Better Late Than Never

Forgiveness, Growth, Life 0

As we renew our commitment to the processes of life, then the processes of life will recommit to us.  We’ll feel forgiven for a past that wasn’t all it should have been when we commit to a future that is all that it can, should, and will be — now that we’ve finally grown up.

The prodigal son did get home late, having partied hard, but his father rejoiced to see him.  And so does ours.

Wherever you’ve been, and whatever you’ve done so far, your entire life was building up to this moment.  Now is the time to burst forth into your greatness — a greatness you could never have achieved without going through exactly the things you’ve gone through.  Everything you’ve experienced was grist for the mill by which you become who you are.  As low as you might have descended, in God there are no limits to how high you can go now.  It is not too late.  You are not to old.  You are right on time.  And you are better than you know.

— Marianne Williamson, The Age of Miracles, p. 9

Age Well

Letting Go, Life 0

By midlife most individuals stop blaming external villains for problems.  They accept their shortcomings more readily and change their ways.  This willingness to reform is a major difference between those who age well and those who do not.

— Allan B. Chinen, Once Upon a Midlife, p. 80

Feelings and Circumstances

Life, Peace, Truth 0

From my vantage point, you’d have seen many, many people who are deeply loved and still lonely, beautiful and still horribly self-conscious, professionally successful and still so terrified of failure that their nocturnal tooth-gnashing could crush diamonds.  Here’s something you’ll need to hold in your mind, at least temporarily, if you want to get a good look at your own North Star:  External circumstances do not create feeling states.  Feeling states create external circumstances.

— Martha Beck, Steering by Starlight: Find Your Right Life No Matter What!, p. 6

Resting in Jesus

Growth, Life, Story 0

Resting in Jesus is not applying a spiritual formula to ourselves as a kind of fix-it.  It is the essence of repentance.  It is letting our heart tell us where we are in our own story so that Jesus can minister to us out of the Story of his love for us.  When, in a given moment, we lay down our false self and the smaller story of whatever performance has sustained us, when we give up everything else but him, we experience the freedom of knowing that he simply loves us where we are.  We begin just to be, having our identity anchored in him.  We begin to experience our spiritual life as the “easy yoke and light burden” Jesus tells us is his experience.

— Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 174-175

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