Some very young children are in serious danger because they do not receive the love they need in order to stay alive. At Children’s Hospital Oakland (California), Susan Shupp had a job caring for these children. Her assignment was to love them: to hold them, and talk to them and sing to them and play with them, giving them the affection and care for which they are starving. Susan would spend forty-five minutes to one hour with each child. After working there for a while, she began to go home exhausted every day.
Finally, when her fatigue became extreme, she turned to God and said, “I can’t do this anymore. Father, you love them through me.”
The next day she went back to her work transformed. At the end of the day, there was no fatigue. Day after day, week after week, no exhaustion.
Susan’s spiritual wholeheartedness and intelligent sincerity enabled her to receive all that the Father’s spirit within her was ready to pour forth through her.
I’ve been telling that wonderful story since the 1970s. Finally last week it occurred to me to try it myself. I was astounded. The nucleus of my being poured forth the purest love imaginable. For hour after hour, with person after encountered person or remembered person: love. Now I know what I have been writing about for decades, but with an experiential fullness, not a literary one. I turned that love towards every person and group that that I had something against. Immediately frustration, disappointment, resentment, and worse emotions vanished, replaced by nothing but divine love. I felt cleaned out, given a fresh start. What a day to live!
The next day it didn’t take long before I fell back into unbeautifulness, needing to climb out, to struggle toward a more serviceable platform for the day’s activity. I did manage a cooperation with God sufficient to provide a quite decent functioning attitude, thought the experience was a mixed one, human factors of concept co-mingling with spiritual love.
Then today I read the first message in God Calling. I give you an excerpt so that you can grasp the paragraph that I put into practice this morning.
January 1
Between the Years
Our Lord and our God. We joy in Thee. Without Thy Help we could not face unafraid
the year before us.
. . . .
Dwell not on the past—only on the present. Only use the past as the trees use My Sunlight to absorb it, to make from it in after days the warming fire-rays. So story only the blessings from Me, the Light of the World. Encourage yourselves by the thought of these.
Bury every fear of the future, of poverty for those dear to you, of suffering, of loss. Bury all thought of unkindness and bitterness, all your dislikes, your resentments, your sense of failure, your disappointment in others and in yourselves, your gloom, your despondency, and let us leave them all, buried, and go forward to a new and risen life.
. . . .
The paragraph about burying the remnants of unbeautiful experiences struck me as a good idea, so I did it. With great forcefulness and vigor I did it. Then I moved to interiorize the action by gestures of burying the ashes of the body of someone who has died: digging up a small hole in the ground, pouring in the ashes, pushing the dirt back into the hole, and standing astride the grave, triumphantly expecting the recycled energies coming forth in new growth.
Next I took my decision to bury those things into my soul. With the decision of my mind, I handed it up and released it into that dim realm of the true, deeper, and real self where powerful decisions are taken close to the light.
You may imagine that after that session this morning, when it was time to awaken love once more, what came forth was more worthy than my blended experience of yesterday, if still short of the recent, revelatory outpouring.
At its core, human love is received from God and given to another, going from one indwelt personality to another. In love at its core, the evolutionary factors of the self are in the background, eclipsed by the shining of what has come straight from the Father. The outworking of love, the merciful ministry, requires understanding attention to what surrounds that core, the evolutionary being in concreteness. But the basic connection of love that motivates and is expressed through that merciful ministry is received from God and passed on to the other.
And so it is: the gradual process of growth, with its ups and downs. Sometimes God’s transformative action is powerful and decisive. At other times, we do what we can in the back and forth between ourselves and God.
Please excuse me for being so autobiographical. The point is to share something that may give you some ideas you want to try out. And if you like one of these ideas, don’t wait forty years to do so!
The quoted selection is from God Calling, published by Barbour Publishing, Inc. Used by permission.
Photo: Baby’s Life Saving Cot Designed by Nurse at Middlesex Hospital, London, England, UK, 1945
Sister Mary Williams holds a young baby as she prepares to demonstrate the new cot she has designed at Middlesex Hospital, London. The cot is a ‘box’ on a stand and is leaning at a 45 degree angle: it can be laid flat. An oxygen cannister can be seen on the lower part of the frame.
Thanks, Jeff. Brilliant!
Scott, if I needed a reason to continue blogging, your comment would be it. A friend I have appreciated and cared about for decades, of whose interest in this weblog I was totally unaware, manifests with delight! Thank you for responding.
Thanks, Jeff. Brilliant!
Scott, if I needed a reason to continue blogging, your comment would be it. A friend I have appreciated and cared about for decades, of whose interest in this weblog I was totally unaware, manifests with delight! Thank you for responding.
Professor Wattles, you have summarized and have captured the essence of the struggle to do God’s will after discovering that will. Disappointment is a close disagreeable associate of all who undertake this supreme mission of life. The self does not yield easily to the demands of the spirit, but dedication, consecration and persistent effort brings increasing success. It is a growth process.
But even after we get the light right, then are we confronted with the task of execution: when, where, to what extent and under what condition to shine this light-the acquirement of experiential wisdom. But as you indicated, we must be willing to pick our souls up when we fail and try, try, again, until that wisdom is acquired that makes it wise as well as right.
Thanks you so much for sharing this experience. It makes us realize that we are not the only ones struggling to discern and execute God’s will.
Dr. Perry
Dr. Perry, your words perform the same service for me that mine perform for you. Isn’t it interesting that we each need such discourse from each other! We know these things, yet it remains edifying to hear them through the lens of the other personality.
Think of the Psalms and how often it seems to be the case in the couplets that “the same thing” is being said twice. In fact, it seems to me, the restatement provides another angle on the reality being spoken of. It is like the depth perception that results from the confluence of the vectors of two eyes, slightly removed from each other. The beginning of Psalm 19 opening illustrates the technique. “The heavens are telling the glory of God;/ and the firmament proclaims his handiwork./ Day to day pours forth speech,/ and night to night declares knowledge./ There is no speech, nor are there words;/ their voice is not heard;/ yet their voice goes out through all the earth,/ and their words to the end of the world.”
bi
Brother Jeff,
Until you started the weblog, it had been over 20year plus since we communicated with each other, but I am pleasantly surprised to announce that it seems as if there never has been a break in our communication. It seems like yesterday when we were involved in that joint venture in Nashville. I value your skillful ministry.
It is forever true, that love knows no time, and also forever true that we need each other to complement each other, for none of us have the complete picture of truth, not to mention the reassurance that we gain when we discover that we are having similar spiritual experiences.
Dr. Perry
Professor Wattles, you have summarized and have captured the essence of the struggle to do God’s will after discovering that will. Disappointment is a close disagreeable associate of all who undertake this supreme mission of life. The self does not yield easily to the demands of the spirit, but dedication, consecration and persistent effort brings increasing success. It is a growth process.
But even after we get the light right, then are we confronted with the task of execution: when, where, to what extent and under what condition to shine this light-the acquirement of experiential wisdom. But as you indicated, we must be willing to pick our souls up when we fail and try, try, again, until that wisdom is acquired that makes it wise as well as right.
Thanks you so much for sharing this experience. It makes us realize that we are not the only ones struggling to discern and execute God’s will.
Dr. Perry
Dr. Perry, your words perform the same service for me that mine perform for you. Isn’t it interesting that we each need such discourse from each other! We know these things, yet it remains edifying to hear them through the lens of the other personality.
Think of the Psalms and how often it seems to be the case in the couplets that “the same thing” is being said twice. In fact, it seems to me, the restatement provides another angle on the reality being spoken of. It is like the depth perception that results from the confluence of the vectors of two eyes, slightly removed from each other. The beginning of Psalm 19 opening illustrates the technique. “The heavens are telling the glory of God;/ and the firmament proclaims his handiwork./ Day to day pours forth speech,/ and night to night declares knowledge./ There is no speech, nor are there words;/ their voice is not heard;/ yet their voice goes out through all the earth,/ and their words to the end of the world.”
bi
Brother Jeff,
Until you started the weblog, it had been over 20year plus since we communicated with each other, but I am pleasantly surprised to announce that it seems as if there never has been a break in our communication. It seems like yesterday when we were involved in that joint venture in Nashville. I value your skillful ministry.
It is forever true, that love knows no time, and also forever true that we need each other to complement each other, for none of us have the complete picture of truth, not to mention the reassurance that we gain when we discover that we are having similar spiritual experiences.
Dr. Perry
Beloved Jeff:
I am so grateful to find you here, to reacquaint after some years (I recently reconnected w/ Byron, btw, hmmm).
Your post inspires and reminds me of a time when I palpably felt the fullness of connection with Spirit (felt as a two way exchange through the crown of my head) while feeling love radiating outwardly from my heart. I recall explaining what I was feeling to our group in the chapel in Lake Forest by reaching right arm heavenward, left arm toward our brothers and sisters.
Worship and service. Many times I’ve mused of there being no joint between the two. When we are truly and fully present our actions of each become one and the same. We lose ourselves in our acts of service so that we are simultaneously worshiping. Is this possible?
Kindly,
~Susan
Susan, welcome to this unusual conversation, and thank you for your fascinating sharing and your question!
One of the most interesting and paradoxical factors of human awareness is our ability to be in tune with our center, the presence of the Father’s spirit within, and at the same time be (for example) driving responsibility on the highway.
You might think that one dimension of awareness would exclude the other. Daily experience provides innumerable examples of being distracted from one focus by another one.
Part of the explanation for co-ordinate consciousness lies in a distinction between the focus of consciousness and the margin of consciousness. When I look at the image of Jesus to the right of my computer, in the background are a Russian icon, a Japanese print, reproductions of paintings by Matisse and Henry Ossawa Tanner, a small statue, the desk, computer, and so on. When I focus on any one of these, the other items recede into the margin.
But something in the margin can have a wonderful influence on flow of experience. Sometimes we totally forget our spiritual values and wander off into worldly this and that. In this situation, it can even come as a bit of a shock to remember our spiritual commitment and to reorganize our frame of mind in order to balance out and renew our perspective once again.
However at other times, in relaxed awareness we can turn to something that needs attention and retain the momentum of a worshipful quality of awareness. When worship catches fire in the soul, its afterglow becomes part of the margin of consciousness.
It strikes me as marvelous how awareness of our spiritual center can co-exist with being active in some field of responsibility. Once this becomes a habit, I suppose I will be out there proclaiming that we cannot truly be fully responsible in any activity without that centeredness or surrounding aura of the momentum of the morning’s worship or communion.
I conceive of gospel consciousness as combining awareness of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. One of these needs to be a spiritual-value-level awareness, while the other was a fact-level awareness; but both had to be present in order for the fullness of gospel consciousness to happen. Example: if I am profoundly engaged in speaking with an individual or group, my awareness of the Father would be marginal; or I am fully absorbed in relating to the Father, while the brotherhood of man is in the background (this combination is achieved by worshiping God as our Father.
Beloved Jeff:
I am so grateful to find you here, to reacquaint after some years (I recently reconnected w/ Byron, btw, hmmm).
Your post inspires and reminds me of a time when I palpably felt the fullness of connection with Spirit (felt as a two way exchange through the crown of my head) while feeling love radiating outwardly from my heart. I recall explaining what I was feeling to our group in the chapel in Lake Forest by reaching right arm heavenward, left arm toward our brothers and sisters.
Worship and service. Many times I’ve mused of there being no joint between the two. When we are truly and fully present our actions of each become one and the same. We lose ourselves in our acts of service so that we are simultaneously worshiping. Is this possible?
Kindly,
~Susan
Susan, welcome to this unusual conversation, and thank you for your fascinating sharing and your question!
One of the most interesting and paradoxical factors of human awareness is our ability to be in tune with our center, the presence of the Father’s spirit within, and at the same time be (for example) driving responsibility on the highway.
You might think that one dimension of awareness would exclude the other. Daily experience provides innumerable examples of being distracted from one focus by another one.
Part of the explanation for co-ordinate consciousness lies in a distinction between the focus of consciousness and the margin of consciousness. When I look at the image of Jesus to the right of my computer, in the background are a Russian icon, a Japanese print, reproductions of paintings by Matisse and Henry Ossawa Tanner, a small statue, the desk, computer, and so on. When I focus on any one of these, the other items recede into the margin.
But something in the margin can have a wonderful influence on flow of experience. Sometimes we totally forget our spiritual values and wander off into worldly this and that. In this situation, it can even come as a bit of a shock to remember our spiritual commitment and to reorganize our frame of mind in order to balance out and renew our perspective once again.
However at other times, in relaxed awareness we can turn to something that needs attention and retain the momentum of a worshipful quality of awareness. When worship catches fire in the soul, its afterglow becomes part of the margin of consciousness.
It strikes me as marvelous how awareness of our spiritual center can co-exist with being active in some field of responsibility. Once this becomes a habit, I suppose I will be out there proclaiming that we cannot truly be fully responsible in any activity without that centeredness or surrounding aura of the momentum of the morning’s worship or communion.
I conceive of gospel consciousness as combining awareness of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. One of these needs to be a spiritual-value-level awareness, while the other was a fact-level awareness; but both had to be present in order for the fullness of gospel consciousness to happen. Example: if I am profoundly engaged in speaking with an individual or group, my awareness of the Father would be marginal; or I am fully absorbed in relating to the Father, while the brotherhood of man is in the background (this combination is achieved by worshiping God as our Father.