While in a conversation today I was trying to encourage a friend to not be so caught up in trying to work things out in such familiar ways. The familiar voices that run in our minds most of the time have been shaped by things and people who most of the time are thinking like humans think...not like God thinks. I told him that a few years ago I took my daughter on a trip in hopes of saving her life and getting her life back on a healthier track and it turned out to be a trip that saved my life...well, actually awakened me to life. I never saw coming what happened.
It was also interesting for that story to come up today just being 6 days out from the three year anniversary of coming face to face with the unexpected. I mentioned to him it was just a bit shocking to come to understand that I had been mistaken in thinking I had built a good life on the Rock when in actuality it was sitting on sinking/shifting sand. This isn't about building a life in order to find some security and squeezing everyone into it, hoping God blesses it. It really is about losing such a life that will never be secure and in the process of having the clutter cleared and seeing for the first time the Secure One.
Some music from around that time also came to mind yesterday that is such a fitting reminder. It's been wonderful listening.
Remember how we chased it like shadows
Life was the ocean; we wanted to swim
Looking back now, it’s just how the path goes
They tell you it’s over; you never begin
We don’t give ourselves time - the way that we used to
To watch it all happen, unfolding in sighs
You’d think we were blind, the things we can see through
The things we look past when emboldened inside
CHORUS:
But it’s alright now, it’s alright
The ghosts of our glories are gray-bearded guides
The sound of our sorrows has stirred us inside
(But) I think maybe I’ve never felt more alive
I asked you just once if you thought we could be found
You never did tell me; but I think I know now
Whatever ship comes, by dark sea or gray cloud
As long as the well’s deep, we make it somehow
CHORUS
I don’t know how to make peace or find it
We’re most of us stories we’re scared to explain
But what if there’s sound, somewhere caught behind this
A song we can sing while we’re lying awake
It was also interesting for that story to come up today just being 6 days out from the three year anniversary of coming face to face with the unexpected. I mentioned to him it was just a bit shocking to come to understand that I had been mistaken in thinking I had built a good life on the Rock when in actuality it was sitting on sinking/shifting sand. This isn't about building a life in order to find some security and squeezing everyone into it, hoping God blesses it. It really is about losing such a life that will never be secure and in the process of having the clutter cleared and seeing for the first time the Secure One.
Some music from around that time also came to mind yesterday that is such a fitting reminder. It's been wonderful listening.
Remember how we chased it like shadows
Life was the ocean; we wanted to swim
Looking back now, it’s just how the path goes
They tell you it’s over; you never begin
We don’t give ourselves time - the way that we used to
To watch it all happen, unfolding in sighs
You’d think we were blind, the things we can see through
The things we look past when emboldened inside
CHORUS:
But it’s alright now, it’s alright
The ghosts of our glories are gray-bearded guides
The sound of our sorrows has stirred us inside
(But) I think maybe I’ve never felt more alive
I asked you just once if you thought we could be found
You never did tell me; but I think I know now
Whatever ship comes, by dark sea or gray cloud
As long as the well’s deep, we make it somehow
CHORUS
I don’t know how to make peace or find it
We’re most of us stories we’re scared to explain
But what if there’s sound, somewhere caught behind this
A song we can sing while we’re lying awake
5 comments:
Happy anniversary :D
Question: how much of living this life comes down to how much we "see", as opposed to temperament or bad stuff that's happening in our lives? I would like your take on it. I mean, regarding what happened with your daughters, your change hasn't come from changing your personality, has it? It's come from you seeing differently.
Because my suspection is that it is 90% to do with seeing. We think we see life as it is. But we see life as we choose to see it, in some ways, in habits we have formed in seeing. This is some of what I have mulling around in my head. I would love your take on it :)
Sue, I do think it is about seeing. What has been so much on my mind from the beginning of these changes is how most of my life was lived in illusions...perceptions of how I perceived things to be or assumed they should be.
One such illusion was tied up in success through the use of power/my own ability. The success paradigm is a lie and it keeps us from simply being...which to me simply speaks of resting.
It's amazing how coming to a place of being able to rest in Father gives us the ability to acknowledge that we "don't know" and it seems to me, that acknowledgement was the beginning of being able to look at what is happening around me at all times critically and then responding to others in love instead of reacting to everything and everyone based upon how I had been shaped previously by the illusions...how I thought things "should" be. It was a way of actually attempting to play God by trying to manipulate reality to be what I wanted it to be. If that makes sense?
Totally makes sense. Good description!
In a phone conversation with Wayne on election day I was telling him how wonderful felt to see all people again as just people. People I could love and engage with in hopes of helping them see something (the illusions/false perceptions)that maybe they had never seen before or ever even considered. It was the first presidential election that I wasn't blinded by the political illusion and political ideologies. With that out of the way I saw no one as being a "good" or a "bad" representative of "right" I saw people doing what they thought was best based upon their perception of things. Trying to identify "good" and "evil" just didn't seem important anymore. Loving the one in front of me seemed to be what Father was doing and was inviting me to do also.
Isn't it about people being set free of the bondage created by the lies?
Yes, and I think it's called loving your enemies, whatever form that takes. How humiliating for people to discover how much their enemies have to teach them :)
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