GOD IS DEAD

I saw a bumper sticker on a car the other day, outside of a local tattoo parlor, and it read GOD IS DEAD!
I can imagine the car belonging to a cool 20 something with “tats” all over her body thinking she has it all figured out, there is no God , right, how could there be , just look around- don’t you see the mess the world is in?

It’s all just chance, there is no God, there can’t be.
I use to think that way when I was in more pain; I got just enough God to make me miserable, if I believed in him on any certain day , he was mad at me for sure, and the whole world in general.

Just look around the world is in chaos, ISIS beheading westerners, Global Warming, white supremacist and cop’s killing blacks- COPS. Total and utter CHAOS!
Or is it?  Is that just the surface, the general back ground noise that so pervasive in today’s world.

All those issues do deserve our attention, and something needs to be done- we need to LOVE more- that’s right I said LOVE.

A few Sunday’s ago  when I preached, I brought up the poor lost kid that killed those SOULS in that Church in Charleston SC. What’s your take away from that tragedy? The 9 people that lost their lives in that horrible moment, or that most of the families of the victims forgave him, the next day. The few that didn’t knew that they would have to work on it, to get there, that’s Radical Grace!
That’s the face of God showing HERSELF – through LOVE and FORGIVENESS. You don’t have to like the person, you don’t have to invite them to dinner, just forgive them and LOVE them. That’s  the kind of LOVE that comes from GOD, a LOVE most of us don’t understand, it’s a total out pouring of LOVE towards us. Our job is to just clean the receptors off so we can receive the signal from her.
I think we take to small of view of the world, we tend to look at it to close, we don’t see the big picture, most of us including me many days, buy into the background noise, we buy that we are separate, we think others exist to please us, not the other way around. We get so caught up in the petty bull shit in our lives we lose sight that we are from GOD.
GOD is big enough for that kind of relationship, we humans are not!
So we dull the pain in a myriad of way; drugs, drink, sex, endless spending, vacation after vacation. We lose the connection that keeps most of us close to God, it’s a shame SHE is an out pouring of LOVE, but we have to learn to see with new eyes.
When we don’t see God, it comes from our side, God is a constant out pouring of love and light.

I remember going to an island in the Caribbean, I was disappointed “it was just like home”, or so I thought, I was kinda honked off waiting all those years to get “there” and it was the “same” as the States. Then in the midst of feeling sorry for myself (not too sorry, I was on a beach with a rum drink in my hand) I thought instead of looking for the things that were the same, I needed to look for the things that we different- that’s new eyes! It changed the rest of the trip; I started “seeing” the wonder around every corner.
Are you willing to try to find new eyes, a new perspective on the world, a new way to see; EVERYTHING. Or are you just going to follow the herd- seeing “THEMS” everywhere you go. Those Muslims-Jews-Hindu’s, they’re all going to rot in hell- RIGHT! Or is the black’s taking all the jobs us white folks should get, or is it all those immigrants they let into this country.
Thomas Merton said “the God you find says more about you than it does about God.” What does your world look like? What God do you see? That relationship is just like our personal relationships, much of what we see in others, good or bad, is a reflection of ourselves.
Your view of God and the world cannot be larger than your view of yourself.

The way to see yourself is  “THE” limiting factor in all areas of your life. Do you see a miserable world full of conflict and war, It’s there for all to see. Or do you see the joy of a new sunrise, or butterflies playing in your yard, or stare in wonder at the stars?

What you seek you will find, that scripture. Be careful what you go looking for, I have come to realize we do find it much more than we realize!

Is GOD dead, to some people, she was to me for awhile, I had to come back around, work out my issues, find her again. She was there waiting for me, with open arms, smiling a knowing smile.

We all have different journey’s to take, we all have different things we need to grow through. We just need to remember that God is always there waiting for us, like Motel 6, she keeps the light on for us!

PEACE!

“The Chair”

“The Chair”

I was watching MLB Quick Pitch this AM and looked into my office and saw this chair of my Mother’s from when she was a kid. As you can see it broken. One of my sons brought it down stairs a few weeks ago, and asked me what to do with it, my first reaction was to trash it, but then I caught myself and said put it in my office, I will try to fix it! This morning I was looking at it looking at the chair and thought, that how most of us live our lives, we hold on to the past, even if it broken?

Many things in life are worth fixing, but we have to watch what we hold onto, most times we would be better served if we left the past in the past. Most of us hold onto the past with a vengeance, most of the BAD, and some of the good, mostly the BAD. Many of you can remember verbatim, some long ago hurt inflicted upon you by some other unconscious soul, LET IT GO! I see most of us hold onto the past, our past, and we think it’s real- HISTORY, but it’s not, it’s subjective at best, but most of us don’t realize that, we think our history is true?

For example, when my parents were alive about 10 years ago, my sisters and I were talking with my Mom and Dad about Christmas’s when we were children. So we were all reminiscing about the days of our childhood, and I was struck by how different our memories were, five of us all in the same house, all remembering things differently. Obviously, we usually remember things from our personal point of view, but the problem is we think that’s “history” or “true”? It’s subjective at best, and can be the source of much pain, at it’s worst.

The past is gone, can you hold onto the good memories, sure, but you hold on to the bad memories as your own peril. I see that much of the pain in this world comes from past slights, miss-spoken words, and the need to right all the time.

Jesus talks about living for today, and seeing with new eyes, the narrow path, all pointers to show us how to live in the here and now, for tomorrow has enough worries of its own!

Jesus calls us to Radical Love and Radical Forgiveness, the kind of Radical Love and Forgiveness that can only come when your operating from your highest best self, that part of you that comes from God.

That radical love and forgiveness that asks nothing in return, that’s when you’re working from your highest best self. I also know it has to starts with you, you must trust the system enough to know you are forgiven and loved yourself. It has to start with you, if you’re not good for yourself, you can’t be good for anyone else, PERIOD! I also know if you can’t let go of the past, it will be very difficult to forgive yourself and others!

The past as you know it only exists that way in your mind, no one else! How you see yourself is the major factor on how you see others and how you see the world. The smallest, shallowest part of that equation is your limiting factor, you cannot be or see any larger than your smallest thought. So sometimes we just need to throw that chair out, and move on with our lives, the past can be wonderful, but it can also be the chains that keep us tied to where we are!

Peace!

Required reading for this post:

The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Do yourself and everyone around you a favor and read them!!

My take on the “wages of sin”

So I have found that it’s much more difficult for me to post when the weather gets nice. Between yard work and baseball and wanting to spend more time outside, it’s been harder to sit down and write a post.
This week I found some inspiration, I was speaking to a friend of mine and she said something like, you know back when you use to sin! I just started grinning, laughing on the inside, when I use to sin, hell I sin every day! It’s that on good days the sins are different than you might think. I have had this thought in the last few months, I have this idea of “soft sins” or the small sins we tend to over look, the big boy sins tend to take care of themselves don’t they, usually if they made the top ten list, you must deal with them, they will force you to, one way or another.
It’s those small buggers we tend to miss; they’re the ones that do the most damage?
You know the ones like being passive aggressive, or with holding love because you are pissed off, or judging yourself or others. Usually the way you treat others is how you feel about yourself on the inside.
So when I use to sin, like today, or every day. I know what my friend meant; we were talking about how I am working with my kids to make sure the first comment out our mouths is a positive one, unlike the usual negative ones we start with! The interesting part is that I now realize that they got that habit from me, I had help, but it starts right here, at the top (lol, its Fathers Day, so I will pretend i am at the top of the heap here at home).
So of course my friend thinks I am better than I really am, we are all works in progress, not works of perfection, but I do try, sometimes I don’t get very far, do I do try to make my life and those around me a better place!
To me sin is missing the mark, like an archer misses the bulls-eye, but we are still on track. God doesn’t keep score, ever! Most of the time I think the bigger problem is that we keep score for ourselves and for others! It’s not your job EVER!
So free yourself, and others, sin is missing the mark- when we choose to move out of God’s grace, God never moves away from us, EVER!
God is always there broadcasting the same message to the world- Grace-Peace-Love- Forgiveness-Joy.
If that’s not what you see at least some of the time, you need to get the corrosion knocked off your receptors. Remember in the beginning, this Jesus movement was called the good news, if it doesn’t feel that way to you; you need to do some internal cleaning!
Peace, love, joy to you.
I have a game of backyard football to get to!

Audio from 6-21-15

My online response to why Christianity is loosing ground in the US.

Here my response to a article on-line to why American’s are leaving Christianity:

Most people get just enough religion to make them miserable, but not enough to show them a way to God.
I read many of the posts here, most of them might be true as to why many have left the “church.” We lost the mystery and awe that God can show us, we have everything, including God in a box.

S\he is energy(spirit) s\he can’t be contained in box.
Modern man, and I use the term loosely, have to make things fit, that’s what we are taught in school, we have scientific minds now. We have to be right because someone else has to be wrong…
God is more nuanced that that, there is beauty all around us if you can learn to see it.

Many\most people read the Bible as a literal book, but its much more than that, its not a history book either, but some how it describes the human condition very well, even 2100 years later. Literalism is not wrong, its just the lowest form of understanding. Literalist get caught up with the law, they quote a verse out of context and usually use it to hurt someone else or make themselves look good. Jesus saw a different God, not a law God, but a God of love.

The problem is Jesus was not a law guy at all, he was a love guy. Tough to build a religion on that, and the Catholic’s did what people do, they humanized it, and drug it to our human level. They have had a lot of help over the last several hundred years from a lot of different religions.

Why so many Christian religions now?

Our thought process has changed drastically over the last several hundred years to a scientific mind, we have to prove things , explain things, we have to “right” all the time. Where people of centuries past would be ok “not having to understand” everything, and I mean everything, in our modern minds we have to “prove” everything “all” the time. Somebody, thing or idea has to be “right” and by our definition – then somebody, thing or idea has to be “wrong.” If your not in exact agreement with them over a few ideas, “they” must be wrong, start a new Christian Religion.

God doesn’t work like that.
Seems to me science points to the unknown(God), more and more every day. Read about quantum physics or string theory. They find we know less and less all the time.
Isn’t  it wonderful.

We need to learn to sit with the unknown, revel in the mystery of it all, learn to see with new eyes. Know that we don’t know everything, and probably aren’t meant to, ever.
If you can dig a little deeper, sit with the unknowable, see with new eyes, its a marvelous adventure.

Peace

Let God back in, or turn the receptors back on!

So I was talking to guy I know through work , I really don’t know him well at all, but he is a good guy. We don’t get to talk that that often, but we had some time this week to get to know each other.

In the course of that conversation we got around to how I preach 3 Sundays a month. It always amazes me how that almost  always changes the conversation, usually for the better. I never know what I am going to get into, I guess that’s one of the joys in life, the surprise of it all.

So back to the conversation, he starts off by telling me of all the “things” he has , RV, motorcycle, boat, snow machine, etc. Also all the vacations he and his wife have been on, they have been blessed to see much of the country and the world!

I have to admit part of me was\is jealous of the life they get to live, and God Bless them they have earned it! On the other hand I was struck by emptiness of it all, I played that game for a long time myself, and truthfully I still struggle with how to be “of this world and not in it.” Sometimes I do it better than others, right now I am struggling with that part of me- quite a bit if truth be told.  That’s called Hell by the way. When you move away from God Grace, and make no mistake- we do it to ourselves.

When I preach about money, I like to quote Billy Graham “The wrong is not when men posses riches, it’s when the riches posses the men.” The riches use to ,and still try to posses me. More accurately, I allow them to posses my thoughts, again. That’s Hell , when we choose to move out of God’s Grace. That my EGO coming out again, to much of me and not enough God.

We are taught here in America, that more is always better, bigger is always better, achieving and pushing is “what” we do. If that’s  the American dream- then why are so many of us disillusioned with this “dream” and miserable? Why do so many of us end up asking ourselves, is this all there is, what am I about, what am I doing here?

So we think more of the same will “fix” that part of us that’s missing, that hole in us, but it doesn’t, we just try to get more. More of everything, more money, more toys, more neuroses, more addictions, more parties, more drinking, more travel, more house, more, more, more.

What we need is less, less of us and this world, and more of God. That hole we are trying to fill is the part in us that God should be filling in our lives. Make no mistake, God is always there, as constant out pouring of love, we just have to turn our receptors back on to receive her love.

Back to the conservation, this guy then proceeds to tell me how he is a regular at church , and where do I preach, etc . We talked a little more and he got emotional and tear’d up in his office, and told me he doesn’t think “he is good enough for God. ” That was not what I was expecting to hear from him, not in our first “real” conversation, but it was beautiful , the honesty of it, the purity of it.  I can I relate to that, that’s how I use to feel myself at times, when I had more pain and less of her Grace in my life.

I am glad he trusted me enough to open up to me!

I tried to help – “there is absolutely nothing you can do to make yourself good enough for God, nor should you try.”

It all comes from God freely

We are whole and compete with God, from the start, there is nothing you can do or say to make it otherwise, Nothing, Nada, Zilch.

To paraphrase Richard Rohr , “everything we need comes in the box from the MFG.”

William Sloan Coffin said ” we get just enough religion to make us miserable.”

Boy is that the truth for many of us! Or all of us some of the time.

The key is to know that we cannot do anything to stop God’s love “to” us, nothing, the rest of it comes from us, and  the noise we allow into our lives.

Know you are loved, you “are” love, and there is nothing you can do about it, just accept it as the free gift that it is, with nooooooo strings attached.

Fill that hole that’s missing in you, with the radical Love and Grace that passes all human understanding. Turn on you “receptors” and let God back in.

Peace

Jesus as wall paper?

We just had a beautiful Easter Service last week with “the real” pastor, and my 3 son’s had their first communion, what a beautiful Easter Service at our little Church.

I was struck by a few things, the sermon was based on the idea that we keep Jesus as wall paper, kind of hanging around, but not front and center in our lives. The pastor did a great job, the C and E days are tough, there are always a lot of people who only come twice a year, which is fine, but the audience is different. He pointed out how we were all speaking about the Easter Dresses, the food at breakfast, and did the Easter Bunny come to visit?

But no Big Guy?

At the time in the pew, I was thinking how he was right; most of us don’t work Jesus into our lives. I seem to have a way to get talking about him, but that’s because I think of him as a friend, somebody in my life. Like all my friends how I feel about him changes based on my mood, but he is always there for me.

When I got home I was thinking about the sermon, and came up with the idea, we don’t talk about Jesus much because organized religion made him a God. Dare I say many of us fear him, because he holds the “keys” to heaven or hell!  On top of that how do you work a God into an every day conversation? On top of that we are not suppose to talk about such things with “normal” folk- no politics- no religion. Interesting to me we lump those 2 subject together?

Something to worship, not a “buddy”, to talk to like you talk to a friend, or somebody to run your ideas by, or engage with about the little things in life. We don’t think of Jesus as a close friend, how close can you be with a God! That creates a level of separation that’s hard to cross. Interesting use of the word “cross.” On “that” cross he showed us how to be Divine, but how to be fully Human as well!

Jesus was enlightened, Jesus got it, and Jesus got God. Jesus never said worship me, he said follow me. That’s a radically different thing!

Come follow me, let me show you this new way of seeing. It’s beautiful. LOOK what right here in front of our noses! This new way of seeing God.

Organized religion has not done a very good job of showing us the Mystical Jesus! Constantine in his conversion to Christianity got the ball rolling in “main streaming” Christianity, but we lost a lot of the best “Fringe” thinking. The subsequent centuries have not been good for seeing the “real Jesus” either. We did what humans do best, we made a system around Jesus, with a different type of hierarchy, depending on what religion you were raised in. Could that be why most religions in the developed world are losing people by droves, or why we see the rampant fundamentalism in all major religions today. We lost the best part of the message its all a radical love story!

If we want to get Jesus off the “wall paper,” then we need to change the way most of us think about him, we need to find a way to bring him into our lives every day. Maybe start by reflecting on how you see Jesus. Know that we can have our own resurrections, everyday, we get to start over every minute if need be, God does not hold grudges.

Jesus showed us a new way to see God, most of us got lost in the shuffle of first half of life thinking. We need to see Jesus with those “new eyes” that they talk about in scripture. If not I am afraid he will stay on the “wall paper” at best, at worst religion will continue to fuel the rampant separation we see in the world today by religious fundamentalists of all stripes ( this doesn’t come from Jesus, rather from our myopic way of looking at his radical message). We need to realize that there are no them’s, just a world full of different looking “us’s”. We are all one with God.

Palms in the wind.

So I was coming out of the post office Friday and I saw this palm frond blowing down the street, it’s not much of a stretch in NE Ohio to think it was a loss from one of our church’s Palm Sunday services last week. As you can see it pretty beat up and has seen better days!

That got me thinking…somehow it’s a metaphor of our lives, especially our lives following Christ! A little beat-up some of the times, windblown, not sure where we are going to end up!

That’s ok too, just like me finding the palm branch, at the end of our “travels” we can be sure that we will always be “found” by God. More to the point, we just find our way back to her. God is always present in our lives, sometimes the wind (our thoughts) seem to takes us away from Her radiant presence, but that’s a choice that comes from our end. She is just waiting for us to return to the fold, always waiting for us, with no judgments.

I was speaking to a friend this week and he is going through a lot in his life right now – problems with kids and grandkids, and health issues to boot! I could hear the pain through the phone as we were talking. I want to help, I really and truly do, but I know that’s not my cross to bear. I know we have to work through these trials, what lessons we don’t learn, we are doomed to repeat until we “get it.” So, I offer what comfort I can to try to ease the burden, but I know these are lessons we must learn for ourselves. I also know that we are given the chance to learn them over and over and over until we “get them” or not, and “not” getting it, that’s what we call pain and the Bible would call Hell. Another way to think of Hell is when we choose to move out of God’s Grace! When I was on the phone with my friend, he complimented me on my sermon from last week. He said he was envisioning the pain Jesus went through, for us, on the cross. The interesting thing is, I never said that – at all. In fact, I started out by saying it was not going to be that “normal” Palm Sunday sermon, that’s not what I see any more.

We find what we go looking for, all the time. I use to know THAT God and, by extension, that Jesus! I use to see the pain, because that’s where I was at in “my life.” Remember the Thomas Merton idea “the God we find says more about us than it does about God.” That’s where my friend is in his life right now.

See, we need to learn to trust that the wind will blow us back to God’s grace, it always does. Or, we can let it blow us to some very nasty places. I have been to a few nasty places, I created them, and they are called Hell. I think Jesus is telling us about the Hells we create here on Earth, I don’t believe it has much if anything to do with the afterlife. I know we need to travel through those Hells, to get perspective, to feel, to learn. There’s the rub, some of us, dare I say most of us, never make the return trip back to “Heaven.” That’s what we are offered through Jesus; his gift to us is that we have the choice to make our lives Heaven or Hell, right here…right now. Jesus is trying to show us the way to the “awareness” to live Heaven here on earth. That’s the gift I want in my Easter basket this Easter.

Peace.

I hope and pray the “wind” keeps you near God this Easter Season!

How do you choose to see the world?

 

How do you choose to see things, through what kind of eyes?

From Matthew 6:22-23 MSG

“Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have!”

I have been thinking about how we “choose” to see things a lot lately. I need you to know that it is a choice, you create your own reality to a large degree. We are taught from everybody; parents, teacher, friends, clergy, culture, everyone, to see things in a certain way the “right” way. But who’s right way; there’s, yours, the groups way? What group? We naturally break things into us and them, and that’s a problem, it keeps us in low level thinking, not wrong, but definitely not “enlightened.” That’s why we are still talking about the same things they struggled with in the Bible, insert the “Holy” book of your choice here.  Richard Rohr says  “literal thinking is not wrong, it’s just the lowest level of thinking, we need to change the way we view the world.”

As near as I can tell, Jesus made no distinctions of religion or race or class or gender! Actually he was radically inclusive. A lesson we still need to learn today.

If you still see a them , and we all do, then you still have work to do. Do you see “other” religions, other political parties, other groups of anything? Sure we all do, what are you doing about it, that’s the question. I know what most of us do, nothing. Blame someone else; blame a “them.”

Until we can see that the “them’s” of the world are the” us’s” of the world, things won’t change all that much. If we can’t learn to “see” with different eyes, we are doomed to repeat the past. You know that old saying, if you don’t remember the past you’re doomed to repeat it, that’s Bull . We remember it and  repeat it, over and over and over again, just look at the world. We are told to forgive but don’t forget, I call Bull on that one too, just forgive and forget period. Jesus calls us to forgive those who persecute you, somebody needs to start somewhere. We need to move the story forward. We need to see the world with “new eyes.”

Hilary Clinton is in the news this week for not using the ‘correct” email server? She says she followed protocol, did she? We are still here, they (who ever they are) didn’t bomb us, and the world kept spinning. What do you see, I am sure what you see is based on your prejudices; the Republicans are on a witch hunt! The Democrats are trying to cover something up, she is hiding something… Or is it all just noise?

Noise that divides us, keeps us from doing the real work that needs done.

Maybe we should be talking about things that matter, like our deficit, or poverty, or hunger, or peace.

I keep hearing that we are the “richest” nation that ever existed, and we have citizen’s that don’t have enough to eat, or are without health care, or a roof over their heads.

What would Jesus do indeed!

The only person you can change is you. You need to be the change you want to see in this world.

What you think about you become, be aware of what you let into your soul, you will become it. “If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar.” Are you a dank cellar?

What you seek you surely find!

My friends- part 2.

Another of my friends called me at the end of the day Friday while I was still thinking about my conversation earlier in the day. So we got talking about spiritual things and my friend proceeded to tell me more of his personal journey and how he goes to a Christian meditative prayer. Also, how his dad was spiritual but never went to church much. I brought up how most of my “un-churched” friends tend to have a cleaner relationship with God than most of us regular attendee’s, funny how that seems to work.

As the conversation continued we started talking about his sister, a born again Christian, and his recovering drug addict friend, and how they had much different ideas than he did about God. So I started telling him how I don’t see the God a lot of my “religious” brethren see either. I threw out the idea that, “the God you find says more about you than it does about God.” See Last Post.

I proceeded to share with him about a period of time where I hated myself for not being what I thought I was supposed to be, who I wanted to be, who God wanted me to be. I had lost my 27 year old family business, having worshiped at the altar of Capitalism, and lost everything.
I went to church most Sundays, but my heart was elsewhere. I knew a mean and nasty God then who punished me for not being “good enough” at anything, ever.
Guess what else I realized? My temperament matched the God I knew then – I was a nasty bastard and I found a God to match. I thought I was a failure in every sense of the word. I could not feed my family, I could not keep a roof over their heads, nothing, complete failure. I wanted to die, and for those of you who don’t know, that’s different than wanting to killing yourself, but still pretty low place to be.
My friend from earlier in the day was around of some of those years and he told me Friday that he was surprised I pulled out of it. He said something profound, he said I had jammed my life into one small “box of pain.” That’s all I could see and it was the place I started from every day. Days on end, when it hurt just to pull myself out of bed, or when I would cringe when the phone rang at work, I was afraid it was another lawyer or collection call. Day after day for years…

I knew a punishing, mean God that took everything ,or so I thought. I deserved it, just like the people of New Orleans did to deserve Katrina, right? I had a friend that was a nondenominational pastor that told me that one. God was punishing me, and I deserved it.

So fast-forward to Friday afternoon…I told my friend we find the God we going looking for… his sister and friend were at a place where they didn’t like themselves for past “sins” they had committed against God.
The problem is, many of us never get past this stage on our walk with God. The thing is, now I see it so differently. Sin is against us, it’s when we move ourselves out of union with God. How could you hurt God with your sin? God calls us to completeness, to strive to find union with Her, to live in the Grace she so freely gave us, before we were born.

So you know what I learned the hard way? That you must forgive yourself first and foremost, it all starts there. Without self-forgiveness you are building your house on sand. See, without that part of the process, you continue to judge yourself by some standard that doesn’t exist.
So the next logical thing is to judge others in the same light, or actually judge them in the same shadow (lack of Light) you judge yourself from. That’s not God…that is an “idol” you made in your image from pain. From Matthew 7: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” I guess the moral of the story is to find the correct door, so keep looking until you find the God that loves you, and learn to love yourself. You will find what you going looking for!

Something else I have learned the hard way is that all of the things in life that cause you “pain,” those experiences are “life’s class room.” That’s were all true growth comes from. I have read that some “lucky” people “get it” without pain, but for most of us, it comes through loss of some kind – death, divorce, bankruptcy, etc.
I have learned to see the “pain” as a process we need to go through on this adventure. I am grateful for my experiences; yes even the difficult ones, more so the difficult ones because that’s where all my growth comes from.
I don’t see things the way others do anymore and I don’t talk the way most of my friends do. I would not trade my “life experiences” for anything. Somehow they are part of a larger plan, my sister told me “we need to lean into the pain,” sit with it.
Instead most of us take “something” to deaden the pain, run from it. I don’t know whether it’s learned or in us, but most of us avoid pain. Maybe it’s a survival technique, but running from a guy with a spear is different than avoiding your mother-in-law. Is all this running from pain keeping us from true growth? Is that why the world is in such terrible shape, we are too stunted emotionally to deal with others on any meaningful level?

Oh and if it can be bought with money it can’t be all that important, fun yes, important no. My friend from my post the other day, he also paid me a huge compliment. In the same sentence that he told me of the small “box of pain” I had made for myself in the past, he said now- “you don’t see a box at all.”

To my friends, part 1.

So today a departure from the norm, I have been using my sermons for a base and writing essentially an “intro” for them. Today I am going to get into some of my recent thoughts. I get themes going in my head, and they tend to stay there for a while, I think it might be due to my horrible memory, I can only keep one thought in there at a time. It seems to work for me, or at least it’s all I have to work with. So I have had this Thomas Merton quote in my head recently, “the God you find say more about you than it does about God.” I have been thinking about that quote a lot lately. I had two very interesting conversations on Friday, though both very different. In the first I was speaking to a very close friend and we were discussing my recent “spiritual change.” By recent I mean over the last 5-6 years and very profoundly in the last 2 years or so. What that means to me, as it turns out, can be totally different than what other’s see. If you have read one of my earlier blogs about my “awakening” you will know I have moved through (and continue to work on) a lot of pain. I use to think I was cursed with this life, or more to the point, my inability to work myself to a point of continuing “happiness.” I was always wanting more, that’s what we are taught here in the US, bigger ,better, higher, faster. So if you read that earlier blog I was caught in the “mode” of being object referral, looking to things outside myself for my happiness. My dear friend pointed out to me how I have changed in the 5 years, some of it good, some, according to him, not so good, and that’s not exactly what he said, but it was what he meant. I can always rely on him to “straighten me out.” In my sermon a few weeks ago for the start of lent, I stated that God calls us to action, and we are to live life wastefully, with joy, to add things to our “beautiful existence”, maybe not to remove things as we typically do for lent. I still believe that, but when I was speaking to my buddy, I realized how much I have stripped away in the last few years, and I think that was the point he was trying to make to me. I think some of my friends think I have removed to much, I am not the life of the party all the time. I don’t party much at all, lots of things that use to interest me bore the crap out of me, a side note- I see God’s party in a lot of places now- in personal growth of others, sunrises, smiles, children. They(those old things) are “of this world”, some people seem to think now “he’s” to good for that, its has nothing to with that at all, and I don’t judge others for being where they are at on their path. Its weird , some seem to judge me, rather harshly at times. I was told by one of my best friends, that I am ‘TO HAPPY” most of the time. TO HAPPY? What I have come to realize is that when we judge others, it usually a mirror of what is lacking in our life’s. Judgment  of other’s, is a cause for us pause to look and see what we don’t like about ourselves, what we need to work on in our own lives.

So it can be a struggle, it difficult to find your bearings at times, what’s important now? I want to be clear, God doesn’t care if I drink or swear(or still do) or saw a girl in a bikini, but he want’s to know ,where is your heart, your soul that belongs to him. God wants us to have fun, live full of Joy, but it changes you- this experience. My friend was questioning me when I said I am happy, and I am probably for the first (extended period) time of my adult life. I am not always on my “A” game, but I continue working on it. I have learned that true happiness is a feeling of Joy that comes from inside of each one of us, if you look for it somewhere else you will lose it, it has to be from God inside of you. I have realized that most things are just background noise, the only true path leads to God…. all paths lead to God. But guess what he wants us to do,  not judge, or hate, or put others down, but Love wastefully and forgive others, try to bring ourselves into completeness with him.

Move the story forward, we don’t have it right yet, not by a long shot. If you still see a them(and I still do) then there is work to be done on you. That’s where it all starts, with you, not them, not ISIS, not the Jew’s or Catholics, or the Muslims or any other “them” you still see. To try to effect real lasting change, we need to break through our old thought process’s. We are not all that much different than when we started this experiment thousands of years ago. We need to be bigger than that, we can do it, we are part of God, he is just waiting for us to gain momentum. We can and have to start meaningful change, or we will need a ride to another planet. Looking back , from the outside , from someone close to me, it must look and seem like I am crazy.  I heard something about people in India being “God drunk”, being so lost in God they seem out of it, in the western world they would be committed. So I don’t think I am near that “bad”, but I have changed, for the better, I hope. I am far from perfect, but I am learning that’s ok too, it too is part of the plan. But this new awareness can cause “problems” of its own, or a better phrase than “problems” might be “we get a chance for new learning experience”. That’s why we are here, to grow and live and love, and to lose yourself in helping others. It can certainly cause you issues with the people you come into contact with, but it’s all part of the process. You can’t change other people, and you realize some of those close to you might never “get it.” Some people think you’re crazy, usually happy, but crazy. It can seem lonely, like your all by yourself, but it’s not a choice, not once you start down the “path”. The only thing you can do is have the power of your conviction, and that’s not the right word either, it not a conviction, it’s a knowing on some level, a feeling, something you can’t describe to anyone that hasn’t tasted “it”, “the way”, awareness, enlightenment, it can be scary and beautiful all at the same time. My friend said he understood my need to have others see my blog, he gets that I want friends to validate my writing and sermons.So that got me thinking, that’s he is partly right. It was more “right” earlier on, I wanted people to agree with me, identify with me, validate me. Now, a big part of it is to try to help people I know are struggling with this world, as I still do,  and help them try to get a”cleaner understanding of this life”. I am sure some of it EGO and Pride, but I guess that comes with it, if not, no one would hear anything I have to say- good or bad. I do understand that many of my friends don’t care at all about this path, or they don’t believe what I believe, but I feel called to try to help those struggling- show them a different way. I know it doesn’t make me wrong if we don’t agree, we are just on a different part of the journey. I won’t judge you for your beliefs, give me the same respect.

Jesus excels at helping us to transcend this world … “be of this world not in it”, be like little children, or from Matthew 7:14 “For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” So how do you read a scripture like that? I have learned enough about the way the Jewish people thought, and they had no thought process of life after death, ideas were about here and now, for this world today. Jesus , a Jew, was telling us most of us get it wrong, here in this life now, today. Or are you still judging yourself and others? “The God you find say more about you than it does about God.” What God do you see, maybe more importantly what “you” do you see, that will probably determine what “God” you find and what “world” you see.