Realizing
A new day dawns. No matter what has gone before, there is a promise in the dawning and a rhythm that we depend on day after day after day. Each dawn holds all the promise of the first day of creation, a new chance, new life, life seeking the best of life itself.
The Holy Spirit brings us the dawn that we may not rest on our laurels and slough off any challenges to grow in love. What is the Spirit trying to birth in you? What is dying off, no longer needed? Are you open to new ideas or ways of living? At the most mundane level are you open to taking a new way home without rational reason, just because it seems like the right time to do it? Do you entertain new ideas, turning them over in your mind to see how it fits in with what you are doing or not? Do you stay open to a person who takes you outside your comfort zone—someone who is ill or dying, a homeless person, or one who lives in the margins in our society? Are you open to learning from them? Are you always seeking the comfortable place to be? Or do you venture into a new arena if you are drawn there?
These questions are pertinent because these are the kind of challenges that God puts before us. How we deal with them depends upon our attendance upon God’s will, our openness to His presence, and our willingness to embrace what comes into our lives, welcome or not. God is always trying to birth in us our full potential, what we were created to be. Realizing that potential is each person’s task, but it can’t be done without the initiative and will of the Lord. Our willingness, our love and our faithfulness to His will are the requirements for entering into the deeper, transformative process of making real, of realizing, the fullness of who we were created to be.
Realizing implies much more than just knowing, it’s knowing and awareness plus the evidence of the senses and of the body, mixing in some wisdom, too. In addition there is a coming into being, a dawning of some new sensibility from a coming together of all our available knowing—from the physical, mental, emotional, and the soul.
Realizing is a process, an unfolding, a fulfilling of all that we are. There is no way that we can accomplish this on our own, even if we were to follow all our inner yearnings. The key to the process lies in the mind of God who conceives of things in their entirety, who has already dreamed what He wants from us, and who we are to be. Our little minds cannot see the whole or what the next step should be or manage the process. That is the job of the Holy Spirit who guides us every step of the way to the fulfillment of God’s vision. For us the process is to stay open to the urgings of the Spirit, to be faithful as listener and lover, and to be willing to go with the Spirit wherever He leads. He takes us from the dawn to new life.