Today, know that Love creates and enforces structure. Love is a conscious orderliness that provides healthy structure to your thoughts, schedule, systems, body, and days. We don't need to try to force order based on our opinions or out of fear of chaos. Just recognize that Love provides shape, form, and organization, which supports good--and Love gives you the ability to discern structure and yield to it.
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God loves you. Just as you are. Feel the truth of this.
If you are a perfectionist, how will this change or shift your standards? What if nothing you do or don't do will increase or decrease Love's abundant and unchanging love for you? What if you stop trying to earn Love's love through achievement and perfection--accompanied, of course, by fear and stress and a sense of never quite measuring up? What, if instead, you begin by feeling and accepting the fullness of Love's love. When this Love overflows in you, you will naturally want to express it, in ways that are healthy for yourself and others. Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, a highly successful gang intervention program, writes in his newest book Barking to the Choir:
"It is indeed a challenge to abandon the long-held belief that God yearns to blame and punish us, ask us to measure up or express disappointment and disapproval at every turn. It is part of our hardwiring. But we can feel, nonetheless, God nudging us beyond our tired, atrophied complacence toward something more oceanic and spacious. We feel God's desire for fullness to dwell in us. We are always being pushed and inched closer to the 'God who is always greater,' as Saint Ignatius frames it . . . . God wants to be found in the mess inside. We have settled for a 'partial God,' as Richard Rohr puts it, when every minute of every moment, we are asked to 'move beyond the mind we have' and land increasingly on a renewed and expansive view of God." Today, you are not making Love real with your thoughts and prayers. Love IS. You are not creating peace and harmony with your prayers, you are tapping into Love's present reality.
If you feel fearful or out of perspective today, remind yourself of this promise from II Timothy: "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Today, know that you, alone, are not responsible for caring for, directing, healing, educating, restoring those you love. Love speaks directly to each person, communicating wisdom, insight, clarity, direction. Love might use us to support others' comfort or growth, but maybe not. Maybe Love will meet their needs in other ways, often invisible to us. Sometimes in our effort to support, we get distracted by analyzing, assigning blame, developing opinions, and trying to force our concepts on others. Let go. Feel Love loving you. Feel Love loving others. Begin there.
In II Timothy, Paul writes: "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
Today, hold to this truth. Feel the power and presence of Love taking away the crazy, settling your fears, giving you a natural sense of authority and dominion in your life. |
AuthorTarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm and numerous essays. You may read more of her work at tarnwilson.com. Archives
September 2020
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