Ari of Aslan

I read Deepak Chopra’s “Jesus” a few years back. It is subtitled “A Story of Enlightenment” and it is a fictionalized version of Jesus’s unrecorded years. His buddy is Judas, and the punchline is Judas, through his slights, snubs and betrayals of Jesus, was the key to Jesus’s enlightenment.

That is so helpful to me in learning not to take every slight and snub, each one feeling like a betrayal, personally.

I have a friend who has a quick-trigger temper, and she has gone off on me three or four times…which is two or three times more than anybody else who has stayed in my life. I have never known why I haven’t mouthed right back, blowing off the friendship right then and there, but I never have.

She’s building up to a tear, which is not comfortable to deal with, so I do extra peace-be-still work when I see it coming.  I was doing my peacefulness time, and I had a blinding flash of the obvious: She is my Judas…and therefore more important to me than anybody.

It is through her that I am learning how not to take real-appearing slights and snubs personally…they are not. They only become personal if and when I personally attach myself to them…respond to them…resist them.

Thank You.

I am watching an interesting possibility hover at the edge of my ego’s worry zone. My unconscious desire is to dodge the thought, bury it, don’t go there…paradoxically, what is required is the exact opposite. Which entails bringing the possible fret into full conscious thought, to look it in the face and imagine the worst-case scenario…that it will happen and then the various ways I can handle it when it does happen.

The process always starts with my reminding myself that God has my back, He goes before me to make the crooked places straight, and He can and will intervene in my life on my behalf. That’s my “Welcome,” my kissing it on the lips, so to speak. Takes me out of the fix, brings God in, and I get to move on.

I have learned that my ego dwells in a state of self-protection and will  always (1) assume the worst so that it can be prepared to defend against and (2) go haring off on endless trails of “if this happens, then I’ll….”

Having learned that, and particularly how much harm it does to my soul peace, I’ve also learned what is required is to not let my thoughts attach to these interesting possibilities in the first place. I, by myself, am incapable of not attaching…that’s why for me the first step in the process is to turn my thoughts immediately if not sooner to God.

This does not ensure that my imagined scenario will not happen…all that is ensured is that it is no longer a worst-case scenario. I have even had some of my imagined awfuls turn out exactly as I imagined them except they benefited me…indeed,  turned out to be my gold.

So that’s where I’m going in my mind today…into my worry zone to gambol with the lambs of What If, Uh-Oh, and Oh No so I can walk free in my own mind.

Thank You.

A couple of quick thoughts that I read this morning really caught my attention. The first was just four words: “fascinated by our sins” and the other, “the attainment of a merciful heart.”

Each of these was personal to me…”fascinated by our sins” spoke of my, back in the day,  getting bogged down in my rues, regrets and remorses. I would never have put that label on it because “fascinated” has such a glitzy sound to me…like, something good I’m seeing or experiencing. I am reminded of the snake…is it the cobra?…that the story says holds one in thrall in order to strike…and kill. Which pretty much describes getting bogged down in rrr. Caught up in a fascination of my sins leads to a deadening…a deadening of spirit, mind, want to…want to do anything but mull those rrr.

The other, “the attainment of a merciful heart,” spoke to my today’s focus…finding understanding within me for Rush and Franklin. The quote is attributed to Isaac of Syria who said, in part, that the attainment of a merciful heart comes from constantly offering prayers with tears for the enemies of truth.

I felt both comforted and electrified by the words “with tears.” I doubt Isaac meant that the way I’m experiencing it, but for today I’ve got to believe that the tears are for my inability to move off of my resistance to those two. I still just have a strong desire to smack them.

Bless them, change me…sigh.

Thank You.

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity. — Euripides

That pretty much describes how needs are met. “The Father knows our needs,” does not mean that the Father will either gift us with our need fulfilled or make our need disappear…no, He gives us strength we know naught of to do what needs doing.

Wants, on the other hand, are pretty much dependent on our willingness to do other than beg God for a freebie. In general, God isn’t going  to do for us what we can do for ourself. Plus, there are a lot of wants that God isn’t about to touch and neither should we, but that seldom stops us, does it?

There…that’s an excellent reason for aligning our will with God’s will.

Thank You.

Years ago, in a spiritual setting, I heard, “I know it, and I show it.” More and more lately I have been saying, “If you know it, you must show it…else you don’t know it.”

Blinding flash of the obvious: If you know it unto realization, It shows Itself…you have no control over it.

Thank You.

My brother died when he was 12 years old…I was 10, my sister was 13. He died of a tumor on the brain and tubercular meningitis.

Paul was the center of our family…we each considered him “my best” friend and/or child, and we paid little, if any, attention to each other. None of us in our singular grief could understand God’s purpose in calling him home…at age 12 yet. But this was a long time ago, and families did not question God out loud then…or families in my neighborhood at any rate.

A very few years later, I was given an insight, a gift of understanding. In the short time since my brother’s death, my sister and I had become good friends…my father doted on us as did my mother. One day, in a blinding flash of the obvious, I had a mental image of my brother as a sort of May pole…as he was lifted up into heaven, the tie to my sister, the tie to my father, the tie to my mother, the tie to me drew us together. We had become a family unit.

That gave me peace, and I never questioned it.

In dealing with another grief recently, I realized that although that picture had given me peace, it did not answer why my brother had to die so young and in such a painful manner.

My thoughts immediately kicked into raceracerunrun…why?why?why?

Again I was given an insight: None of us have any way of knowing another’s God path. Paul lived and died as he lived and died. I simply get to accept the peace I was given in the certainty that God was the giver, and it is, therefore, reasonable to assume that Paul was given the same peace…then in the midst of his illness and now.

Thank You.

What if your worst fear and your greatest hope both came true simultaneously?

Would you realize them both for the same?

What if that is the “kingdom of heaven?”

Would you still seek it first?

Thank You.

“I stand at the door and knock.” It is the Father within who stands at the door and knocks to be let out…to be released.

My needs are always met…by God. “The Father within knows my needs.”

My wants are sometimes met, sometimes not. It is my obsession with getting my wants filled that turns my wants into my god of the moment, and thus blocks the grace of God. It is known as free will, but there is nothing free about it.

Likewise, there is nothing, per se, wrong with having wants…that’s how life moves forward. It is when I get all bogged down with whether I’ll get my needs met (do I have enough money to last the rest of my life?) that my wants grow spurs and ride me. That’s when I confuse my want (enough money to last forever) with my need (to open the door of my soul to the Father who knows my needs and whose good pleasure it is to fill my needs).

It was during my 10+ years of taking care of the IRS that I learned that…which is exactly why I know my experience with the IRS to be of God, a need I had, but assuredly not a want, and for which today I am deeply grateful.

Thank You.

“Integrity is what we would do if we knew we’d never be found out.” I don’t know if that was original to my eighth grade teacher or if she was quoting someone, but she stated it in class one day, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Is personal integrity ever negotiable? Say, for instance, I am a single mother with two children who depend on me alone for the food on our table and the roof over our head. Events transpire in my workplace wherein I behave badly…justifiably, without malice aforethought, but, regrettably, my actions are a fireable offense, without exception. 

However, to my knowledge, there were no credible witnesses to the act. Second however, this now becomes a secret, and secrets can and do kill…the soul if not the body.

My dilemma: Knowing it is a fireable offense and my children and I depend on my paycheck, do I report what I did to my superior? If I do report, do I report what I did because there may have been a witness, and “the penalty for a cover-up is worse than for the crime?”…if the witness should choose to remain silent, can I afford whatever price may be asked of me later?…or, if no witness, will my conscience remain silent?…if not, can I afford whatever my conscience might demand later?

These are just some of the questions I would need to wrestle with, to discuss with trusted friends, before I could make any decision that I could live with. It is in the mind-wrestling, that I am led to God. It was through turning the dilemma inside out that I was reminded of a story in the Bible.

That story in the Bible (which I do not know well, so this is my lame memory’s relating) told of  several farmers in the field gathering their crops on a Sabbath, a serious offense.  Others were aghast and calling for severe penalties against the farmers, but Jesus not only agreed with the farmers, but helped gather the crops…saying their livelihood depended on it, and the letter of the law is just words, not God’s Word.

It seems to me personal integrity is simply trusting God…He has our back whether our reasoning mind (or the law) knows it or not.

Thank You.

I love when a hard lesson learned back in the day stands me in good stead today.

Back story: When I had my first dog, a seven-pound Maltese, whenever I flew, I could take him with me in a carrier that fit under the seat in front of me. Once I was flying home so my dad could drive us down to see “the old home place.” I was excited because it was news to me that I hadn’t seen “the old home place”…I thought that’s where we went to visit when I was a kid.

So, in the preparations to go, I had a feeling that I needed to nail down my dog’s reservation to be in the cabin with me…only one pet per cabin was allowed. I went to the airport the day before, bought his ticket, got confirmation that he’d be allowed to fly under the seat in front of me…we were all set.

The next day, we’re at check-in, and the lady behind the counter was having a baaad day. Came our turn, she was having none of this dog-flying-in-the-cabin stuff. No matter the paid ticket I showed her, the reservation that was listed on her manifest…no and no and no.

I could feel my insides turning to stone, my jaw clenching tighter…and all the sudden the voice of reason spoke in my ear, “Think your resentment through. It is a 59-minute flight. That dog can survive one hour in the belly of the plane. If you do not give over, you are going to have a resentment that will be on your mind the entire time you’re at the old home place…all you will see, hear,  feel will be your own thoughts grinding about the letter you’re going to write the airlines and the unfairness of it all.”

With which, in mid-sentence, I said, “Fine…whatever needs to happen, we’re fine with it.”

With which, the woman said, “Oh, good Lord, take your dog and go get on the plane.”

I am reminded of that this morning because I just saw Rev. Franklin Graham on television double-talking as fast as he could about President Obama being less-than a Christian and Newt Gingrich, et al., being white lights of Christianity.

I need to start thinking this resentment through, or that “hard lesson learned back in the day” isn’t going to mean a thing today…and hard lessons learned once mightn’t get seconds.

Thank You.