God’s Colorful Will

Beauty, God, Guidance, Joy, Life 0

“Thy will be done” is not the mantra of a joyless life. We are not signing up for a life that boils down to one long tour of duty. “Thy will be done” has more color in it than that. God’s will has a great deal of color in it. Looking at the natural world, this diversity and color should not surprise us — and yet it does. Our idea of God is shockingly drab and colorless. We act as if The Creator has only a few colors on his emotional palette and that they fall into the sensible range — dull grays, browns, maybe olive drabs.

What if God is more colorful than that? What if we look at the natural world and begin to consider the actual power and diversity of what we are dealing with. What if we begin to see that “Thy will be done” is an expansive and not a constrictive concept, what if we start to realize that God’s will for us is that we get larger, not smaller?

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 136

Discover Joy

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I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.

— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, p. 58

Caring for Ourselves

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When we are caring for ourselves, we discover that there is actually plenty of time and energy to care for others and the world too. It is not negatively “selfish” to care for yourself brilliantly and exquisitely. In fact, as you fill your own well from the inside and tend to your self with great love, it will naturally and effortlessly “spill over” for others to appreciate and utilize.

When you see someone who radiantly glows from within, you are seeing a self-caring soul. This kind of self-care is a living example to be inspired by, so that you can live that way also.

— SARK, Glad No Matter What, p. 56

You Can Make Yourself Feel Better.

Growth, Healing, Joy, Life 0

Just as you have the capacity to go indoors when you get cold, you can take yourself to another emotional climate if the one you’re in becomes uncomfortable. That means you can pull yourself out of a slump or a rage. You can reintroduce feelings even if you have spent a sizable portion of your life numb. And, if need be, you can fall out of love. Resilient people believe that they can — and should — make themselves feel better.

An essential part of being able to do this is knowing when you feel bad. Resilient people are aware — they know when something has pushed a button and they’ve ended up feeling trauma-y. And instead of just being adrift in a sea of emotions, they have the ability to say, ‘Hey, I’m in a bad mood, let me do something about it.’ They know when they’re off balance. And knowing that you’re off balance isn’t so scary when you’re resilient, because you have internal efficacy — the knowledge that you’ll be able to make yourself feel better.

Whether they need soothing and comfort, or some distraction, or a little physical activity, or rest, resilient survivors feel confident that they’ll be able to change their moods by taking action; they know that they can restore their natural equilibrium.

Indeed, what is remarkable about resilient survivors with regard to their sense of internal efficacy is that they not only believe they are at the helm of their own emotions, but they have a willingness to do something about it — to put on a different song, for instance, and to let their emotions be changed by it. They grab an emotion off of their Rx emotions list, and they do what they have to do to get themselves feeling that way. Taking positive action helps them move from defeated to empowered.

— Alicia Salzer, MD, Back to Life, p. 146-147

Be the Motion.

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Dive into your passions, and you blow past the heartaches and excuses that keep you from feeling pore-tingling fun without guilt. When you have the life force humming, you’re not going through the motions anymore. You are the motion. You don’t have to restrain your enthusiasm. You can be as excited as you want to be, shout without fear of breaking decorum, feel at home in your own skin. You realize that celebrating is not something to save for milestones but sustenance you can indulge in every week.

Most of us live in the soulless flatlands of adulthood, resigned to the loss of eagerness and joyful abandon. But you can bring that spark back from the dead through the life force of participant experience. Your brain, it turns out, doesn’t want comfort, it wants engagement.

— Joe Robinson, Don’t Miss Your Life, p. 18-19

Shifting from Worry to Watching

God, Growth, Joy, Letting Go, Prayer, Trials 0

When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching. You watch God weave his patterns in the story of your life. Instead of trying to be out front, designing your life, you realize you are inside God’s drama. As you wait, you begin to see him work, and your life begins to sparkle with wonder. You are learning to trust again.

— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 73

A More Joyous Experience

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When we are aligned with God, our heart does lighten and we do experience the humor that is present in life. Freed from the pressure of trying to make life happen as we think it should happen, we are able to enjoy the ebb and flow of emotions and events as they do happen. We begin to be able to play more keys on our emotional piano than just the melancholy and dramatic ones. We begin to be able to experience the full range of responses that are part of our human nature….

When we begin to experience God more directly, less through our intellect and more through our heart, more experientially and less theoretically, we begin to have a more joyous experience. We discover we have access to a broader range of human emotions in our own responses to daily life. We feel the way we do feel not the way we should feel, and we discover that the way we do feel is acceptable to God who, after all, gave us the full range of human emotions we are now willing to undergo.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 135-136

Joy in Small Miracles

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Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.

It is true, I never stop wanting to learn the hard eucharisteo for the deathbeds and dark skies and the prodigal sons. But I accept this is the way to begin, and all hard things come in due time and with practice…. Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant — a seed — this plants the giant miracle. The miracle of eucharisteo, like the Last Supper, is in the eating of crumbs, the swallowing down one mouthful. Do not disdain the small. The whole of the life — even the hard — is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. These are new language lessons, and I live them out. There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.

I, too, had read it often, the oft-quoted verse: “And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:20). And I, too, would nod and say straight-faced, “I’m thankful for everything.” But in this counting gifts, to one thousand, more, I discover that slapping a sloppy brush of thanksgiving over everything in my life leaves me deeply thankful for very few things in my life. A lifetime of sermons on “thanks in all things” and the shelves sagging with books on these things and I testify: life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.

— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, p. 57

Precious Ordinary Moments

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I think I learned the most about the value of ordinary from interviewing men and women who have experienced tremendous loss such as the loss of a child, violence, genocide, and trauma. The memories that they held most sacred were the ordinary, everyday moments. It was clear that their most precious memories were forged from a collection of ordinary moments, and their hope for others is that they would stop long enough to be grateful for those moments and the joy they bring. Author and spiritual leader Marianne Williamson says, “Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.”

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 84