A Sense of Direction

Faith, God, Guidance 0

So often faith comes down to having a sense of direction. Faith requires believing that we are headed in the right direction for our lives. When we feel lost and abandoned, when we feel that God is not beside us, we are always mistaken. God is with us every moment, in every circumstance, in all places. We may lose touch with God, but God never loses touch with us. God is the Great Creator. We are the beloved creative children, never out of sight and out of mind, watched over and cared for at every instant. All that is required is for us to one more time avail ourselves of God. “Lord, I believe; help my disbelief,” we must again pray. We must claim that God is with us always. We must seek to touch God and to allow God to touch us right where we are.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 66

God’s Orchestration

Faith, God, Growth, Guidance, Waiting 0

“Thy will be done, God,” we pray, “but in the meanwhile, let me try this.” It is difficult to allow the timing of God, the moving of other gears into play. We forget that God is orchestrating a much larger whole, and we tend to think of and want God’s will for us to be an instantaneous release from all that troubles us. We want our spiritual life to be a product, not a process. We want to be finished, solved, soothed — and sometimes it is our discomfort that is drawing us toward God.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 60-61

God’s Will

Faith, God, Growth, Guidance 0

When we talk about God’s will and the possibility that it might be other than what we envision, it is easy to feel frightened. It is easy to say, “So. I knew it would come to this. My will at one ende of the table. God’s will at another.” But that is not really how it works. The daily attempt to find God’s will moves us closer together. Often we discover that God’s will for us involves more freedom, not less. Our dreams and desires do not come from nowhere. They come from God. God is able to shape both the dreams and desires and our character so that we arrive at a happy medium where our dreams and God’s dreams for us can be seen to coincide.

As we become teachable and open to God’s will for us, we have many small revelations. “Why, I thought X would make me happy, but it turns out that Y makes me happy instead.” All the time we were begging for X, God knew Y would make us happier. This is why, a day at a time, X was denied to us and Y was encouraged. We fight this encouragement. We fight this superior knowledge of our own temperaments. And then, in a fit of willingness, we surrender and we see that God had our best interests at heart all along.

God always has our best interests at heart. If we can believe this, it is easier to have faith. It is easier to believe this if we remember that God has the long view. God knows more of the variables. God knows not only what is best for us but what is best for everyone. God is involved in working out a far more intricate dance than we can know the details of. We work on our corner of the tapestry. We think, “Ah, it is a tapestry about a fox,” because the fox is the animal that we can see. What we do not know is that it is a tapestry about a unicorn and that the fox peeking through the shrubbery is way over in a tiny corner at the left. God’s eye is on the unicorn and the fox. God’s eye brings each one along a stitch at a time.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 25-26

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

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

Making Peace

Growth, Guidance, Letting Go, Trials 0

After forty-eight hours of writing about my problems, praying about my problems, and meditating about my problems, I remembered something a friend had said to me.

“What are you doing?” he had asked.

“I’m trying to surrender to God’s will.”

“No you’re not; you’re trying to figure it out.”

Within six months, each of the problems I was wrestling with worked themselves out. I was either guided into an action that naturally felt right at the time, or a solution came to me. The immediate solution to each problem was the same: let go. Just surrender to the situation taking place.

Sometimes, what we need to do next is surrender.

If you don’t like the word surrender, try calling it making peace.

— Melody Beattie, More Language of Letting Go, p. 194-195

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

The Trapeze Bar of Life

Growth, Guidance, Letting Go, Life 0

We’re not used to letting go. We’re used to hanging on for dear life. We hang on for lots of reasons: because something is familiar; because the past is a known commodity and the future is a question mark; because we lack imagination and can’t conceive of a future better than the past we’ve had; because blankies (no matter how ragged and trashed they are) and relationships (no matter how complete they already are or inappropriate they have become) are a comfort to us. We hang on because we’ve been taught that persistence is good and we should never give up. Or we’re simply afraid of the free fall, afraid of coming alive as ourselves….

Letting go, on the other hand, asks you to believe that somewhere across the Big Tent of Life there will be another trapeze bar that you can take hold of after you’ve let go of this one. It’s an act of terror and freedom, of trust and faith that when you let go, you will find something new, better, different.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 71, 72

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