Brokenness

Joy, Life, Trials, Trust 0

Something bad happens.  I hurt.  I feel unhappy.  I long to feel good.  I ask God for help.  I am resolved to feel better.  I do whatever I can to make at least a few dreams come true.  That is the way of the flesh.

Something bad happens.  I hurt.  I feel unhappy.  I long to feel good.  But I trust God.  His pleasure matters more than mine.  But His pleasure includes mine.  I believe that.  So I abandon myself to His pleasure.  I live to please Him.  I work hard and live responsibly and strive to put balance in my life because that pleases Him.  Making Him feel good is a higher priority than making me feel good.  And somehow, inevitably, at some point, I discover joy.  That is the way of the Spirit.

I shift from walking in the way of the flesh to walking in the way of the Spirit when the pain of life destroys my confidence in my ability to make life work and when it exposes as intolerable, insubordinate arrogance my demand to feel good.  That is the experience of brokenness.  It is then that the chain falls off my leg and the heavy ball rolls away.  It is then that I fly.

— Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams, p. 153-154

Age with Joy

Joy, Life 0

The responsibilities of a mature life often force us to focus on things that are immediately in front of us, and in that sense, “settling down” can be a good thing.  But such focus doesn’t have to translate into a constricted state of mind.  No one can age well who lets go of their sense of wonder.  You might find yourself thinking things like, Oh, that museum.  Been there, done that.  But if you make the visit anyway, you’ll realize that what you saw at the museum in your younger years was only a fraction of what your eyes can see now….

All of us have seen people who’ve aged with sorrow; we’ve seen others as well who’ve aged with joy.  It’s time to intend to age with joy, deciding that the joy of youth is a good kind of joy, but it’s not the only kind.  In fact, there is a joy in knowing that after all these years, we’ve finally grown up.

— Marianne Williamson, The Age of Miracles:  Embracing the New Midlife, p. 4-5

Seeking, But Letting Go

Growth, Letting Go, Life 0

It’s admirable and healthy to go after our dreams, know what we want to accomplish, what we want to achieve, get, and gain.  But whether it’s a person, place, attribute, value, or thing, after we identify what it is we want and are seeking, then we need to let it go and know, not in our minds although that’s a good place to start, but in our hearts and souls that we’re okay — whole, complete, and at peace — whether we ever get what we’re after or not.

Melody Beattie, Playing It By Heart, p. 175

Renewed Vision

Growth, Inspiration, Life 0

One of the most poisonous of all Satan’s whispers is simply, “Things will never change.”  That lie kills expectation, trapping our heart forever in the present.  To keep desire alive and flourishing, we must renew our vision for what lies ahead.  Things will not always be like this.  Jesus has promised to “make all things new.”  Eye has not seen, ear has not heard all that God has in store for his lovers, which does not mean “we have no clue so don’t even try to imagine,” but rather, you cannot outdream God.  Desire is kept alive by imagination, the antidote to resignation.  We will need imagination, which is to say, we will need hope.

Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 156

Mourning to Dancing

Gratitude, Healing, Life 0

If God is found in our hard times, then all of life, no matter how apparently insignificant or difficult, can open us to God’s work among us.  To be grateful does not mean repressing our remembered hurts.  But as we come to God with our hurts — honestly, not superficially — something life changing can begin slowly to happen.  We discover how God is the One who invites us to healing.  We realize that any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step….

The mystery of the dance is that its movements are discovered in the mourning.  To heal is to let the Holy Spirit call me to dance, to believe again, even amid my pain, that God will orchestrate and guide my life.

We tend, however, to divide our past into good things to remember with gratitude and painful things to accept or forget.  This way of thinking, which at first glance seems quite natural, prevents us from allowing our whole past to be the source from which we live our future.  It locks us into a self-involved focus on our gain or comfort.  It becomes a way to categorize, and in a way, control.  Such an outlook becomes another attempt to avoid facing our suffering.  Once we accept this division, we develop a mentality in which we hope to collect more good memories than bad memories, more things to be glad about than things to be resentful about, more things to celebrate than to complain about.

Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully.  And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy.  We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s presence in the middle of all that happens….

If mourning and dancing are part of the same movement of grace, we can be grateful for every moment we have lived.  We can claim our unique journey as God’s way to mold our hearts to greater conformity to Christ.  The cross, the primary symbol of our faith, invites us to see grace where there is pain; to see resurrection where there is death.  The call to be grateful is a call to trust that every moment can be claimed as the way of the cross that leads to new life….

I am gradually learning that the call to gratitude asks us to say, “Everything is grace.”  As long as we remain resentful about things we wish had not happened, about relationships that we wish had turned out differently, mistakes we wish we had not made, part of our heart remains isolated, unable to bear fruit in the new life ahead of us.  It is a way we hold part of ourselves apart from God.

Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning Into Dancing:  Finding Hope in Hard Times, p. 16-19

Good Things Coming

Joy, Letting Go, Life 0

Do not worry about how the good that has been planned for you will come.

It will come.

Do not worry, obsess, think you have to control it, go out hunting for it, or tangle your mind trying to figure out how and when it will find you.

It will find you.

Surrender to your Higher Power each day.  Trust your Higher Power.  Then, stay peaceful.  Trust and listen to yourself.  That is how the good you want will come to you.

Your healing.  Your joy.  Your relationships.  Your solutions.  That job.  That desired change.  That opportunity.  It will come to you — naturally, with ease, and in a host of ways.

That answer will come.  The direction will come.  The money.  The idea.  The energy.  The creativity.  The path will open itself to you.  Trust that, for it has already been planned.

It is futile, a waste and drain of energy, to worry about how it will come.  It is already there.  You have it already.  It is in place.  You just cannot see it!

You will be brought to it, or it will be brought to you.

— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 368

Haunted by Goodness

God, Joy, Life 0

It strikes us that to hope in the kind of goodness that would set our heart free, we must be willing to allow our desire to remain haunted.  This side of the Fall, true goodness comes by surprise, the old writings tell us, enthralling us for a moment in heaven’s time.  They warn us it cannot be held.  Something inside knows they are right, that if we could do so, we would set up temples to worship it and the Sacred Romance would become prostitution.  We understand that we must allow our desire to haunt us like Indian summer, where the last lavish banquet of golds and yellows and reds stirs our deepest joy and sadness, even as they promise us they will return in the fragrance of spring.

— Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 140

Loving What Is

Letting Go, Life 0

I am a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.  We can know that reality is good just as it is, because when we argue with it, we experience tension and frustration.  We don’t feel natural or balanced.  When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind, and fearless.

— Loving What Is, by Byron Katie, p. 2