"To the prayers then."

H,

The morning blues is constant nowadays. It just occurred to me that this early morning awakenings are a good opportunity to pray. I forget, in my anti-everything, that this helps with the blues.

Hmmm.

Oh well, to the prayers then.

Amen.

"Strenght"

H,

On mondays we have to find strength from somewhere. The week looms heavy and all the inspirational quotes and messages we receive do not speak to the individual challenges and doubts we scrap with during the week. After all that mountain talk, there is still the flatland to work on and work out. There is never enough inspiration for the hours and the hours.

I am learning to look up more now. I should look up all the time but this is a lifelong habit and i am just forming it slowly over close to four decades of being. It is not an easy skill. This present iteration of life keeps demanding immediacy, keeps asking for all the answers today and keeps telling us we need to show our handiwork as quickly as we can. There is a constant push to be more current in our doing than in our being.

Yet, we are not here for our doing but for our being. God gives strength for us to be a certain sort of character and not just to do things we think are important.'Being' over 'doing' is not about inertia. In truth, we only get the strength to do the right thing from our position of grace in being the right person in God.

"The time is always now."

H,

We keep going back to the idea of waiting on God, on waiting for His ultimate will and way to be fulfilled and for the glory to somehow show we are not the crackpots that we appear to be. That validation may never come this side of eternity. We might be crackpots for life.

Yet, it was and never will be about that sort of validation. We are not here to be proved right. It is not about earthly elevation. No milestone here can cut to the heart of the very human struggle with meaning. Even if all we want and need to happen does happen, it will not resolve as much as we think it will.

There is no other feeling to get to, no other place to be and no greater self to reveal to a waiting public. There are no garlands for our dishonorable desires to get ahead of the pack and no provision that will ever make us think we are good enough.

The time to be full is always now. Our hearts are in the scope of heaven. We can access that peace, that inner reserve of joy and love and faith at anytime. The glory inside will never match the buildings outside. The ennui of daily living speaks to our hearts of a greater space for mind and spirit. The body is such a distant third. Now is the time for our salvation. Now, is always the time to be filled up in God.

"Back to the basic"

H,

In the recent upheavals that have taken place all around us, i am more at peace than i have ever been about the storms that may come. It is a note from experience, a true and tested response to the hills and valleys that characterize our pilgrimage up this holy mountain. We have never had a straightforward ascent. Let me put that in clearer terms: we cannot see all of the road so it seems winding to us.

It is probably the straightest line in the universe even though it does not feel that way. We rage against the things we do not anticipate but the truth is, these things are not in the way, they are part of the way. We are on a defined road to something grand. There is no doubt about this. We must always remember that our journey is curved by the divine hands and creator of everything we call life. We will not slip into the abyss. The glory road is tested and true.

And when we are faced with these powerful and honest waves of fear and doubt, we must not deny it or pretend there is nothing there. Pain is pain and fear is fear. We believe in things above the fear and doubt and present pain but we are in present disarray. Let us remember, now more than ever, the simple call, the most basic line of our faith and how to follow.

The lord is my shepherd...

“That the fear may be good, that it only means you care about the outcome”

H,

It is well storied, at least to me, this constant battle with anxiety and dread. Once, it was all in stutters and now it is spread evenly across all my engagements with life and living. It is not easy to speak, to ask, to talk on the phone or to be assertive in a room where I know I should speak up or make a contribution.

I used to resent this shadow. I used to hate how it felt; that knot in the stomach and that doubt in the mind. I used to hate myself for it and remonstrate with my inner state in the foulest language. It used to be the greatest effort to do anything and leave me completely drained of all my energy and all of myself.

I know a lot of people feel like this. The world is not set up to make you feel validated or powerful or significant or seen.

I know a lot of people feel like this. And that was the start of the breakthrough for me. The dark always seeks to isolate and define the problem in the most peculiar terms. It makes it seem like you are a sore thumb upon the tapestry of time and space. You may be unique, but you are not exceptional to the human experience. Neither are you inferior to it.

I do not know if it was the soft tones of Elyon directly, a lifetime of those, or some of his vessels, including my mother reading out one of the letters to Timothy “Spirit of courage and a sound mind”, but something finally broke through. It flattened the higher levels of self-hate and despair and it said to the individuals moments: “this fear you feel is good. It just means you care. Now, be calm and do the thing you care about.”

I cannot tell you the watershed this was. To understand your inner state, to know this is what that means and to do things in spite of the nagging and rising terror that only tells you how much you cannot do.

We do not live without the sound and fury of fear but in spite of it.

“Do not be afraid of the hard”

H,

There is no escaping the hard bits of life. Some might argue that all of it is hard. That we are fighting gravity and learned nature and all the present darkness of the world. We must not sell a fantasy of ease when it will take all our belief to live in the light. We must be honest. It is not for the fainthearted.

But, of course, it is for that fragile heart. In relation to the high hopes and deep dreams of living right, all of us and all our hearts will fail. We are talking of applying eternal principles to temporal life. It is telling the human soul and body, attuned to survival and selfishness, to forget dread and fear and self interest to focus on things like kindness, bravery and people less fortunate than you are. The focus on others is the hardest discipline of the human heart.

It is a hardship we must embrace. There is no other way to slip into the divine. There is no higher calling. And it is impossible to do. It is not something we work out ourselves. We are given the opportunity through grace, faith and love to commune with eternity and let these things become our character. It is the light within before the light comes out.

We are learning to bring light to this hard plane. We will learn this, inch by inch, throughout our whole lives.

Amen.