KNOW ALL IS WELL WHEN IT DOESN'T LOOK IT

God Calling today, August 7: Practice daily saying 'All is well.' ... Say it until you believe it, know it.  

Blinding flash of the obvious:  Know all is well even as our worst fear comes true.

We will never know, never believe, 'all is well even as our worst fear comes true' until our worst fear comes true. Then, slowly, slowly...if we're doing it right...it proves to be our pearl beyond price.

This is not new news; it is, however, a clearer understanding...an ever-deepening realization...that our prayer to have our worst fear removed is answered by our acceptance of our worst fear in our life. This comes wrapped in the understanding that the worst fear in our life is God's will, God's way for us and for our benefit.

The hard, hard work of realization of that Truth is in letting go, of giving up trying to realize the truth of it. We read nothing but spiritual literature, we walk, we talk, we ponder, pray and meditate spiritual realities...all the while the reasoning mind is feeling bupkis, but the spiritual mind is growing its wings.

This is the Higher Power within us, the I that I Am, doing its perfect work. 

The reasoning mind resists, the spiritual mind exalts.

Thank you.

NOTHING IS WASTED...GOD HAS HIS USES

My recent entries on my flashbacks re the death of my friend, Jim McG, have led to new insights.

Today, I am living the lesson that the pearls we take in at any given time may not be useful until later...and we do not get to determine any part of the lesson...neither the time nor the message.  

The unselfed love I wrote about a couple days ago...wrote about as a blinding flash, i.e., brand new to me...I am learning from my God Calling notes began a full year ago...and I named it an epiphany then! 

My August 5 note from last year: '23 to hold to my epiphany of selfless love through Jim's death. My  note this morning following that '23 note: '24 now named, unselfed love...thank you. (And I did no naming...the words unselfed love came as I wrote them.)

This tic-toc is important to me...why is unknown as yet. All I know is that every morning a new piece of information is showing up in my dailies that I have read over the years. The information was of no knowable use to me until it was knowable, and the Father within controls the time and the message. 

That leads to this morning's God Calling message: Refilling with the Spirit is a need. That dwelling apart, that shutting yourself away in the very secret place of your being...away alone with Me.

There...the spiritual explanation for my recent withdrawing...that which I've tried so hard to overcome, thinking it was a leftover from the pandemic when we were all shut-ins. Being a loner, that period felt very comfortable to me, and I thought I needed to break out from that...yet again. 

I did use that alone time for spiritual work...to read, study, wirelessly share more deeply with others. Now, I see that time was part of God's plan. Proof further that nothing is wasted in God's world...the material world has a pandemic, God uses it for our good.

There...an excellent example of why I'm a believer that the God of my understanding is a favorite description of God...anyone can think we're bat-blank crazy, but nobody can take our own understanding away.

Thank you.

LOVE AND LAUGHTER...GOD'S ALWAYS GIFT

 I am being brought to a deeper consciousness of the invisible Power for good within us that is for our benefit. It seldom seems to our reasoning mind that it is for our good...from our eyebrows up, it seems to be our worst fear...lurking.

CAC teacher James Finley writes in today's Daily Meditation about the childhood trauma inflicted on him and his family by his alcoholic father. That trauma led to his finding his Father within and his spiritual growth leading to him becoming a healer. 

I felt awed as I read it...the end result of his spiritual experiences brought through fear of and pain from the harm inflicted on him and his family is akin to my spiritual experiences brought through fear...free-floating fear, my name for anxiety. 

My personal experience with anxiety began simply with a feeling...a "fear of."  Often, I knew naught of what, I just felt gutbucket fear from my toes to my nose, and my brain would quake as in terror.

For me, too, spiritual growth became my healer...I considered psychiatry and was gifted with the sound advice to give a year to God, to seek spiritual growth for a year, and if I wanted other after a year, fine. 

Spiritual growth became by standard-bearer for which I can never be grateful enough. I have visited a shrink a couple times as I moved along...never got a breakthrough but never regretted being open to the possibility.

As I often note, when I turned 80, my inner life changed...became flashbacks, insights from those flashbacks, sweet memories and mellow might-have-beens. I am learning from each and every one...learning that God lives in the love and laughter of our lives.

To find the love and laughter in our life is to defang our rues, regrets and remorses...they, too, are upgraded by love. 

Ah, the 80s...love 'em and laugh.

Thank you. 

UNSELFED LOVE...GOD'S GO-TO GIFT

Transformation is a process—and for survivors, it’s a process with its ups and downs, flashbacks, and panic attacks. But, as [a raised consciousness] confirms, it is the better way; it is God’s way. -- Theologians Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan Shaw, Fr Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation, August 4, 2024

Blinding flash of the obvious: unselfed love - thank you

From my journal this morning: Jim McG died August 2, 2023...as I wrote then, I feel now: Jim McG has died...I felt the love for him that I want to feel for God...unselfed. 

That came from God then and now. That is the love I seek...unselfed.

 

That is the love I have ever sought, unknowingly...the "something missing" I've prayed God to supply. This morning's blinding flash of the obvious, unselfed love - thank you, has been awaiting its own release for a year now. 

Just because we thought it, is no guarantee we got it...today I got it. Now to live it...aware. That's all. Just aware. God picks it up from there.

God is so good to me...to us. God is so good.

Thank you.

GOD IS SO GOOD FOR US

We are all forever beggars before God and the universe. We can never engineer or guide our own transformation or conversion. If we try, it will be a self-centered and well-controlled version of conversion, with most of our preferences and addictions still fully in place, but now well-disguised. -- Fr Richard Rohr, "Daily Meditation," July 21, 2024

Everything old is new again...or has that been said before? 

I ponder Fr Richard's quote, and I know it for truth because I have thought, said, preached the same thing for years...probably thinking it was original to me. Another gift to love and laugh with. 

Today is the first anniversary of a friend's death...thinking of you, Cyn 💝. It is also the 112th year of my mother's birth...thinking of you, too, Mom 💖.

I'm also thinking of my best friend from high school...after many years we have reconnected. What a gift! We bounce our latest ache, pain and free-floating anxiety off each other...that helps us to determine if it's just a symptom of being 80+ or if we should visit the doctor. 

When we reach 80 and keep on going/growing, it is a comfort to have a friend our same age...not only to hoot and holler as we revisit fun memories but to help us check out our many new and different ailments...serious? or the 80s? Our personal fix's brand-name...panic-panacea.

Lately, a long-ago BFO is floating in my thoughts...we go to God for God and that is all. There. That's our best panic-panacea. 

God is so good for us.

Thank you.

RAISED CONSCIOUSNESS...TRUST...TRUST...TRUST

Our consciousness is raised not by a self-determined objective...we may want that, desperately and determinedly, and there is nothing wrong with that, but as Mother Teresa attested to, want will not get the job done. 

Our consciousness is raised by the grace of God alone. 

Ah, but learning to live with that as our singular desire keeps us heading in the right direction...away from self consciousness toward God consciousness.

We learn to trust the God of our own understanding by doing our footwork, starting with when...not if...wrong, promptly admit it. Trust.

Following are some lessons in consciousness being raised that my friends and I have experienced: 

First, we must try with a will or fall by the wayside...trust...let go and let God...trust...stumble, fall, get up...trust...hold our nose and take a leap of faith...Trust. Then...sit and wait on the Lord -- really, really Trust.

According to public theologian Rachel Held Evans, All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way. 

Thank you.

ON FINDING OUR CORE...AND LOVING IT, I

[The following is a reprint of my post of December 29, 2021, and is as true today as it was then.]

The following, by Joan Didion, is from her essay, On Keeping a Notebook, at p 126. This, more than anything I've ever read or heard, describes me and my being in my world as I live it:

"....I tell what some would call lies. 'That's simply not true,' the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. 'The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn't that way at all.' Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day's pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

"I tell what some would call lies," Didion wrote. "How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth...."

As I read that, from my toenails up, I felt accepted, partnered...twinned, dimdammit! And I heard my innards laughing for I could freely admit that is me...I tell how it looked, felt, was...looks, feels, is...to me.

And here's the nut as Didion wrote it: "I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters." [My emphasis added.]

It seems likely...to me at any rate...that it is our way of communicating that won Didion Pulitzers and has won me friends, each of them my Pulitzer and the pearl beyond price.

Finding our freedom within through the freedom of a like Soul proves true self-acceptance is the acceptance of Self.

Thank you.