Asking to be Surprised

God, Growth, Life, Waiting 0

I have a good friend who says to me that we tend to think we can second-guess God. We say, “God’s will will be A, B, or C — only to have the answer be God’s will is H, heliotrope, which never occurred to me.”

When we believe in God and put our faith in God, we are asking to be surprised. God is all-powerful and works on our life from all corners. We may think “Now is the time to focus on my career,” only to find that God has decided “Now is the time for me to find a fulfilling personal relationship.” We may decide “Now is the time for me to find a personal relationship,” only to discover that God has decided to stabilize our career. God’s version of what is good for us is far more far-seeing than our own. We can seek to cooperate with God, but we do well not to argue too hard with God’s sense of timing.

Few things create more misery than a fight with God about the seasons of our life. When we hold out, stubbornly insisting on a certain blessing that we feel God is withholding, we miss the many blessings that God is in the process of bestowing. When we are saying, “I want this now,” we miss that that may be coming to us instead. We may be asking God for a romantic relationship in a period when God is focused on building up our grid of nonromantic friendships. We may be yearning for a special someone to make us feel more special while God is working on giving us that feeling for ourselves, independent of our romantic status. We may be asking God, demanding of God, that we be given someone to make us feel less lonely when God is in the process of teaching us how to be comfortable on our own.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 21-22

The Silver Lining

God, Growth, Trials, Trust 0

So many of our catastrophes never come to pass. We project disaster and we do not allow for the working out of solutions that will happen as the days tick forward. We think that the worst will happen, only to find out, living through it, that what happens actually may be far closer to the best.

What I am talking about here is the silver lining. We may get tired of trying to look for one, but the truth is that one is always there. Inside every adversity lies opportunity. Take the dicey matter of finances. We always think that what we want is more money, when what we may really want is a gut-level assurance that God will provide — and this is something that often comes to us not in periods of abundance but in times of shortfall. It is when we do not know where the rent money is coming from that we notice the “miracle” that puts the cash into our hands. This is not to say that we need to manufacture misery in order for God to rescue us, merely to say that when we are rescued, we have a tendency to know the face of our rescuer and that face is God.

It is during hard times that we come to rely on God and that is a reliance that we can encourage in ourselves at all times. We do not need to be broke to ask God to help us with our money. Consider the flow of the natural world. Supply comes just where it is needed. We can ask God to be for us such a source of supply. We can ask God to make us attuned to our financial seasons, to cue us when we are free to spend and when we should curtail our spending. We can ask God to take away our fear of financial insecurity and to direct us as to where, from what corner, our prosperity might best come from.

We live in an abundant universe. Our share of that abundance comes to us as we rely upon God. Whenever we make our employer into our source — in other words, when we make our employer into God — we enter a period of fear, for our reliance is not squarely where it belongs. We are intended to rely upon God. God intends us good, and we are tutored by God daily in how that good can come to us. God moves in mysterious ways, but his ways become less mysterious as we try to draw closer to him. When we believe that we will be cared for, we fixate less upon exactly how.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 20-21

God Is With Us.

God, Growth, Guidance 0

In order to work with God, we must assume that God is willing to work with us. To do that, we must assume that God can start right where we are and not at some imaginary place we have to get to in order to meet him. God is not waiting to rendezvous with us once we have earned the right to his attention. God is waiting for us right now, just where we are.

Very often when we think about what we would like to have happen in our lives, we cast ourselves very far forward and out of the day we are in. No wonder everything seems so impossible and so difficult. We cast ourselves far into the future where we stand alone and buffeted, wondering where God is.

God works in the day that we actually have going on. God’s miracles are miniature daily miracles. They are miracles of evolution and miracles of progress. They are the small miracles that add up to large miracles. They are tiny right steps that lead us in the right direction. If we want to find God, we need first to find ourselves. That is where God is. Right with us.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 19

Becoming Larger

God, Growth, Letting Go, Waiting 0

Very often when we are in a panic about faith, it is because God is making us larger. We do not see how we are going to be able to make ends meet, and we doubt that God is going to do that for us or through us. We are afraid we are being made smaller, and yet for some of us the temptation to rush back to what once was a right size and is no longer is a very real temptation. “I’ll just cut my losses,” we decide, and then we set about trying to wedge ourselves back into a former definition of our self that no longer holds true. What happens? It doesn’t work very well. We cannot go back, but we do not see how we can go forward either. And the answer is that we cannot go forward of our own steam, left to our own devices. In order to go forward and become larger, we are going to need the grace of God.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 16-17

Glad to Hear from Us

God, Guidance, Prayer 0

If God is with us every moment, then we can ask for direction at all times. There will never be a moment in which our prayer is unheard, although we may hurry onward, not taking time for an answer. To know God takes a beat. We must reach out and allow the time to feel that what we have reached out to has reached out back to us. Most of us are too hurried to know God. And yet we act as if God is too hurried to know us….

If God is always there and always available, then we are the ones who lag behind. Perhaps we do what I do and tag base with God only in the morning, forgetting about God the rest of the day, just going from thing to thing without taking God into account. Is it possible that in light of this, God gets lonely? Is it possible that God misses us? I think it is possible. I think that God is always glad to hear from us.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 8

Every Moment

God, Guidance, Prayer 0

If God is with us every moment, then we can ask for direction at all times. There will never be a moment in which our prayer is unheard, although we may hurry onward, not taking time for the answer. To know God takes a beat. We must reach out and allow the time to feel that what we have reached out to has reached out back to us. Most of us are too hurried to know God. And yet we act as if God is too hurried to know us.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p.8

God Never Gives Up

Forgiveness, God, Universalism 0

The parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, both taught by Jesus at the same time as the parable of the prodigal son, can be understood to mean that God never gives up on anyone until they come into a saving relationship with His Son Jesus….

Don’t you see it?! By telling these parables, Jesus was saying, “That’s how My Father is! That’s how I am! As long as there is one of My Father’s children, My brothers and sisters, who is lost, we are going to keep on looking for him UNTIL WE FIND HIM!” Does that sound as if He is going to give up on anybody just because he dies? No!! Look at the story of the prodigal. It should be called “The Story of the Father Who Never Gives Up on His Children”!

— Mark T. Chamberlain and Thomas Allin, Every Knee Shall Bow, p. 22-23

Guidance

God, Guidance 0

How do we know if we are being guided by God? How do we know if we are moving in the right direction? There is an inner sense of rightness, a feeling that all may yet be puzzling yet all is well. When we are being guided by God, we may not know what step to take months from now, but we will know, unsually, the right next step and, taking that step, we again know the next right step that follows. Rarely are we given great bolts of knowledge. God’s will comes to us in daily increments, “Do this next.”

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 6-7