Jeff We know we need to receive God’s love, but sometimes we don’t make the time or don’t know how. The simplest way is to accept the personal assurance: God is love, and his spirit gift lives within you. A longer way: we know God, and we can activate our God-knowingness. We can also ponder the meaning of love, different types of love, and the truth that God is spirit.
Sometimes I allow myself to get caught up in an unbeautiful emotion, one that does not fit the truth of the situation, and is not dominated by goodness. I am learning to respond to this disorder by bringing to mind a recent discovery: God is the reality of values.
For decades I have offered help to persons who are looking for work. I give feedback on their resumés, but the main thing I do is take them in seven steps to more powerful decision-action or prayer. I ask, “Do you want the religious version or the non-religious version?”
I believe that God has messages for our world, and that we can achieve better communication with him. Today I started anew. I tried to imagine what God might want to communicate. Here are my imaginings.
Living the truth encompasses the truths of material fact, intellectual meaning, and spiritual value. But some material facts are ugly and cruel. In Deity, truth consorts divinely with beauty and goodness. So how can we practice these values in our earthly environment?
Laughter? Reasons? Causes? Occasions? A child securely strapped to the back of his mother on a wonderful hike; the awareness of being with you–whom I love!–at the beginning of each podcast episode; the complete security that follows total commitment to the will of God; good news; a good joke; the call to rejoice.
Truth is alive, sturdy yet flexible, a gift of God discovered by the scientist who experiments intelligently, the philosopher who interprets wisely, and the believer who studies, serves, prays, and worships in spirit and in truth. One person’s truth can differ from another’s in the sense that truth is many-sided, and for various reasons people often focus more on one side than on another. The more we seek truth in its wholeness, the more we live the truth.
Amid happy laughter among friends, equals in the family, the rule of living–Do to others as you want others to do to you–unfolds in three levels, then six levels. A path to ascend to the way Jesus lived the golden rule is full of lessons, including lessons about how not to get overwhelmed by a seeming Mount Everest of idealistic challenge. Relax. Learn. And don’t let philosophical complexity upstage your moral and spiritual intuition! The golden rule is about living the truth in love.
First a report of my experience at Wrayco this morning. Next, a reflection on the reports I heard about marches last Sunday in Washington and Cleveland.