Do I spend my life looking down to avoid the pit falls
Do I give myself to sealing up the cracks in life
or do I need to learn to step over them

Only a constant inspiration of divine hope
allows me to look up and step over the issues.

Most of my life issues boil down to security. The need for happiness, order, understanding, fairness …. all these things constantly threaten my security and I’ve been round the track too many times now to think that I can control them.

I know I need to work for these things but somehow if I could only be free of the need to have them.

So I’m practicing a new discipline. When anxiety rises or I feel challenged I say to myself  ‘I don’t need to have this resolved. I want it resolved, I will work to resolve it, but I don’t need it resolved.

It’s a form of poverty to not need these things. The bible calls people who relinquish the need of things, the poor, and this kind of poverty is a blessed state.

Thomas Merton says that monks don’t live in poverty just because they have no material goods and no decisions to make. Life is easy for them.

God’s version of poverty is not the relinquishing of things but letting go of the need for them. So now I am foundbygod in amongst all issues and stuff of life.

True poverty is not in removing all things from my life but in removing my need for them.

An issue arises to do with home or my work and there is a ‘free for all’ of thoughts that just fly into my head. I spend my precious energy and time trying to deal with the most aggressive, intrusive of these illegal entrants. Much later I find that the quieter thoughts in the background are sound and creative and healing.

I must declare a no fly zone in my head and as soon as I see an illegal entrant I must throw it out and see the background ‘breath of God’ thoughts that give me a way through and life. In the clearing I am foundbyGod.

To fight would mean conflict, and acceptance that I can only find life when I’m winning the most I can. It would mean running away from the formative experience of losing. Perhaps I need to learn to lose, for my body to be trained to lose so that I’m able to find life in the losses which will surely come in life.

I think I’ll avoid the conflict and appeal to their better nature for my so called loss and find life where I am foundbyGod where the Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

I walked into danger like walking into water

it’s as if I’m drowning by consent

He jumps from heaven to his death to save me

I am broken by my own choices

and made whole again by his own sacrifice

first forgiven then healed

the beauty and the passion of the rescue arrests me

I am changed for life

made more ready for eternity

foundbygod

Thankfully people are becoming much more open about their infirmities and realising that everyone has something can be helpful.

However ’sufferer beware’. I have noticed a tendency for people to take the tragic step from having an infirmity to labelling themselves as infirm. One minute you are compulsive and obcessive, the next minute you are OCD (obcessive compulsive disorder).

It’s really important to be honest about your infirmities and take responsibility to arrange your lifestyle around the real you ‘warts and all’.  Look after yourself. But be very careful to not to take on the identity of infirm. You manage your infirmity it doesn’t manage you.

This became clear to me when I realised that all the famous bible characters had massive physical or psychological infirmity which is out in the open and FoundbyGod. It’s here that the real living begins.

see useful website www.findingsanctuary.co.uk

On reflection a small voice said to me, ‘yes, garden the way you live your life, get rid of the bad habits and nurture the good ones. But, don’t attempt to garden the issues and circumstances around your life to create the outcomes you think you want. Leave those to my Father who is the gardener of the way your life works out’.

Well this is in the bible and it’s Jesus who says my Father is the gardener so I guess I’ve been ‘foundbygod’

I found myself asking the present moment for something that it was not giving. And I missed what the present moment was giving.  Being reflective I allowed the example to spread across my life and realised that I often do this. I ask the present moment to give me something it is not giving and miss the life in front of me. Perhaps I just need to enter the life given to me in the moment and trust for future moments in the future.

I am found by God in the present moment and nowhere else but what if I’m not in the present moment, I won’t be there to be found.

Mostly I find that thinking too much of the future isn’t really helpful. It’s seems good to have plans and hopes and dreams but working out how they will work doesn’t work well for me.

I find that what is actually happening today is so different than I could have imagined.

It seems that things work out when you get there not before hand. So I am only ever and always FoundbyGod in today.

I ask myself, ‘how did they get in here, into the intimate space of my thinking’.

A still small voice inside me says, ‘you bought them in, now walk them out, and if you find them in here again don’t converse with them or entertain them, walk them out’.

I’m either going nuts or I am truly being FoundbyGod.