God Dependency

Core Value, God, Love, Relationships 0

God dependency corrects all other faulty dependencies. God keeps us right-size and allows us to go through the ebb and flow of our work day without overreacting. We are able to see our co-workers as separate and equal. We treat them with dignity, and we behave with dignity ourselves. God is our source. We remember that, and it draws everything to scale. We are able to see our true employer as God and our boss as a stand-in. We perform our work well because that is doing God’s will for us. We do the best we can and let the chips fall where they may.

God allows us, too, detachment in our love relationships so that every shift of our partner’s mood is not an indictment of our lovability. As our relationship comes to include God, the ebb and flow of personalities becomes far less personal. We lead our life each day in relationship first to God and then to our partner. We treat our partner with loving courtesy, but those attributes are grounded in our relationship to God. Secure in God, we turn less to our human companions to supply something they are not able to supply. God is the source of our emotional security. That established, we are able to love others with a less-demanding neediness. This is attractive to people. We have an inner compass, a personal gravitational field that circles us back, always, to God. Our partners may love us, but they cannot supplant God for us. We may love our partners, but we cannot supplant God for them. When this is clearly understood, when God is the primary relationship and all others, however cherished, are secondary, then we begin to have right dependency. “Thy will be done” we pray, and we include our relationships within the range of the prayer.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 129-130

Embracing Detachment

Acceptance, Growth, Letting Go, Life, Love, Peace, Relationships 0

To begin with, I think we have to cultivate our willingness to let go, that is, to detach from the trials and tribulations of our contemporaries if we want to find the quiet peace we long for, a peace that will allow us to truly love, to truly embrace, and to appreciate those who journey with us. In this process, we also give those companions the freedom to grow and to find their own way, thus their own eventual peace too. I don’t think we can come together as loving equals without embracing the willingness to detach.

We live very codependent lives, from my perspective. By this I mean that too many of us let even the whims of others — in our families, our communities, our workplaces, even in other parts of the world — define us, determine how we feel, and then decide what we will do next in many instances. Learning to detach allows us to live the life we were meant to live. By allowing other people’s behavior, good, bad, or disinterested, control us, we miss many opportunities for movement and expression in new directions. The converse is also true: if we attempt to control the other persons on our path, wherever they may reside, keeping them “attached” to us through any means (and most of us are very practiced at this), we immobilize them, thus preventing the growth they deserve and have been prepared for already.

— Karen Casey, Let Go Now: Embracing Detachment, p. 1-2

The Terrible Thing

God, Love, Universalism 3

“But you must allow that God hates and punishes sin — and that is a terrible thing.”

“It would be ten times more terrible if he did not hate and punish it. Do you think Jesus came to deliver us from the punishment of our sins? He should not have moved a step for that. The terrible thing is to be sinful, and all punishment is to help deliver us from it, nor will it cease until we have given up being sinful. God will have us good; and Jesus works out the will of his Father.”

I myself do not believe that mere punishment exists anywhere in the economy of the highest. I think mere punishment is a human idea, not a divine one. But the consuming fire is more terrible to the evildoer than any idea of punishment invented by the most riotous of human imaginations. Punishment it is, though not mere punishment, which is a thing not of creation but of destruction: it is a power of God and for his creature. As love is God’s being and a creative energy in one, so the pains of God are to the recreating of the things his love has made, and sin has unmade.

— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 148

New Hearts

God, Life, Love 0

Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways. They centered their hopes in the God who simply does not give up on creation and the people who inhabit it. The God who is the source of all life, who works from within creation to make something new. The God who can do what humans cannot. The God who gives new spirits and new hearts and new futures.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 36

Love and Belonging

Acceptance, Core Value, Love 1

As I conducted my interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. It’s as simple and complicated as this: If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 23

The Jesus Story

Faith, Forgiveness, God, Joy, Life, Love, Truth, Universalism 0

This love compels us to question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the Jesus story. A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance of anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. viii

Dazzling Light

Acceptance, Core Value, Joy, Life, Love 0

What would it take for us to remember our worth? How good we are, and how complete and loving and lovable. men shouldn’t have to bear the burden of our remembrance. It’s not their function to remind us we are goddesses. It’s our function to remember it and then reveal it to the world. When we remember, they will too. The light will be dazzling.

— Marianne Williamson, A Woman’s Worth, p. 136

Wholehearted Living

Compassion, Connection, Core Value, Life, Love 0

Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Shine Like a Star

Core Value, Joy, Love 0

You need not apologize for being brilliant, talented, gorgeous, rich, or smart. Your success doesn’t take away from anyone else’s. It actually increases the possibility that others can have it too. Your money increases your capacity to give money to others, your joy increases your capacity to give joy to others, and your love increases your capacity to give love to others. Your playing small serves no one. It is a sick game. It is old thinking, and it is dire for the planet. Stop it immediately. Come home to the castle.

— Marianne Williamson, A Woman’s Worth, p. 54

The Keys to Beauty and Happiness

Compassion, Forgiveness, Joy, Love 0

I do know this: On the days when I feel love and compassion and forgiveness in my life, I’m happier and more attractive to other people. Those feelings are the mystical keys to beauty and happiness. It is so simple, and it doesn’t cost a thing. From pseudosophisticated corners, there is resistance to such an easy message. For if women were really to believe these things — that love in our hearts could renew our lives — billions of dollars would be spent elsewhere.

— Marianne Williamson, A Woman’s Worth, p. 36