Being Known

Connection, God 0

When you keep your relationship with God exclusively fact-based and rational, it’s easy to make judgments about others and yourself. Such judgments reduce your anxiety and increase your sense of safety and protection. However, this way of being also has the curious effect of increasing the isolation you feel, both from others and within your own mind.

If you allow yourself to be known by God, you invite a different and frankly more terrifying experience. You are now in a position of vulnerability. If you permit others to know you, they can make their own assessment of your worth. They can react to you. You give them power to be affected by you and in so doing to affect you. You grant them the option to love you or to reject you. In essence, you must — must — trust another with yourself.

However, I will argue that it is only through this process of being known that you come to know yourself and learn how to know others. There is no other way. To be known is to be pursued, examined, and shaken. To be known is to be loved and to have hopes and even demands placed on you. It is to risk, not only the furniture in your home being rearranged, but your floor plans being rewritten, your walls being demolished and reconstructed. To be known means that you allow your shame and guilt to be exposed — in order for them to be healed.

— Curt Thompson, MD, Anatomy of the Soul, p. 23

The Way Home

Faith, God, Growth, Guidance 0

Religion is simply the way home to the Father. Because of our unchildlikeness, the true way is difficult enough — uphill, steep, but there is fresh life with every surmounted height, a purer air gained, more life for more climbing. But the path that is not the true one is not therefore an easy one. Uphill work is hard walking, but through a bog is worse.

— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 22

Restful Thankfulness

Acceptance, Faith, God, Gratitude, Letting Go 0

When we rest in God, we begin to have a different experience of God. It becomes less about our striving and more about our receiving. God is the great giver, and too often we are too busy and too self-driven to be able to receive. We ask for help, but then we hurry blindly on, and when our help arrives, we do not pause to acknowledge its source, we just grab for it and keep on moving. “God help me” we pray, but when God does, we are often too preoccupied to say “Thank you.”

A friend of mine is worried about money. She is afraid of ending up out on the street. Each month she worries about where her rent money will come from. Each month her rent money does come. God opens some new door to her, and the flow enters where least expected. My friend does not thank God for this continued support. She is focused, always, on her notion that the support will soon stop. In this way, there is no way that God can ever do enough for her. No matter what miracles occur, she always wants more. Wanting more, she is blind to the fact that what she has been given time and time again is enough. We do not want enough. We want more.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 90-91

God’s Generosity

God, Gratitude, Joy 0

We cannot see the benevolence of God’s will for us because we do not expect benevolence. We expect God’s will for us to be niggardly. We so often see God as a miser, doling out the least possible benefit just to keep us quiet. We do not expect God to be generous. We do not expect God to fill our cup to overflowing. And yet, when we begin to work with prayers of gratitude, this is often the experience that we get: abundance. It is by counting our blessings that we begin to be able to see our blessings. It is by seeing our blessings that we begin to fathom the possibility that God could actually intend for there to be more of them. Gratitude gives us a glimpse of God’s good intentions.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 89

Real Belief

Faith, God, Obedience 0

Is Christianity a system of articles of belief? Never. It would be better for a man to hold the most obnoxious untruths, opinions the most irreverent, if at the same time he lived in the faith of the Son of God, that is trusted in God as the Son of God trusted in him, than for him to hold every formula of belief perfectly true, and yet know nothing of a daily life and walk with God. The one, holding doctrines of devils, is yet a child of God. The other, holding doctrines of Christ is of the world — yes, of the devil.

To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by. If a man lives by the love of God, and obedience to God’s law, as far as he has recognized it, then whatever wrong opinions the man holds are outside of him. They are not true, and they cannot really be inside any good man. At the same time, no matter how many correct opinions another man holds, if he does not order his life by the law of God’s love, he is not a child of God. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.

— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 20

True Justice

God 0

A just man is one who cares, and tries, and always tries, to give fair play to everyone in everything. When we speak of the justice of God, let us see that we do indeed mean justice! Punishment of the guilty may be involved in justice, but it does not constitute the justice of God one atom more than it would constitute the justice of a man.

— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 197

Nothing Random

Acceptance, Faith, God, Gratitude, Growth, Guidance, Letting Go 0

Ours is an abundant world, but it seldom seems that way when we are demanding more. When we say “Thy will, not mine,” we are saying, “This is enough,” and in saying that, we may actually have that experience. This is an experience of acceptance, and acceptance is usually the sticking point when it comes to our will versus God’s. We would accept God’s will for us if we could just see where it was going. If God would just give us a glimpse of what we were being prepared for, then we would go along with God’s preparations. If we are all indeed being brought along like fighters, then there is nothing random in what we are given. We are given just what we need at all times to further our spiritual growth, fund our spiritual development.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 89

Collaborators

God, Growth, Life 0

The idea that God can be invited to co-create a life with us gives us a vested interest in the life we are making. We are not the victim any longer. On the other hand, we are not the sole creator. We are the collaborator. We are involved with God in a partnership, and this is where it gets interesting.

If God’s will and our will are not at opposite ends of the table, they may be said to be in communication with each other. We may find, as we pray, that what we pray for becomes more and more what we have. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which came first, God’s will for us or our will to do God’s will? We are endowed with freedom, and it is our perfect right to use that freedom to pursue an understanding of God’s will for us. That is to say, we can entrain our own will to a higher will and in so doing experience more freedom, not less.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 87

Smelling Salts

God 0

Christianity, however, teaches that God hates the suffering and oppression of this material world so much, he was willing to get involved in it and to fight against it. Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.

— Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p. 113