The search for heaven . . .

I was in hell.

I have found heaven.

Heaven.

Where exactly is that place?

Several days ago I was reading in my devotional book Jesus Calling about heaven. At one point, Sarah Young, the author, writes:

"Your longing for heaven is good because it is an extension of your yearning for Me. The hope of heaven is meant to strengthen and encourage you, filling you with wondrous joy."

Not five minutes after reading that passage, my eight-year-old son came stumbling into the room, rubbing his eyes, and croaking a cute "Good morning, Mama" to me.  Our morning routine, be it when he gets up or when his daddy drops him off in the morning on his way to work, is for my "little" monkey to come into my room, grab a snuggly blanket, and climb into my lap so we can pray together and snuggle afterward. Once he tires of snuggling, he then starts saying the typical eight-year-old boy things like poop and fart and can I please please please watch a YouTube video about how to turn copper pennies into pure gold, but for a few minutes anyway - I'm in heaven.

It was at this moment a few days ago - after heaven faded and the bathroom words began - when I felt a stab of guilt as I realized that I really didn't want to go to heaven. That I kind of like my new life - the new me. For the first time IN my life I actually love ME, and I intend to do this for many more years. I'm sure heaven is completely awesome, but my snuggle time in the morning feels very close to what I believe heaven could be. And that's when I started to wonder . . .

Can we create heaven for ourselves right here on earth before our spirit and body separate? Did God say you HAVE to die before you can go to heaven? Maybe this death could be metaphoric - more like the death of the old self and birth of a brand new. So what did I do? I went online and researched what others believed. This is where things got really complicated...

Being a well-educated woman and a logical, most things that are brought to me need to be brought to me with a "how this works" label, clear directions, and black and white lines. I need proof of pretty much everything - including whether my children actually did brush their teeth this morning. Digging into other people's beliefs in heaven was a HUGE mistake.

Nothing was backed by providential evidence, in my opinion, but there's where my faith lags. The absolute need for solid, tangible proof. And yet, my faith in The Almighty is solid. Let me explain that part of my faith comes from the fact that I have experienced, first hand, the glory of God. I have wept in his presence, cold and alone, and felt the comfort that could only come from the Holy Spirit. Because of this, I will never veer from the path of the Lord again. No human could even come close to the compassion, forgiveness, love, and comfort that I have been gifted by the Divine. That evidence is tangible, in my opinion. He knew it is what I needed to come back to Him, and so he allowed me to wallow in my misery until I turned to him and felt that peace wash over me. Then, and only then, could I logically understand that God truly does exist AND that he loves me unconditionally - another strange phenomenon of which I was unfamiliar. Unconditional love.

Ironically last week I received my daily devotion email from the Center for Action and Contemplation - a Richard Rohr meditation. What was the subject? Heaven, of course. Rohr believes that heaven begins here on earth with our own connection to Christ. That we create our own capacity to give and receive love through our own God-given free will, and that that capacity is the doorway to heaven here on earth. That death is a mere extension of what we have created through the love of Christ here on earth.

In a conversation I had yesterday with my own sister-in-Christ and long-term friend, she listened to me talk about my thoughts on heaven, and she, too, expressed the need to believe that there was something more after death - that we can, indeed, begin to create heaven here for ourselves here, but that after death, that continues.

Rohr agrees with her. His view is that we will continue to live and grow, even after death. That our souls, if we permit, will grow infinitely closer to God, even after death. But it must start here on earth.

I'd been considering a second blog about prayer until this morning when I realized that my blog topics actually parallel. Debbie Macomber, fiction writer, wrote a book called Angels at the Table. In this book, the angels Surely, Goodness, Mercy, and Will were sent down to earth by Gabriel as prayer ambassadors to work on answering a prayer that had gone unanswered for about ten months. As they were working on divine guidance, Will, the apprentice angel, saw an unrelated incident that he wanted to fix because he saw another human suffering. His mentor angels stopped him. In confusion Will asked why he couldn't help the woman in distress.

Their response is that, as prayer ambassadors, they were only allowed to guide in answering prayers. This woman had clearly not asked for intervention. Will contemplated for a moment before asking his next question. "What if she asks too late?"

The angels' answer made so much sense to me. God delights in answering prayers of necessity. He wants us to ask - "Ask and you shall receive." I think it's kind of his way of making us responsible for ourselves and creating humans who don't just expect provision. But those who stay close to Him and ask for daily guidance will likely be veered off in a direction that remains close to Him. We realize early enough that we need to begin asking for guidance for things that may turn into potential disasters, and he can guide us in how to begin dealing with them. If things become too intense, He picks us up and holds us. Those who choose human-will on a daily basis may walk a path that gets further and further from Him. A last minute effort to save a situation with a prayer may be too late for Him to guide anyone through a tough situation. God creates miracles, but his first promise is to teach us and allow us free will. And, like a good parent, he allows us to suffer consequences so that we can learn.

Once the learning process begins, we begin to create our own heaven right here on earth. I created hell for myself and wallowed in that torment for years. Currently I believe I am in my own heaven, and I believe that it's okay to feel this way. My minute-by-minute "check in" with Jesus helps me to stay clearly attached and know that I will be provided with the guidance I need to complete tasks that I would have considered uncomfortable, awkward, painful, and just downright icky - all while maintaining my close walk with Him.

The day of my divorce I anticipated to be one of the most difficult days of my life. Did I cry? Yeah. The night before I slept horribly, but every time I woke up I prayed that God would hold me again, and He did. That morning I prayed nonstop throughout the entire proceeding. I prayed for wisdom to speak to the judge - and even though lies were spoken and my ex-husband's lawyer was mean, I maintained composure. I cried before it. I cried after it. And then I allowed the Holy Spirit to wash over me and allow me to feel Its presence. It took me a few days to shake myself off, but this had been a long time coming, and I feel better now. Believe it or not - I was still in heaven. My heaven. The one that I asked Jesus to create for me here on Earth. I grew. I learned. And healing has begun.

Namaste.

Who is God?

Something has been troubling me deeply about my walk with God, and I just need to get it out so I can process through. Currently I’m reading A Case for Faith, which is a great read if you haven’t read it. I haven’t finished it, and it’s taking me a long time to finish because I haven’t really made the time to sit down and read, but I’m asking Santa for a few more hours in the day and some time management advice, so maybe in January I’ll get that book finished up.

My faith is stronger than it has ever been. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a God and that Jesus died on the cross to save us all from an eternity in hell (whatever your definition of hell is). I can attest to the fact that once I confessed my brokenness and my need for the trinity to come hang with me, a peace has settled over me that I never thought I could ever be worthy of having. God is there. Real. I feel him every day.

But something has really been bugging me. I'm struggling with my logical side because logic tells me that there is no "man upstairs". That faith in God means that there is faith in a being that I can't even comprehend. That my definition of God today is not what my definition of who he was when I walked with him twenty-five years ago. Him . . . her  . . . ? 

I practiced mindfulness for ten years without totally comprehending what it meant to self-love. And nobody noticed. Of course I believed in God without a true comprehension of who God really was. Isn't that what faith is all about? Not for us logicals it's not. It's hard to have faith . . . and yet I watch my eight-year-old logical talk about evidence that does, indeed, prove over and over again that God, does in fact, exist. The faith of a child is a beautiful and wonderous thing. I wish I had it.

Who is God? It wasn't until recently, honestly, that I finally had a true understanding of how the Holy Spirit works. Why am I forty-two and just now understanding that my internal guide is the Holy Spirit speaking to me - that that Spirit lives inside of me  and speaks to me the way God does? I'm just now understanding that God sends his Holy Spirit to walk with me day and night and to take over my mind, my mouth, and my actions when I give my will over to it. 

I know who Jesus is. He is God's son, sent to earth to help God learn how being human can really suck sometimes and also to shed his blood and clean us up after we make a mess of our lives because we can't seem to give in to the Holy Spirit all the time. 

Well, this morning I was reading in Jesus Calling like I do every morning. Often, my devotion will remind me that I need to need God. That I cannot adult on my own - that I'm needy for the Lord to use his Holy Spirit to guide me. It's like God is the dispatcher, and the Holy Spirit is the policeman running to call after call in my head. But only if I call upon God first. Otherwise, he sits quietly.

This is circular, I know, but stay with me. God. Who is he? His spirit dwells within all of us, and yet he is all around us. The air we breathe, the sound of the birds, the breeze. He's here. Not sitting up in a throne in the sky. That's why we only have to whisper the name Yahweh and His spirit responds immediately with relief and eventually guidance.

I fell short of this today. How easily it can happen, honestly. I lost it on somebody I do not even know who was just trying to do her job at the cell phone company. I refused to stop and ask Got to dispatch. I can do this on my own, right? I ended up in tears after trying to reason with this woman who obviously wasn't budging on her stance, and I am still paying for a cell phone that I can't use. Nothing was accomplished except now I have a headache, my eyes are puffy, and I'm in a foul mood. 

But you know what? The Spirit told me to sit down and write. So that is what I am doing. I'm in tuned with His will now. I can feel it. It's no longer my will. It's His. His will for me is to step outside of my logical self and have faith that he truly exists. And tonight, faith is what I have. Namaste.

On leadership and boundaries

So there's a story in the book of Exodus about Moses. Moses was a pretty important guy, as we all probably know. He was given lots of responsibility by God to lead his people out of Egypt to a promised land, but he was so busy leading that he didn't have time to contemplate what good leaders should do.

I've had a lot of experience with different leaders - bosses per se. Some of these people gained my wholehearted respect, but most of them fell short of what I would expect a leader to be. Part of this, mind you, was my total lack of boundaries and backwards thinking on what my responsibilities are, but part of this was just a lack of knowledge of what it means to lead.

Leadership is not equivalent to micromanaging and/or taking responsibility for everything. In this respect, I even screwed up when I was working as a reading specialist. I felt like I had to have my hands in everything when it came to reading - partly because I was actually being evaluated on how well it went, but partly because I didn't trust anybody to do it the way I wanted it done. This is how a lot of leaders view things - in fact, this is the reason why many people go into leadership roles. They're unhappy with the way things are being run, and they think they can do a better job. OR they hate where they are so they look to supervise those roles, which makes NO sense, in my opinion. You don't like you're job because the leaders make you miserable so you're going to become a leader so you can make others miserable . . . ?

In Exodus, Jethro (Moses's father-in-law) noticed Moses growing weary because he was directing and helping so many of the Israelites. Jethro approached Moses with wisdom, telling Moses that he needed to choose leaders under him to be responsible for some of the lesser serious cases where direction was needed.  Moses would then be free to judge in only the most serious and severe cases, allowing him time to do other things or to rest when he needed it. Moses immediately organized and chose a hierarchy of men to provide this leadership. He trusted God to help him choose able men. And guess what... It worked!

 This can be applied to so many facets of my life. Yesterday a small group of my own little tribe and I started talking about ways to empower women. Sorry, men, you're important, but my calling has been to do things that will impact women in such a way that they no longer feel dependent on any one person. As I started talking to this small group, one woman who is an expert in the field of couponing said that her ultimate goal is to teach others how to use coupons to such an extent that others would notice and ask to learn. She wanted to spread the wealth, but she didn't necessarily want to be the one and only teacher. She wanted to teach us so that we could teach others and the skill would spread. This is her mission. Her ministry is to help others make the most of their money using coupons, and to do it for free. She didn't write a book or blog about it asking for a membership. She is trusting Jesus to provide her with time and money so that she would have time to help others.

I love this. It reminds me of the Alcoholics Anonymous program. These are leaders. Those who spread the word through others. Those who trust that the Lord will provide them with followers who will do their teaching justice.

I want to be this way. I want to trust in God so much that I can spend my time helping others but to teach others to help each other. This is my dream. To empower people to be good people. People that God would be proud to say This is my child. I'm absolutely positive that God was proud of Moses, but I'm sure that God didn't want Moses to work his fingers to the bone. And so he sent Jethro to speak to Moses about boundaries. Thankfully Moses had the sense to listen to his father-in-law. Because of this, his people grew stronger. Namaste.