GOD IN US DOES THE HEAVY LIFTING

Blinding flash of the obvious: I am slowly coming to the awakening of my Being. 

I sense my consciousness is being raised before my thoughts get there to dissect and misdirect.

Our Innerworks are of God, they need not be changed, just awakened...but awakened through our raised consciousness. That is necessarily slow, slower yet, God-in-I business.

We need to get it God-right...trouble is, we settle for self-right. Early on, we are half-wrong but willing to accept it as God's will, God's way just because spiritual growth doesn't make a lot of sense to us...to our reasoning mind.  

There is the key: Our reasoning mind...it needs to change, and only God can change our mind.  

Our reason needs to give over, give up, give in, and we need all of our spiritual growth to feel the fear and do it anyway. 

The hard-to-remember, yet always good news: God does the heavy lifting...ah, but we must work with Him.

Again, and yet again, God is so good to us.

Thank you.

ON FINDING OUR CORE...REVISED, I

[The following is a reworked reprint of mine from December 29, 2021.]

The following, by Joan Didion, is excerpted from her essay, On Keeping a Notebook, at p 126. That, 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," 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! 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 that often does not even resemble another's view. 

The great lesson to learn...that does not mean the other is lying, any more than I am. 

Here is 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 manner of communication that won Didion Pulitzers and has won me friends, each of them my Pulitzer and the pearl beyond price.

It may be...to me anyway...that finding freedom within through the freedom of a like Soul proves true self-acceptance is the acceptance of the other in Self. 

Too convoluted? Ah, but true to me, and I'm loving it.

Thank you.

GOD LIVES GOD'S WILL, GOD'S WAY...REJOICE!

In a sense, our culture, our society is dissolving. We are collectively entering the chrysalis, and structures we have come to rely on and identify with are breaking down. We are in the cocoon and we don’t know what the next phase will be like. Learning to surrender to the unknown in our own lives is essential to our collective learning to move through this time of faster and faster change, disruption, and breakdown. -- Buddhist teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo

Whoa! What a gift! That paragraph is describing us and our inner life today...it gives us hope, allays our fears, rights us.  

Breaking it down: In a sense, our culture, our society is dissolving. To me that reads, In a sense, my very self...my mind...is dissolving. 

Then comes, We are collectively entering the chrysalis, and structures we have come to rely on and identify with are breaking down. We are in the cocoon and we don’t know what the next phase will be like. To me: We are feeling all alone and terrified of the oncoming unknown. 

Comes the Answer:  Learning to surrender to the unknown in our own lives is essential to our collective learning to move through this time of faster and faster change, disruption, and breakdown. To me: We need to give over, give up, give in to the scary unknown....it is not just right, it is essential to our collective learning to move through this time of faster and faster change, disruption, and breakdown.

Ah, this is all about what our hardest lesson taught us: God's will, God's way is the opposite of the reasoning mind's best thinking...that is the blessing. 

God does not live in the reasoning mind only. There is nowhere that God does not live...protecting, enwrapping, loving...God lives. Period. 

Thank you.

FOR AMERICA...RESIST NOT, PRAY THANK YOU

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too.... Dear God, these are anxious times.... We must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. -- —Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life 

I continue to feel gobsmacked when I stumble again on Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life. To me her story as a Jew in Nazi Germany in the late '30s, early '40s sounds eerily...scarily...like the birthing of our story today. 

There. That is my grateful reminder that nothing turns me to God faster than fear, and comparative thoughts of Nazi Germany then and America today is...fear unthinkable. 

It was fear that led me to my morning practice of giving God my three-minute prayer for America. (I know me...more than three minutes, and I'd begin to harangue God.) 

My prayer consists entirely of Dear God, For America..., and I let God consciousness take it from there. That is my attempt to prove more deeply my belief that God needs no instructions from us, just our trusting belief. 

I believe that God knows the needs of the Universe...has already perfected the outcome, and the outcome is for the benefit of all...no matter how it appears to us. Pray thank You and resist not.

In this time, I suggest some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above. -- Fr Richard Rohr

Thank you.

FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER...CHIEF JOSEPH LIVES

From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever! -- Chief Joseph, Nez Perce tribe, Surrender Speech delivered 5 October 1877, Bears Paw Mountains, Montana

Morning blinding flash of the obvious: I will fight no more forever. -- Chief Joseph ... BFO: I shall seek forever more.

Those six words, I will fight no more forever, are with me this morning giving me cause to suspect the thought comes to me when my inside trepidation is fighting a dreaded upcoming.

My dread is the bane giving birth to the gift, I shall seek forever more.

There...I needed that clearer understanding...free-floating anxiety creates deeper free-floating anxiety...peace comes with acceptance of anxiety. 

I will fight no more forever does not mean that now I will live worry-free. No...I'll just not need to live in dread of life as it comes calling. An old lesson refurbished actually.

God loves me...us...so much!

Thank you.

THROUGH DEFEAT, SPIRITUAL VICTORY

Blinding flash of the obvious: Spiritual victory comes via material defeat.

It was early in my spiritual growth that I first heard unto acceptance that I am the source of all my woes. I was really pleased to realize that the Father within must be the source of all my happy, too.  

Ah, the beginning of my resistance being turned around...righted, in a word. 

That's the Tell...when God is doing our thinking for us, there is little to no resistance on our part. When our self-determined objective is first in line, crash and burn lifts its serpent's head.

There it is...the proof that spiritual victory comes via material defeat. The serpent's head becomes the detour sign for us to make a mental U-bie...turn around, away from self toward Self. 

Overcoming our material objectives transmutes them, and they become our spiritual victories...God's will, God's way.

Thank you.

THE TELL...SHARING OUR FEAR INVITES LOVE

We must form squads of love and make a path through together … no matter how fearsome the mob. Only a community—even one that goes unnoticed in the crowd—the band that refuses to join the rabble—can keep us from going completely over the edge. -- Diana Butler Bass 

The new realization, the spiritual insight, is that the fearsome mob is our fear and by grace for our benefit...it got birthed with the blinding flash that nothing turns us to God faster than fear.

This rough and rugged road paved with anxiety that we are walking today is our blessing. I know this from my eyebrows up...as my heart pounds and my stomach churns. 

There...that is the Soul's call for company! Tell a friend...share the "benefit"...invite the "squads of love" that is at our elbow, sitting on our shoulder, clinging to us body and soul. That's where the love of God lives...with us, within us, without us. 

We must needs open our self to that love.  If it looks like a mudpie to us, it is a miracle aborning to God. Our opening to it is the Tell.

Paraphrasing Thaddeus Golas: We must go beyond reason to love...to the Tell, to God.

Thank you.