Our responsibility to society and to our children

Romans 12 is my favorite scripture currently. Yesterday morning I spent some time processing through it and making connections because I felt that the message in it is so powerful. It speaks to me because of my current career situation, but I also believe that it has a bigger, more powerful message to speak to the people of every developed country.

The chapter speaks specifically about responsibility toward society. Paul is giving God's command as to how our society should piece together and operate. How no member of any society is any better and how we should all be working together for the common good. 

God has given each person a gift, or maybe a few gifts. Because this is a God given gift, he expects us to use the gift to glorify him. 

So right away I see a HUGE problem with the way I experience life. If I'm reading this scripture correctly, some people will be born to be teachers. Some protectors. Some givers. Some people will be born with a talent to lead or write or sing or create beautiful works of art. Some will be born with an innate ability to build or calculate or discover. God has created just enough people to do the right amount of work according to their God-given talent, and once a person discovers what that ability or talent is and can begin using it to glorify him - alignment and ultimate bliss becomes the norm.

If this is the case, how did our education system get so screwed up? How are we not looking into the Bible to realize that even two thousand years ago Paul was telling us that all men are not necessarily created "equal". We are created equal in God's eyes and are all loved unconditionally - but we are all vastly different, and therefore we need to experience life differently - including how we are educated. What we need to have is a system that helps us to discover our God-given talents and abilities and then helps us to develop them.

Instead what we have is a system that is broken and has been broken for hundreds of years. A system where we make an attempt to fit billions of square pegs into round holes for the sake of "equality", "opportunity", and "citizenry". I call Bull.

We have broken billions of people because we have tried to undo God's plan for them.

Years ago I read Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsh. I cannot, for the life of me, find my copy of that book, but I recall a question that God answered about humanity and his plan for how we should live, and God specifically speaks about how he envisions life to be. He, again, speaks of people's true talents and abilities as the way they should be living life. That if each of us used what God gave us first, the puzzle would piece together, and there would be enough people doing each and every job that we would never be without.

But instead we start teaching our 3-year-olds how to read by memorizing words and pictures so that they can "get a head start" on the others. We reward those who excel at reading, writing, and math with art, music, recess, and social time while those square pegs get their talent areas taken away so they can develop in areas they have no business developing because they are not cognitively ready like their peers are.

All children are not created equal. They are all beautiful and important in the eyes of God, but listen to me when I tell you that we have created a society that has destroyed itself because we have forgotten that we have claimed to have been created by the grace of God. If God's grace gave us this promised land, then why have we used man's will, greed, and need for power to destroy it and the people who populate it? Every. Single. One.

As an adult I chose my livelihood partly on what I wanted to do, but when it came down to it - money, benefits, outlook, and chance of advancement were my ultimate goals. And I began to crash about fifteen years into it. 

What did you love as a child? What passions did you have? What were you really good at? How do those things weave into your life today? If they don't, think again about where you should be. Is this really your place, or does God have a different plan for you? I know I've been praying for guidance and will continue to pray as the beauty of my life finally begins to unfold. 

Perhaps you should too. For what better model for your children than to allow them to see you be what God has created you to be! Namaste.

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.

On giving thanks

Job was a man whose situation makes me shudder. He lost everything except his own life and the choices he made on how to live it, and God rewarded him greatly for his faith. I'm not sure that, if put in the same position, I'd be quite as honorable. What was the key to his ability to live through the tragedy of losing his home, possessions, and family? How did he manage to live through and come out onto the other side?

Many Christians say faith is the key. Have faith that God will deliver you. And yet tragedy continues to throw good and faithful Christians to the wolves. Situations don't seem to change with prayer. Then how do some remain faithful? This is where non-believers can point a finger at believers and say, "Where is your God now? You're a good person and you prayed for this to happen. Why does he choose to answer some prayers and not others?" In these times of tragegy, some Christians just lose faith.

Well, actually there's an answer to this.

God answers every aligned prayer.

Every. One.

Notice the extra word - aligned. In other words, if your intentions are pure, and you've chosen to follow His path, you only need to ask Him how to proceed, and He will guide you to make the choices necessary to make it happen. Prayers that stem from despair, anxiety, anger, greed, suspicion, and any other emotion stemming from fear keep you from lining up with what He has in store for you, and those prayers cannot be answered. That's not the way God operates. As I read once in the book Breathing Underwater, God is all about providing for our needs but not necessarily our wants. And our needs are up to His discretion. Are we lined up with his will for our lives? If so - watch the prayers get answered!

So what does this have to do with giving thanks? One thing I have learned through my divorce is that God allows us free will and the ability to learn. He provides us with the tools to become closer to him, and it is our choice as to how we use those tools. Some people walk away from Him. Some pay little or no attention to the Divine and try to fix things or heal alone. Some draw nearer. Those of us who have drawn nearer start to understand that every situation - significant or not - is a situation from which we can learn. Each learning experience brings with it a new set of questions and "ah-ha" moments if we would just allow those moments to happen.

Staying present and watching each situation with curiosity and an expectation to learn means that we start to learn and change at a quicker pace. We begin to realize that God grants our needs before we even know we need them, and this is where gratitude comes.

I've heard dozens of moms say that they wish their kids were more grateful. More appreciative. As a grown-up, I, myself have preached the "be grateful for what you have" speech a multitude of times. But we are not simply talking about the "you should be grateful for that food on your plate because there are kids in other parts of the world who don't have food to eat" idea. We are talking about the ability to learn and grow. When adversity hits, this is the capacity to thank the Almighty for the message and the opportunity to change, discover, and become new.

This is a difficult concept to teach our youngsters but not an impossible one. It's a matter of pointing out learning opportunities when adversity stands in our paths and the paths of our kiddos. Of saying thankful prayers out loud in front of them and then pointing out how we grew at the end.

That being said, I am truly grateful for the situations that I have found myself in over the last forty-two years. Although I spent a majority of my life ignoring Jesus and his soothing forgiveness, once I found my way back, the lessons I should have learned during some very difficult times of my life started to flood over me and the metamorphosis has been overwhelming! Events over the last year have come together and worked together in a seamless pattern of healing and change. And the new me is emerging.

I cannot express how truly joyful I am when I think of all that I've learned about myself and the woman I'm becoming. Is this what kept Job so close to God? I cannot imagine what else could have held him steadfast on his journey, regardless of what he lost. So this year, my Thanksgiving stems from gratitude for forgiveness and unconditional love, for friends who stand by me in my ugliest times, and those who check on me while I'm becoming aware of myself and expanding. I am truly the luckiest woman alive.

Namaste.

The message in 1 Corinthians 13

1 Corinthians 13. The love chapter of the Bible. It's what popped up on my devotional book today. Verse 12, to be exact. Interestingly, just yesterday I had a conversation with a friend about the mistake of taking single verses out of context and trying to make them work in your life - of using the Bible to justify your actions, choices, or thoughts. So today I was like Let me just read this whole chapter.

I'm so glad that I did...

As a master manipulator, motivation behind behavior has always been a key factor in how I chose to act. Even the way I said or wrote things was a way to get what I wanted. It's so embarrassing to admit this, but what good would it do to keep it a secret? I'm glad I tell people upfront now. I want them to know who I was and who I am now. I'm monitoring myself minute by minute now because I choose a new route. No way I could do this on my own, which is why I've chosen Christ's path instead of the main road I didn't even realize I had been taking for forty-two years. 

But how? you ask. Oh trust me when I say this has been a lengthy and painful discovery and an even more lengthy and energy-expending labor to monitor. We are talking minute-by-minute monitoring, my friends. The way it must be done is by checking my motivation in everything. And when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING.

Me picking out clothes:
Me: I think I'm going to wear these yoga pants today with this tee shirt.
Holy Spirit: Why?
Me: Really? They're yoga pants, for Pete's sake.
Holy Spirit: Why?
Me: Ugh. Fine. Because they're comfortable and I only have three pair of pants that fit.

Holy Spirit: That checks out. Carry on.  

What does this have to do with 1 Corinthians 13? As I read this morning, my mouth dropped open as I read the very first verse.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become as a sounding brass or a clanging symbol. 

 Now many interpret this verse as a report on the importance of love. Love is so important. Without it most things just sound like things, but with love there is meaning and beauty in everything. But after reading the chapter and relating it to my life, I feel like the Holy Spirit has charged me to evaluate everything I say and do and measure it on a love meter. Many who have done any life reevaluation know that there are two widely accepted emotions from which all other emotions stem: fear and love. God's wish for us is to approach everything with his eyes. Peer through his lenses of love. Then and only then should you choose your next action, word, or thought.

So often we react to somebody or something without even considering why or where our motivation stems. We just react. Much of what we do is instinctive. I can recall times during my teaching career that I couldn't remember half the day at the end of the day because I had been on autopilot. I was out, and yet the lives of hundreds of teenagers rested in my hands daily. Notice how I said considering where OUR motivation stems. There is nothing you can do about the motivation of anyone else, and so focusing our attention on another's motivation is a waste of energy.

I've been given gifts, including the gift of guidance. I revel in the fact that my piano teaching ability goes way beyond my ability to actually play the piano. And so I teach. But daily I'm being tapped on the shoulder, and there's the Holy Spirit standing there with an eyebrow raised asking me that same irritating question - Why? Why do I teach? Do I teach out of fear that I won't make enough money to support myself and my babies? Or do I teach because I love my job, my students, music, and my babies enough to sit at that piano five plus hours a day and teach? And if it is solely fear-driven, how can I change my choice so that it begins to focus on the love aspect of it and not whether the next student remembers to bring me a check?

It makes a HUGE difference, friends.You can do the same thing for a hundred different reasons, and the results will not be the same. The energy you put into anything will inevitably cause the energy behind the action to produce results that - wait for it - have the same energy! True story! "Garbage in, garbage out", as they say. Love in, love out.

So how can you really make this work? Can one really approach scrubbing toilets or inputting data at work with love? Sure we can! It's more difficult to do that than it is to approach snuggling with a child on a couch or going on a date, but it is possible. The trick is to remember WHY we do these things and to search for Christ in everything. View things from his lenses. Pray constantly that He will provide you with the ability to see him in even the monotonous or terrible tasks. Honestly, the Lord has allowed me to see lessons in things that I've done this year that I had never even CONSIDERED. See things through curious eyes if you can't find the love. What comes next? How will God use this to teach me to grow?

When you think about each and every task as a growth experience or a learning experience, something starts to shift, and before you know it - even those tasks seem filled with a little more love. Namaste.

Values vs. Goals

When I first started counseling in October of 2015, I was a hot, angry mess. I'm not an angry, hot mess anymore, but I am still in counseling - still working on me because I know there's work to be done. Frankly, I'm not sure if I'll ever stop going.

This week Krysten and I started processing core values. She said something this week that kind of made me stop and really think. I think I must have been using the words goals and values interchangeably because she addressed that exact topic with a flat-out definition of each that made me pause and think.

She basically said that our goals are what we strive for - like there's an end point to most of them. Our values are what we hold dearest - they are what drives our goals sometimes, but often in our crazy, fast-paced society, our goals overshadow our values and sometimes even contradict them. We will sometimes allow society to dictate what our goals should be and sometimes our values bend to accommodate those goals. A clear boundary violation.

And that is where unhappiness sets in. When you don't live up to your own core values, you are not aligned with yourself, with God, with the Universe. You're out of line.

And  . . .

You are unhappy. Unable to express the unhappiness because you created this grand life for yourself and EVERYBODY thinks you have a fantastic life. On the outside you have a wonderful husband and marriage, two fantastic children, a fancy car, home, a dog, hobbies, a successful career where you are building prestige and respect in the field you've chosen, and Disney vacations every year. You've got it made.

You also have two upside-down mortgages, $60,000 in student loans, $30,000 in credit card debt and $30,000 in other loans taken off retirement funds. You have stuff. Lots of stuff. You have stress. Medical bills. You have hidden addictions and unhealthy behaviors because nobody can handle it, and nobody can address it. You have anger and resentment. You have control issues. You  have miscommunication. You have non-communication. You have a hot mess.

You have divorce.

I'm not even sure what I wanted out of life. I thought I did, but I never, ever stopped to evaluate where my drive came from or what I truly valued at my core.

And now its time for me to get in touch with those core values because I refuse to have my life fall apart like this again. Even during the divorce process I stop to evaluate WHY I do what I do. Recently there was a disagreement to which I had to really ask myself WHY I wanted to stand my ground on an issue. What was my true motivation behind what I was asking? Through prayer and processing of this blog, I'm still asking God for wisdom in how to handle the situation. I refuse to fall back into the trap of allowing my ego to drive my decisions. If my reasons for doing ANYTHING are based on anything but love, I know I'm out of line and need to figure out a different course of action.

As I've read multiple times, there are two basic emotions: love and fear. My entire life has been run on fear-based decisions. No more. I choose love. And I choose love for not just me - but for my children and for my future as well.

Namaste.