I’ve written before about seeing my life
I’ve written before about seeing my life as an airplane in which God is the pilot of the airplane and I am the co-pilot. There is a lot of back-and-forth between us as I surrender to the direction God has set and as I comment on what is happening in my life. My part in the ongoing dialogue is as important as listening to God’s input into my life. If I’m not telling God about my thoughts and feelings about things and people, then I am not allowing my own awareness to embrace them. Whether they are positive or negative thoughts and emotions, it’s in offering them to God that they get released.
Our part in this two-way relationship consists of sharing our hopes and dreams and our fears and negativity, our resistance and pain, if it is to become co-creative. The more of the positive and the negative we share with God, while saying “yes!” to what God offers, the more we are moving towards our own wholeness and deeper into the Life of the Spirit, the life lived in, with and for God. Think of the deep desires of our heart and soul as being implanted at our creation, and now in co-creating with God, he is helping us realize those very things that give our lives meaning and purpose, fulfillment and joy.
The negatives come up so easily in us—our resistances, our fears, our angers. After all we live in a world of negativity. The Psalmists are a good guide to voicing our angers and fears to God. “Why are my enemies doing so well, when I am languishing here?” is a common plea in the Psalms. In fact the Psalms give us permission to voice the whole range of negativity towards God, at God even, knowing that unless we share the negativity with God there is no way for the Spirit to transform us. If we try to hide our negativity from God, if we don’t feel permission from him to be resistant, we are operating under the wrong version of the kingdom. We are keeping up the walls between us and the Divine. God is quick to forgive and to love. She knows us so well that our resistance is hardly a surprise. So share your negativity, angers and fears, open the gates of negativity and let the Spirit transform them.
Until we can fully express our own resistance, until we bring it out into the full light of day, until we embrace the resistance, it remains a hidden barrier to a deeper relationship with God. So go ahead, tell God how you really feel! It’s essential to your freedom and wholeness.
It’s often harder for us to accept and acknowledge our dreams and desires. Sometimes we’ve been taught not to desire anything, that desire is egocentric. Or we don’t feel we’ve achieved enough to deserve to dream. Or dreams can contradict something in our lives that we feel obliged to hang on to. Often we are simply not in touch with the very things that would bring us joy and fulfillment. What God dreamed for us in our creation is buried deep in our souls and without a practice in our lives that allows us access to the soul material, the soul’s agenda, we are adrift from the very purpose of our life.
Once we are quiet enough to listen to God and to our own soul, the shy, deep soul-self is willing to test the waters with a suggestion or two about what we might really want. If we are willing to entertain the suggestion without rejecting it out of hand—“I couldn’t do that!” or “I’m not qualified!” or “I haven’t the time!”—if we let it roll across our tongues and our minds, and give it free rein to find a perch in our psyche and perhaps fertile ground from which it can grow into a full-fledged idea, and then a new direction, then we might just be on the right track to realizing our dreams. If the deep soul-self’s ideas are entertained and embraced, then it will speak a little louder and stronger the next time. And the next, until you are living from the soul’s agenda, the one implanted at your creation by God.
God speaks to us within ourselves, through the Word, through books and movies and what other people say, through our dreams, through nature. Where do you hear God’s voice calling you? How do you experience the Divine One? Look for resonance, a kind of call in what you hear or read. If there is resonance, then join God with your willingness to go where he leads. He does the transformative work; we have to be willing to go along for the ride.
It’s in the small steps that the larger purpose can be revealed. If we say yes to our soul’s agenda step by step, then we will come to where we want to be—expressing ourselves fully, living the Life of the Spirit.
Things to ponder over the weekend: If we use a scale of 1 to 100 with 100 representing complete surrender to God, where would you place yourself on that scale? And if you’ve surrendered your life to God, what number on that scale would you assign to the joy in your life? To deep satisfaction with your work, family, God, avocation, etc.? To your experience of living in the kingdom?