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

Having Forgiven

Forgiveness, Healing, Letting Go 0

How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to remember to say about it all. You understand the suffering that drove the offense to begin with. You prefer to remain outside the milieu. You are not waiting for anything. You are not wanting anything. There is no lariat snare around your ankle stretching from way back there to here. You are free to go. It may not have turned out to be a happily ever after, but most certainly there is now a fresh Once upon a time waiting for you from this day forward.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 403

God’s Agenda

God, Growth, Letting Go, Life, Trials, Waiting 0

It is one of the ironies of the spiritual life that so much can be seen in retrospect as having been designed in our own best interest. When something finally does come to pass, it is often all we can do to manage it. “Why, if this had happened any sooner, I wouldn’t have been ready,” we catch ourselves thinking. “I needed every instant of preparation for this that I have had.” Many times we ask God for help with securing a certain agenda, then rage because God does not cooperate, only to have God’s agenda revealed later as far better.

It is in seeking to cooperate with God’s agenda for our life that we come to some sense of peace. Is it too much to think that God has an agenda for each of us? I don’t think so. Again, a look at the natural world tells us of the exquisite particularity of God’s care. The daffodil is given just what it needs to grow and we are asked only to cooperate. We must be willing to be either the daffodil or the violet, according to God’s will for us. We so often do not see the lineaments of our own character being formed. We have an idea of ourselves that may be counter to what God’s idea for our self is. I am in the midst of discovering this for myself right now.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 23-24

The Highest Vibration in the Universe

Healing, Joy, Life, Love, Trials 0

Dogs and cats can love you. Nature can love you. Music that sounds like you’ve heard it your whole life can love you. Art can love you. Beauty can love you. Whenever you deliver yourself to the experiences, sights, and sounds that make you feel loved, your experience will change. Your problems won’t be instantly solved, but in the arms of love, they will start to feel different. You will feel different. Instead of being in the foreground, your difficulties will recede into the background and your experience of your catastrophe will be transformed. That’s because Love is the highest vibration in the universe, and when you can feel it for even a nanosecond, everything else in your life will fall into its proper — and lesser — place.

Of course, we don’t want love just in the abstract and in general. We want it to be personal and particular. That is, we want to feel and share love with real people in our lives. As you’re going through this extremely difficult time, therefore, lean on the people who love you. Run, walk, or hopscotch, take a train, a plane, or a bus, to the people who can give you some love. They are your family, your friends, your neighbors and colleagues. Sometimes they’re even strangers. Whoever they are, you’ll know them by how they make you feel. With them, you feel happy and whole. They are the people who recognize your spirit, who touch your sensivity, who nourish and enliven your body, who make you laugh, who “speak your language,” who share your interests, who ask how you’re doing, who call to see if you got the job, won the case, could get the car fixed for less than six thousand dollars.

They are the ones who will say the words that will carry you through.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 175-176

Conscious Forgetting

Forgiveness, Letting Go, Relationships 0

To forget means to aver from memory, to refuse to dwell — in other words, to let go, to loosen one’s hold, particularly on memory. To forget does not mean to make yourself brain-dead. Conscious forgetting means letting go of the event, not insisting it stay in the foreground, but rather moving it off a stage, allowing it to be relegated to the background.

We practice conscious forgetting by refusing to summon up the fiery material, we refuse to recollect. To forget is an active, not a passive, endeavor. It means to not haul up certain materials or turn them over and over, to not work oneself up by repetitive thoughts, pictures, or emotions. Conscious forgetting means willfully dropping the practice of obsessing, intentionally outdistancing and losing sight of it, not looking back, thereby living in a new landscape, creating new life and new experiences to think about instead of the old ones. This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 402

Asking to be Surprised

God, Growth, Life, Waiting 0

I have a good friend who says to me that we tend to think we can second-guess God. We say, “God’s will will be A, B, or C — only to have the answer be God’s will is H, heliotrope, which never occurred to me.”

When we believe in God and put our faith in God, we are asking to be surprised. God is all-powerful and works on our life from all corners. We may think “Now is the time to focus on my career,” only to find that God has decided “Now is the time for me to find a fulfilling personal relationship.” We may decide “Now is the time for me to find a personal relationship,” only to discover that God has decided to stabilize our career. God’s version of what is good for us is far more far-seeing than our own. We can seek to cooperate with God, but we do well not to argue too hard with God’s sense of timing.

Few things create more misery than a fight with God about the seasons of our life. When we hold out, stubbornly insisting on a certain blessing that we feel God is withholding, we miss the many blessings that God is in the process of bestowing. When we are saying, “I want this now,” we miss that that may be coming to us instead. We may be asking God for a romantic relationship in a period when God is focused on building up our grid of nonromantic friendships. We may be yearning for a special someone to make us feel more special while God is working on giving us that feeling for ourselves, independent of our romantic status. We may be asking God, demanding of God, that we be given someone to make us feel less lonely when God is in the process of teaching us how to be comfortable on our own.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 21-22