at 2:00 AM, June 1

God's work is done with our realization of our defect...God's help is ever with us as we commit to and aim toward living this new way, i.e., sans defect. 

We remember that a defect of character began as a habit that we came to rely on. The human condition is such that breaking those habits is tedious at best and a hard slog in general..."want-to" is the culprit, meaning we don't want to, and that's the necessary change.

Ah, comes the dawning...the reason why our rues, regrets and remorses are our gold: Our "want-to" is ego's chauffer, and it rarely if ever drives God's high road to heaven. Every time we allow the chauffer to decide the way, we end up with the old r,r,r. It is those regrets that turn us back...in fact, return us to God and our new way of living. Ah, there's our cheap shot at gratitude!  

In our reasoning mind's perfect world, the realization of our defect lifted ensures that we walk free of that defect ever after. That is another mistake to which reason clings and in the clinging makes moving up deeper mandatory. 

In the mirror-image of our Father, doing it wrong is doing it right. What else so completely turns us to God? Or, more aptly, breaks our dependence on our own thinking...which is pretty much the source of all our woes.

We have come to believe because we have found it so that our Father really does know our needs. He truly does go before us to make the crooked places straight...plus, and a big plus it is, he lives within! Within you, within me, within us.

Instead of trying so hard to do our thing, in living the new, why not try to let God do his thing? 

Thank you.