Hal Green, Ph.D - SoundSage

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Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), was called “the man of the twelfth century.” His vision of the full extent of the Christian’s spiritual journey and destiny, together with his grasp of the nature of love, are second to none in church history. His exquisite descriptions of romantic love between God and the soul may well have helped to trigger the entrance into and fixation on romantic love in the Middle Ages, which continues unabated unto the present moment.

It is said that Saint Bernard had a “honey-sweet voice.” And he extolled the sweetness of Christ and Christ’s love for us. His prayer of praise to Jesus connects divine sweetness with human joy. From the former arises the latter:

“Jesus, how sweet is the very thought of you! You fill my heart with joy. The sweetness of your love surpasses the sweetness of honey. Nothing sweeter than you can be described; no words can express the joy of your love. Only those who have tasted your love for themselves can comprehend it. In your love you listen to all my prayers, even when my wishes are childish, my words confused, and my thoughts foolish. And you answer my prayers, not according to my own misdirected desires, which would only bring bitter misery; but according to my real needs, which brings me sweet joy. Thank you, Jesus, for giving yourself to me.”

What effect might the sweetness of Jesus have upon you? As you meditate on this prayer and the sweetness of the love of Christ for you, I will share my own reaction. The love of Jesus being sweet calms me at once, and heightens my confidence to approach him without fear, but rather with open tenderness, to match his own tenderness for me. With sweetness is also understanding and gentleness, and Jesus’ gentleness brightens my love for him, as well as my desire to draw near to him. Such silent sweetness includes an acceptance of me as I am, and a responsiveness to my prayers, ever directed at what I really need, rather than what I think I want.

Central to our faith is the actual sense, if not experience, even taste, of Jesus’ love for us. As Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). What could be sweeter than such a pure, self-giving love? “O taste and see that the LORD is good; happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 8:8).

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There is surely no grander a statement of faith in God than Psalm 91. It is a psalm to carry in your heart, especially when seeking God’s protection from evil of all manner, including “deadly pestilence,” which we recently endured with Covid 19. As you read and pray the first ten verses, imagine how you would feel if you truly believed in and acted on these words. Imagine the peace, assurance and strength these promises of God could generate in your heart:

“You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’ For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked.
“Because you have made the LORD your refuge, the Most High your dwelling place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.” (Ps 91:1-10).

What does the psalm say is the key to your safety? That you live in the shelter of God as your refuge and fortress. This gets intensified in the remarkable final three verses of this psalm, which are truly soaked in radical, Biblical faith. I will quote the RSV translation, changing the third into the second grammatical person, to render it more personal and powerful. I invite you to pray these two verses, as if God is actually saying them to you:

“Because you cleave to me in love, I will deliver you. I will protect you, because you know my name. When you call to me, I will answer you; I will be with you in trouble, I will rescue you and honor you. With long life I will satisfy you, and show you my salvation” (Ps 91:14-16 RSV paraphrase).

Most significantly, the “cleave” in the original Hebrew means “devotion,” signifying cleaving to, as lovers cleave to each other, or as parents and children cling to one another. The message? Cleave to God now and God will take care of you, all the way to your eternal life.

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Prayer is communication with God in all its forms. This includes intimate as well as seemingly distant communication, from monologues to dialogues, from texts to touch, from speech to silent communion. Prayer establishes the bridge between God and humanity. It is as vital to our personal well-being to develop a flourishing prayer life, as it is to learn how to communicate love to human loved ones.

An analogy may be helpful here. There are two sides or hemispheres to the human brain. What connects them, so that they can communicate with each other, and work together for that person to be whole and healthy, is a band of neural fibers called the “corpus callosum.” If this band is damaged or destroyed, that person can no longer function fully as themselves.

To extend the analogy: let the left hemisphere represent our embodied being connected to the physical universe. And let the right hemisphere represent our spiritual being connected to the unseen kingdom of God. That means we have a “joint citizenship” in both this cosmos and heaven. This was already understood by St. Augustine back in the fifth century C E.

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Is there a Hell? The three faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam say a definite “yes,” just as they do about the existence of Heaven and a coming Final Judgment.

Heaven and Hell are as two destinations, the one of light and love, the other of darkness and hatred. And we are purportedly journeying toward one or the other right now. If toward Hell, God wants us to turn, and offers us constant opportunities to do so. If we will but turn to God, God will direct us to Heaven, God will see us home.

Hell is both a process and a state. It begins here and leads to a terrifying place beyond this life, which the Bible calls a lake of fire, into which we are thrown where we burn but never burn up. Yet that is also an apt description of hatred here, which is very close to the state of Hell. Hell is not indifference, for there is no fire in that. Hell begins here as the dark burning of the heart inflamed with the fuel of bitterness, resentment, unforgiveness, jealousy, envy, self-pity and hatred. Hell is when you see what you want and cannot have it.

In “New Seeds of Contemplation,” Thomas Merton says: “Hell is where no one has anything in common with anybody else except the fact that they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves. They are all thrown together in their fire and each one tries to thrust the others away from him with a huge, impotent hatred. And the reason why they want to be free of one another is not so much that they hate what they see in others, as that they know others hate what they see in them: and all recognize in one another what they detest in themselves, selfishness and impotence, agony, terror and despair.”

Hell is always of our own choosing, not of God’s. God wills that no one go to Hell, but that all turn and live (see Ezekiel 18:30-32). Hell is therefore the place we end up when we have constantly, willfully refused the appeals of God and love. It is not as if God flings us there in God’s righteous wrath; it is rather where we put ourselves, while God continues to love and grieve over us. Hell is not God’s final word to us, but our final word to God.

C. S. Lewis, in “The Great Divorce,” says, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened” (p.72-73).

Hell is like a “black hole” we enter here when we lose the capacity to love. Hell is a state of silent misery, which we try to cover up and over with the pleasures and diversions of this life. We do this to no avail: our misery will eventually overtake us, our emptiness haunt us unto our final hours.

C. S. Lewis believed that Heaven and Hell remain end places of our continued choosing. He said that even should we die and go to Hell, we will still have opportunities to turn to God and choose Heaven.

Rob Bell says much the same thing in his recent book, “Love Wins.” He asks, how could God love you like a son or daughter one minute and then throw you into an eternal Hell of privation and torture the next? I believe it is beneath the greatness of God’s love to ever close the door forever to reconnection. As the Psalmist says, God is as present in Hell as in Heaven. And wherever God is, there is Love.

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To sense Your presence is to sense Your fullness.
Even the slightest breeze of You, bears the ineffable sense of You as such.
Like a musical note of unique tone and timbre, You require very little volume to be heard with utter clarity.

Whenever You show up all of You shows up.
You are never partial or partially there, as if You would divide Yourself, as we seem to divide ourselves between multiple demands.

Wherever You are, You are all there, all in, silently instructing us to be likewise: wherever we are, be fully there, with whomever we are – above all with You, the Beloved.

You want all of us, only all of us, ever all of us, all in.
And that is what You bring to us, as the first volley of true relationship.
You seem to say, “I will begin by being fully present to you.
Do likewise to Me, so we can move forward united to the place I have planned for us.
We must be all in, together, or you will not attain your destiny in Me.”

A tiny taste of the ocean is nevertheless a taste of the ocean.
The merest of ingestions teaches us at once the salt content of the whole.
The quality of the whole reveals itself in the smallest of its offerings.
So it is with love, and so it is with God.

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At some level, we are all servants. Perhaps we are all here to be of service, to make some difference in the lives of others. Whom do you serve? God? Yourself? Family? Friends? Neighbors? Community? If you determined your wealth not by money and possessions, but by the cumulative service you have rendered to others over the years, how rich are you? Conversely, how poor?

This is not the way we usually think, however. We measure wealth in material terms, not spiritual. Through the millennia, most have believed it is better to be served than to serve. Most secretly envy and seek to emulate the rich and famous, the prestigious and popular, those who are the served, rather than the ever-lowly servants.

Yet when we consider the most important persons in our lives, those who most affected and affirmed us, they are the servants. They are not the persons we served, but the persons who served us. They are the ones who were there for us when we were in need, those who lovingly shaped and sharpened us.

So which kind of person do you want to be? Those valued or envied by others, those treasured in the hearts and memories of others for service given, or those quietly disdained and disliked by others for goods attained?

As for me, I choose to be a servant. I didn’t always feel this way; as a young man, I wanted to become rich and famous, and have others serve me. I thought being a mere servant demeaning. Then I turned fourteen and that very day became a busboy at a steakhouse in downtown Des Moines, managed by my mother. So it went with job after job; I seemed to always be serving others. Yet I still yearned to become one others serve.

Most fortunately for me, that turned out not to be my lot. It became apparent that I belonged among the many servants silently working in the world, who attempt to keep things together, keep things moving. In hindsight, I would not have it any other way. I thank God for years of service, though mostly unthanked for at the time. The joy was in the serving, not the praise of others.

The ancient adage that “It is better to give than to receive,” rings true for me. What it really means is that it is ultimately more rewarding to serve than to be served. It also rings true for me the three haunting questions a pastor breathed again and yet again, while in the midst of a potentially life-ending heart attack. Lying in an intensive care hospital bed, his three possibly final issues were these: “Who loves me? Whom have I loved? Have I served the Lord?”

Those questions are never very far from me. Nor is the succinct summary statement about service offered by the founder of the people called Methodists, John Wesley. These words are as profound as they are simple:
“Do all the good you can
by all the means you can,
in all the ways you can,
in all the places you can,
to all the people you can,
as long as ever you can.”

If you can somehow manage to so live your life, on a daily basis, your eventual wealth will be beyond measure. The wealth known only by, and given to, servants.

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Let the first step on your path to God be that of faith. Take the proverbial leap of faith that by your faith, you have obtained peace and right standing with God through Jesus Christ. Take hold of that faith, and let it take hold of you.

Once that faith is in place, strengthened by the surrounding grace of God, you will be ready to face unshaken, whatever may come in your service to God and love. Paul puts forward what to expect, in one of the most important promise passages in the Bible:

“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:1-5).

Paul wants us to boast in the hope of sharing God’s glory, as revealed and offered to us in Christ Jesus. We are even to boast about the sufferings that may come in service to the Lord. Why? Because such suffering, with the hidden upholding of the Spirit, will produce endurance, and endurance will lead to character. Then in a kind of circling back, character will produce hope. And this hope will not disappoint us or fade away, because God’s love will be poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, given to us, as we persevere in hope.
As Paul elsewhere attests, “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” (Romans 8:24). While you cannot see hope, you can definitely feel it giving fresh strength to your heart and soul. Believe in that hope!

Even with hope, suffering will nevertheless visit us all. Essential to maturing in faith is learning to withstand such hardships. That includes the faith that suffering will generate endurance. Truth is, without suffering we cannot develop endurance. And endurance lays the foundation of character. Here I think of the elderly persons I served as a pastor who were members of the “greatest generation.” They suffered through the Depression and World War II; yet they endured. In so doing, they attained a quiet strength of character, moral fortitude and clarity about what truly matters in life.

As you pray this Scripture, ask the Holy Spirit to pour God’s love into your heart. Through God’s love and the hope that it generates, you will be able to endure what comes with the faith conviction that you are destined to share in the glory of God.

It is no wonder that Paul closes out his great letter to the Romans, with this hope-infused benediction on hope: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).

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When asked the question about where God is, an ancient sage said simply, “God is wherever we let God in.” There is great truth here. We actually have to invite God in, rather than expect that God will do what we want without our asking or awareness. Who among us would enter into the home of a friend without first knocking and waiting for them to open the door?

When Jesus sent seventy disciples into the countryside to prepare the people for his coming, he said, “Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house” (Luke 10:5-7).

In other words, those who were open to and welcoming of the peace of Christ, were also ready for the coming of Jesus into their home and life. And those who were not open, missed out on the all-to-rare moment of God’s visitation. We do not know when God will arrive at our door, but we are cautioned to be ready, open, inviting, and welcoming.

I seek to be ready daily, and I have vowed to God:
“I will be ready for You when You come. I do not know when You are coming or how, or where I will be, but I will be ready for You when You come.
I am not ready for You now, though I have been ready before. And I will be ready for You when You come.”

God is always ready for us, even if we are not ready for God. These insistent words of Christ frequently address me when I pray: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me” (Rev 3:20).

Sit in a comfortable straight back chair, with both feet on the ground and arms resting on your thighs. Relax and practice “belly-breathing,” with your eyes closed. As you breathe in, let God in, so to say. And as you breathe out, let go and let God; that is, give your heart and soul and life to the God whom you have invited in, including all of your worries, fears, and concerns.

Breathe in, “Let God,” and breathe out, “Let go.” Do this for 5 to 10 minutes. God is ever so gentle and kind. I assure you, whatever you give to God, God will take. Whatever of yourself you open to God, God will enter.

Note carefully, not only is God wherever we let God in; God will let you find God when you seek God with you whole heart. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God said:
“For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD” (Jeremiah 29:11-14a).

God is far more desirous of entering us than we are of entering into the Spirit of God. But when you are ready, and all that you are stands at the entrance door into the kingdom, God will open to you, and you will enter God as God enters you.

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https://drhalgreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BREATH-PRAYER-FOR-LETTING-GOD-AND-LETTING-GO.mp3When asked the question about where God is, an ancient sage said simply, “God is wherever we let God in.” There is great truth here. We actually have to invite God in, rather than expect that God will do what we want without our asking or awareness. Who among us would enter into the home of a friend without first knocking and waiting for them to open the door?
When Jesus sent seventy disciples into the countryside to prepare the people for his coming, he said, “Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house” (Luke 10:5-7).

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Psalm 51 is most powerfully prayed when you truly seek the forgiveness of God. King David wrote it after the prophet Nathan told him that God knew about his joint sins of adultery with Bathsheba, now pregnant with his child, and the grievous murder of her faithful husband, Uriah. David did so in order to take Bathsheba as yet another wife. The psalm is David’s confession, taking full responsibility for his actions, and seeking forgiveness and restoration.

While very few of us will ever sin against God’s commandments to the extent of David, the psalm nevertheless has a universal message. All sin is against God, since “sin” comes from archery and literally means to miss the mark God sets before us on how to live right with God.

David admits his responsibility and throws himself on the mercy of God. In seeking forgiveness, he also seeks to go back to how things were between God and him before his grave sins. And these verses will speak to us as well, especially when we are in the throes of the dire consequences of disobedience of whatever sort. What David seeks is precisely what God’s forgiveness can do:
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you” (vss. 10-13).

At one time or another in our lives, most of us will struggle with the weight of guilt, together with the felt need to confess our sins to another, such as a priest or pastor, which we are actually commanded to do (Jas 5:16; 1 John 1:8-10). That is why we have Confession, and why Christ Himself gave the church the authority to forgive sins (Matt 18:18: John 20:23).

At the close of the psalm, David realizes what is acceptable to God:
“For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (vss.16-17).
This raises an important question: where does God abide? As if in answer, God says, “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isa 57:15).

And Jesus said, “For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 14:11).
Sometimes it takes being broken, like David, in order to humbly beg for and be open to receive, God’s reviving forgiveness.

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The common cold of the soul just may be irritability. Or so a group of us determined during a recent meeting. To be like the common cold, it has to be readily “catchable” by others. And what is more catchable than another’s irritation? It is easier to catch than the horrific Covid virus. Irritation spoils the spiritual atmosphere between people; it carries itself virus-like into the hearts of those who breathe it in.

There are different reasons for being irritable. For some it is a chronic way of life; whether they were born sensitive and tightly wound, or bear wounds from unresolved childhood issues, they are miserable and keep infecting others with the “strain” of their particular virus.

For others, irritability is situational and short-lived. Something occurs that gets to them; then they “sneeze” their irritation back out into the relational atmosphere.

How do you protect yourself against this common cold of the soul? First of all, make sure you are healthy, not emotionally stressed or run down, which renders you more susceptible to infection. If you are susceptible, be aware of that, and keep some careful distance from others, and from those issues which you know will set you off. Do this at least until you regain greater health of soul, as vital to your wellbeing as health of body.

You can regain health of soul by doing what’s good for your soul, which also happens to be what’s good for your body. You need sufficient rest, nourishment, time for meaningful and rewarding work as well as time for relaxing, recreating activity, from sports to reading, hikes to meditation. You also need a satisfactory relational life. If some of your relationships are working, hopefully others are; invest yourself in those that produce rather than deplete energy.

Another way to protect yourself from being infected by the irritability of others, is not to take what they say personally, even if they want you to. Everything they say or do is also self-reference; it first and foremost reflects back on them. If someone frowns and snaps at you about some wrong you have supposedly committed, don’t just look at your behavior; look also at the other’s behavior, at what they are telling you about themselves. In one way or another, everything we say arises from our perspective and point of view.

Irritable reactions are hardly ever appropriate to the situation. If you need to apologize for something you said or did, the other may need to apologize for how they snapped at you. If you are expected to be accountable for your behavior, so are they; if they do not hold themselves accountable to you, then as long as you have to work together, try not to take them too seriously or take in their irritability toward you.

There is a line from the musical play, Fiddler on the Roof, that addresses how to handle irritability. A beggar receives only one half of what another typically gives him. He asks why the man is half as generous as usual. The man replies, “I had a bad week.” The beggar responds, “So if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”

If another is having a bad day, why should you suffer? Stay healthy and seek to avoid what irritates and those who irritate you. What you do not get, you will not pass on to others.

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We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about heaven. Not unless we are facing death, our own or a loved one’s. We have all we can handle right now; we are not ready to let go and move on to some unknown realm beyond here, whatever it may be, if it is at all.

Heaven is not the place where everybody gets to go simply by virtue of dying. Heaven is the realm of highest privilege, for that is God’s own special place to dwell, where you can see God – and not worry about living through the impact of beholding the holy.

The ancient Greeks believed that we humans came from a heavenly realm before our birth, and that we longed to return to our true home. They said your origin determined your destiny, where you came from where you are going, or at least where you long to go. Further, until you get to your true origin, which is your final destiny, your heart will remain restless.

Jesus left this earth to return to the Father, to heaven. He did so because that’s where He belonged, as God’s Pre-existent Son, with God from before the foundations of the world. While here, Christ merely “tented” among us, as a stranger in a stranger land.

Heaven is where we really belong. We live now in a land of forgetfulness. Still, we have many fears about heaven. We fear it may not really exist. We fear we may not get there. We fear who we may or may not find there, loved ones and those we disliked or disliked us here. We wonder: if we didn’t get along in this life, how will we ever get along in the next one?

We fear heaven may not be everything we hope and dream it will be. At the same time, we fear it might be so superior to anything we had thought or imagined that we won’t know what to do. We fear we will not like it – and won’t be able to tell anyone! Or we fear that we will like it too much, and will run the risk of losing it somehow, through some transgression we might knowingly or unknowingly commit there.

We cannot imagine true heaven here. All we can do is imagine a life like this one only greater. That may scare us all the more, because who wants to go to what you cannot imagine, giving up all you’ve known?

Yet heaven is our true home. It is where we were born, even before our birth on this thin plane of existence. Jesus tells us to put our treasures, and then our hearts, in heaven, for “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Your heart follows what you treasure, whether that is friend or fortune, persons or pleasures. Find where your heart is, and you find also what you treasure.

Jesus says that the treasures that really matter, which nothing can destroy or take from you, are the treasures of heaven. Only these treasures grant peace, strength and perpetual well-being. Heaven’s treasures are all of God, of love, of your first and final home.

One of the greatest treasures of your heart, put there by God, is a morsel of the manna of heaven, a tiny fragment of the sod of paradise. It is sufficient to nurture and sustain the faith of your heart all your days; nothing on earth can tarnish or eradicate heaven’s sod.

Heaven is the time and place for our coming consummation in God. It is that communion with God which, once entered upon, shall go on forever. Heaven is also the time and place for our reunion with loved ones who have gone before; it is the place for the fulfillment of human love. Which is the more important to you: communion with God or with loved ones? To answer either way may well leave you feeling uneasy, as if you have neglected something most vital to you. No wonder then that the history of the concept of heaven has vacillated between these two emphases.

The first emphasis is the “theocentric” or God-centered view. The second is the “anthropocentric” or human-centered view. Which is more important to us is a statement of our current values. Of course we do not want to make heaven an either/or, but a both/and – for both kinds of communion are necessary for our true and lasting fulfillment. How could it be heaven if we attained only the one or the other, but not both unions? And wouldn’t an eternity of one kind of communion without the other become boring? God forbid that heaven should in any way become stale to us! Imagine how great our disappointment would be if we should find ourselves grumbling, “Is this all there is?”

One or the other vision of heavenly communion predominates for each of us. Ask yourself this question: If there were a “Y” in the road beyond the grave, the one leading to God and the other to your lost loved ones, which path would you take? I would take the path to God – and rely on God’s love to build a bridge to my loved ones. I would want to make my home in God, then invite my loved ones to dwell there with me.

The bridge between God and our loved ones has already been built. Jesus Christ is its name. For in Christ we are both one with God and one with each other (see John 17). Christ is the Source and Ground of our unity with God and with one another in God.

Another issue concerns whether heaven is something we enter right after death, or only at some future point, say when the “new heaven and new earth” are revealed and the “General Resurrection” takes place. Is heaven a place for our souls and spirits now, or for our entire being, including our new and eternal “spiritual body,” when God consummates this creation? What can we expect now, and what later?
In accordance with the Biblical witness, heaven appears to be a time and place of two phases. First, it is the abode where we go immediately after our death, the realm of the dead referred to in the Psalms and the Parables of Jesus. Secondly, heaven is where we shall live forever with God and one another in a new creation, a new cosmos, with new and never-decaying, never-dying bodies (Revelation 21-22).

We wonder what our bodies will be like. This is a great mystery of our looming destiny, for we do not yet know what we shall be like, but when Christ appears, we shall be like Him. We shall have attained, we shall have become what the apostle Paul witnessed on the road to Damascus: a spiritual body, like our Lord’s, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
I believe our spiritual body will include wings, and the ability to fly like angels. For we shall be like angels not only in terms of not marrying, as Jesus tells us, but also as regards finally being able to know the flight our hearts may only dream of and pine for, here.

What must we do to get to heaven? While in a real way our whole lives is a preparation for heaven, Scripture teaches we are saved through faith in Christ, not from works. Yet without works, our faith is dead, just as without deeds, love is dead. Holiness both of heart and hands, both of soul and life are necessary for entering into and abiding forever within, paradise.

We do deeds of service not in order to get saved, but because we are saved. Just so, we do deeds of love not to be loved, but because we are loved. Our works of love prepare us for entrance into heaven. As the Bible warns, only the holy, only those who let God sanctify them through and through, may enter. Christ came to sanctify or purify us with His life, His body and blood, His Holy Spirit. That is why we must all be baptized; that is, we must all be cleansed by the waters of the Spirit, and washed in the forgiving, healing blood of the Lamb, who takes away the sins of the world.
What of those who die who are not fully prepared for heaven, those who had some faith, but never developed into full scale lovers of God and humanity? It is not for us to judge, for we shall be judged with the very same scale we use to judge others. We must leave to God the final disposition of all persons, including ourselves.

That being said, since we are talking about most of us, who are neither good nor bad, hot nor cold, who are ready neither for heaven nor hell, the question of where we go has urgency. For over a thousand years, the Church believed in a “Purgatory.” Purgatory was the place most of us went at first, a hospital-like abode not for punishment but healing, maturing and preparing us for our long-sought entrance into heaven proper.

God, I hope, will do whatever is necessary, even after the grave, to prepare God’s own children for entrance into paradise, for their return home.

According to Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, in their fascinating book, Heaven. A History, the prevailing view of heaven today has eight common characteristics. See how they accord with your view:
1. Only a thin veil divides heaven and earth.
2. Heaven is seen as the continuation and fulfillment of earthly life, rather than its opposite.
3. Though still the place of “eternal rest,” it is a place of continuing activities.
4. There is a focus on continuing communal and familial love and concerns.
5. Describability: heaven shares with earth characteristics of concrete and describable existence.
6. New experiences: a real life continues with new experiences in both a time and place existence.
7. Self-consciousness: we continue as persons, with a continuous self-identity and consciousness.
8. Relatedness to God: we have a much greater, more intimate connection and communion with God.

In sum, let us hold to the faith that the best is yet to be. Let us trust in our heart’s manna of heaven. The Holy Spirit will give us a “down payment” of paradise now. Heaven here is the communion with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit – and also the sweet communion with one another in love, which means in God. If we are not open both to the Spirit and each other now, we will not be ready for a heaven of endless communion and community later. Love God and one another to the full now, and heaven is already yours.

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It is important to be aware of your expectations about prayer. It is also important to beware of them. We all have expectations about a many things, from the weather to the behavior of loved ones. Much of our daily life is preceded by and lived through the prism of, and silently evaluated by, our expectations. It has been said that, “Relationships go awry when you either don’t get what you expected, or what you get, you did not expect.”

This is certainly the case regarding your relationship with God, including your prayer-life. As you have developed an attitude toward God over time, so also have you developed expectations regarding what might happen during and as a consequence of prayer.

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What do we desire when we desire God? The ancient philosopher Plato said God was the union of the good, the beautiful and the true – and that the only way to ascend to the realm of the holy was through desire. Plato said that when we desire God, then – and only then – passion comes to our aid, giving us wings so we may fly heavenward. Hence, rather than fearing passion, we need to nurture it, and ride it all the way to its end, which is God, the good, beautiful, and true.

What if it turns out that the desire for God and the desire for love are really one and the same desire? Note that I said the desire for “God,” not the desire for the possible benefits of a relationship with God, such as comfort and peace, healing and salvation. These are the kinds of benefits people tend to talk about regarding their respective desire for God.

I have had many discussions with persons over the years who said they had no desire for there to be a God. Or more to the point, they said, “I don’t need God.” I have never known quite how to answer that. After all, we may well be constructed, or at least placed into a cosmos where we can seemingly get by sufficiently well without a God pulling strings from the wings.

Perhaps the best response I have come up with is to answer their question with another question: “But do you want there to be a God?” Sometimes this has stopped persons in their verbal tracks, as they attempt to take in the question. What does “want” have to do with God, life, purpose, personal satisfaction and fulfillment? I would venture to assert that want is every bit as significant as need. I have a question for you: which is in the end the more significant to your daily life and strivings, wants or needs? I already know the answer: wants, hands down. “Want” involves your will, your very freedom to choose what you desire and are willing and wanting to seek. “Need” on the other hand, seems to refer to your “deficits”, to what is perhaps necessary to complete your being as a person. That is, “need” takes the free will out of desire.

When it comes to love, I wonder whether love is a need or a want. I have asked persons, “Do you need or want love?” The usual answer involves a combination of the two, though a few have maintained that they can get along fine on their own, like being their own islands, with no loved ones to be concerned with, to pull them down as well as pick them up. For the most part, however, persons have decided that love is more of a want than a need; that is, love is a matter of the heart’s desire, less urgent than say, the stomach’s yearning or the lungs gasping. This does not make love any less important than our physical needs; it just takes it out of the realm of necessity and puts in squarely in the area of freedom and choice.

I am convinced that to desire love is to desire God. And that just as truly, to desire God is to desire love. Further, to desire God for God’s own sake is roughly akin to loving God for God’s own sake. And isn’t this how we want to be loved, as well as to love another? Not due to this or that benefit, this or that personal characteristic, but because that person is lovable in his or her own right; or more to the point, because we actually do love that person, well, simply because we love that person. We can give you reasons, but the love itself is greater than any reason given as to why it should exist. This is the secret of love: it exists for its own sake. Love, like God, is our ultimate end, rather than merely our means. And the good news is, love seeks us even more than we seek love.

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A single verse from Isaiah has touched my life deeply over the years. Whenever I pray through it, these anointed words have not failed to quiet and strengthen my soul:

“For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa 30:15).

It is never too late to return to God. I have witnessed persons returning to God after years of seeming alienation, for whatever reason. Perhaps it was due to suffering, and not believing that God was there, that God could or would save them from their painful state of helplessness and aloneness. Yet this single verse offers an extraordinary promise from the God of Israel, which God alone can fulfill.

Recently, a close friend, who had been an avowed atheist for decades, finally returned to God. Living alone, he had to put down his beloved dog of fifteen years. On returning home, weeping, he discovered what he could not deny was a sign from God. His dog was to be cremated. And when he went to pick up his little dog’s bed, next to his own, he found ashes both in the bed and all around it. There was no way this could have just happened. He sensed that it was a miracle, and came to believe that his dog was not only a gift from God, but had brought God to him. Broken by grief, he was at last open to the love God showed him.

The ancient rabbis said that whenever you turned or returned to God, no matter what your circumstances, you would have an immediate audience with God. Even if you did not feel it at the time, God would hear you and respond in God’s timing and way.

Such turnings can be sudden, even unexpected. It happened one evening in a hotel bar in Salt Lake City, on Wednesday, May 24, 1967. I was 24 years old and working in the field of psychology in Denver. I had just given a paper at the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association. It was well received and would be published in a journal. I had also been offered a full-ride Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Colorado State University. I finally had some confidence with women, and was enjoying an active social life. I had picked up golf and three good golf buddies.

On the surface, it seemed that my life was going great in all directions. Except for one: there was a growing void at my center, which, if there was a God, would surely be the one, and perhaps the only one to somehow fill it. I had been an agnostic for more than a decade, but now the “God-question” surfaced, like a whale emerging out of deep waters, and not merely from my head, but above all from my heart. I finally, fully realized that without God, life had no meaning, purpose, or ground.

After few beers into a life examination, something I did rather often, I grabbed a bar napkin, and to my surprise I wrote a poem to an “unknown God.” I later titled it “The Turning”:

“I’ve lost it,
That little nexus that fosters both
Meaning and motivation.
After wayfaring years
The circle is complete –
I’ve met myself on snowy,
Stark mountain pass,
Going where I have been.
I will not take that trip again,
For I have learned its end.
So I stop and pause
And take no step.

“A tiny kernel,
Once failing to sprout,
Can neither rise nor return.

“A standstill.
I want to succeed unaided,
To break through the barren earth;
But I cannot supply the needed nourishment.
And so a plea is made:
The hands upturned,
Strong legs forced to kneel,
A desperate face skyward.
With pride smitten words I ask,
“Help this ‘modern man.’”

The following November, God touched me at a prayer meeting, changing my life forever.

Jesus came to call us home to God, regardless of where we were. He said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30).

Countless good will come from your returning. You will attain a Sabbath rest with God, and in simple quietness and trust in the God who has saved you, you will receive strength for your life journey toward God.

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More on love and picking berries. A few more things I discovered while my wife and I picked raspberries and blueberries at the Bock Berry Farm, close to Iowa City, Iowa. When we began, I somehow sensed that a berry patch could teach me some things about love. Nature will grant us insights into life if we will only stop, look and listen. Being mindful of physical things can open the door to spiritual realities.

When we got to Bock’s, we were ushered to one of many raspberry rows, to pick that row. Frankly, we were disappointed with our row. It seemed in between good harvest times; after several feet picked and minutes spent, we only had one quart.

So we decided to pick the other fruit we had come for, blueberries. I had never even seen a blueberry patch, let alone picked from one. What a difference we found between the blueberry and raspberry patches! In an hour, we picked thirteen pounds of blueberries from our assigned row.

The first lesson: there are always other patches, even different fruit to harvest. So don’t lose heart or hope; don’t assume any one patch or relationship will be the only opportunity you will ever get. Other patches, new relationships dwell just ahead, out of sight but not out of reach. There you may find good fruit just waiting to be harvested.

As Kitty and I picked blueberries, moving down the same row across from one another, we kept noticing berries behind us we had missed.

The second lesson: it’s important to keep looking back. It affords us another perspective from which we may discover missed fruit. The only true mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. Reflecting on our past has much to teach us, and as we traverse life’s berry patch, we will see our ourselves differently, and therefore also our past.

When you see good fruit you missed, reach back and pick them from the stilled stems of time. And rather than putting all the fruit into the containers of your memory, taste some berries now and again. They will strengthen you and renew your hope. Your past may yield more fruit for your present than you thought it would when you were going through it.

As we patiently worked our row of blueberries, bending in the humid heat of Iowa in July, we discovered that blueberries further down the row looked even fuller, better. In excited anticipation, we moved down the row. It turned out that these berries were indeed better. Perhaps they had been less picked, being deeper into the row.

The third lesson: sometimes the harvesting gets better, the farther you get into a row, the further you get into a relationship. Patient perseverance can pay off. But you cannot find out until and unless you persevere.

On the other hand, the opposite can prove true. Moving on to ripe readiness can be a better use of your limited time and energy. You can keep working in one section, in one relationship, from which, try though you may, you derive little fruit. Or if another section, another relationship, seems to offer the fruit you have been seeking, you can give it a chance.

You need to gain the wisdom, through your personal experience, to tell when it is time to patiently persevere, or to move on ahead. Though you will make mistakes, trust that there will always be fresh and fruitful berry patches ahead.

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A single verse from Isaiah has touched my life deeply over the years. Whenever I pray through it, these anointed words have not failed to quiet and strengthen my soul:

“For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa 30:15).

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Picking raspberries has some things in common with loving. I realized this a while ago when my wife and I spent an idyllic late afternoon in a raspberry patch. The weather was flawless, the fruit abundant and succulent, and our conversation as intermittent and intimate as the breezes which intertwined us.

We joyfully, carefully labored among the many bees already at work. As we picked, we would eat raspberries, as well as place them into containers. When both our stomachs and our containers had sufficient raspberries, we went home to make jam.

If you can put love into food, and I believe you can, love was in that jam. We enjoyed giving much of it away. And every time I tasted that jam, it transported me back to that raspberry patch, and to our sharing in nature’s bounty.

The most obvious thing raspberries has in common with love is thorns! Yet with love, as with raspberries, the fruit is well worth an occasional prick and loss of blood.

Timing is very important to both. You must give love time to mature and not get frustrated when things don’t move as rapidly as you would like. Have faith in the process, and strive to be there at the right time. As is said, “The timing is everything.”

You need to be patient and persistent. You may have to return to your love patch time and again, without giving up or getting discouraged. You never really see growth, but only its results. And you can sure tell when the fruit is ripe. Love relationships, like raspberries, are either coming on or decaying. As the poet Gibran said, “A love that is not always springing, is always dying.” Yet what seems dying, can surprisingly spring again, in both nature and the soul.

You cannot be in a hurry and enjoy the process. Nor can you find all the fruit. Slow down, appreciate the harvesting as much as the consuming of what you harvest. Put some of the fruit away for later, and eat some right now.

Harvest what is fully ripe, but also some of what is under ripe, for the under ripe adds body and taste to the jam. Take whatever is offered in love, even if it has not yet fully matured. As a whole, the harvest will always satisfy.

Spend some time on your knees, for it will give you a very different view. You can see the fullness of the plant only from ground level. Only the humble worker can harvest all of love.
Much of the process is out of your control, from the soil conditions to the weather. What you do is essential, but do not assume responsibility for everything. You usually harvest what others have planted, anyway.

Pick carefully, gently pulling the raspberries into your palms. The fruit is quite crushable. Be sensitive. Let love guide your grasp.

You get more raspberries when you harvest with another. It takes two to make love work; and the fruit of common labor far surpasses that of a single effort.

Others will come after you to pick what you miss. Do not try to get everything, for there is more than enough fruit—and love—to go around. Do not be possessive.

What you drop will not go to waste. Birds and insects will find much of it, and unseen fruit will enter the soil to generate tomorrow’s plants. Nothing of raspberries or love is ever really lost.

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Among the most profound teaching of Jesus occurs in John 3:1-8:

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

The Greek preposition which is used here for “from above” is “anothen.” The preposition “ano” means “above,” and the suffix “then” signifies “from.” Yet anothen also means “again.” Either way, what Jesus is saying is that you have to experience God; the unseen Holy Spirit must touch or enter you in some unforgettable way in order to enter the kingdom of God.

Perhaps the best analogy for being born from above or again is that of falling in love. Falling in love is a life-changing experience, built on the addition of the “other” and what that relationship brings to your life. All that you are falls in love with all that your partner is. Like the John Legend song says, “All of me, loves all of you.” The difference between reading a romance novel and actually meeting and falling in love is analogous to the difference between being “once born” and “born from above.” Yet how can you fall in love with someone you have never met? And how can the once born understand the twice born?

When I have conducted premarriage counseling with couples who had been divorced from a previous marriage, I would tell them that they get to start over again, rather like getting another “at bat” in baseball. And I would remind them that we learn more from our mistakes than our triumphs. And that with God, you can always get another “at bat,” regardless of the inning.

Now when you finally fall in love with God, it will be forever. And you will realize that being “born again” or “born from above” means to have entered into this love relationship with God, which actually takes place in God, through the Holy Spirit who is Love. I am most thankful to say I am in love with the God who loves me. In grateful response, I have written to God:

“I loved You before I knew You. When You dawned upon me, the rays of You reached at first light all that I am, all that I have been, all that I shall be.
And I knew then there was never a time I did not love You, nor could there ever be a time I would not love You.
I love You because You loved me first. My love arose in response to Your love, arose uncreated, unbidden, unmatched, arose as a flower-strewn path to You fixed before the foundations of the world.
I loved You from the first moment of Your glimmering grace. I loved You from the first with a love that lifted me, carried me to You, a love that knew not only You but the way to You, a love that found not only You but me in finding You.
In my love for You, hidden in me, hidden from me from the beginning, was also hidden the stilled shrine of the knowledge of You. When You dawned, You summoned forth my love and knowledge as twin gifts for me and for us, forever.”

For this prayer, breathe in God’s love, and breathe out your love for God in response.

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Among the most profound teaching of Jesus occurs in John 3:1-8:

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There is a lot of fear out there us these days, as we face a multitude of problems, from the pandemic to economic survival. It is difficult not to focus on the “what-if” or “could-be” variety of negative “possibility thinking” which our flesh is heir to. Anxiety has been defined as “living in the gap between the now and the then.” So, are you living in the gaps? This wonderful little psalm seeks to resolve any and all fear. The shortest of all 150 Psalms, Psalm 131 consists of a mere three verses:

“O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore” (vvs.1-3).

Jesus tells us that we must become as children to enter the kingdom of God, and that those who elevate themselves, God will humble – for their own benefit. But children know who they are; they are humble and not upset about that. Nor are they really concerned with the things they realize are beyond their grasp. For that they have to trust their parents. Their hearts are open and trusting and teachable; assuming they feel loved, and especially when they are small. They like being held; they readily calm down when in the sturdy arms of mom or dad.

Now, as David perfectly grasped in this brief and yet profound psalm, being thus humbled back into your childhood mentality can be one of the best things that can happen to you. Don’t fight it; let it be, just as you need to let God be God. God is already your Ultimate Mama or Papa; let God be so, taking in all the joy you can about this fantastic fact. Don’t sweat the small stuff, and let your divine Parent handle the really big stuff which will remain beyond your grasp. Let the One in charge be the One in charge. You are capable of doing that, really. You just have to want to; you must be willing to be God’s child, trusting God completely, as does an infant trust its momma.

Whenever I slowly read David’s words, I re-enter into my childhood, I re-experience my childhood, as well as the childhood of my own children, when I used to hold them, even rocking them to sleep. As my heart opens and I cease focusing on the great issues, letting go of all concerns and coming fully into the present, and the silent offer of being held like a child of the Beloved, a calmed peace fills me, and I am at trusting rest, just like a weaned child with its mother.

The prayer of St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), found in her breviary after her death, brings me to much the same place as Psalm 131. I hold them together in my heart as companion pieces. The one leads my heart over to the other.

“Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.”

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We all have our inner naysayers. We generally prefer not to talk about these harassing little daemons, though it can help us when we do. By “daemon,” I am not referring to some objective evil or the devil; I mean something akin to a computer virus, or a bacterium that can dis-ease our bodies.

Healthy as well as unhealthy persons have potential disease generating “beasties” dwelling in hidden recesses of their bodies. As long as we remain healthy and strong, we do not get sick from whatever virus or bacteria exists within us. But if we get overly tired or stressed or weakened, up springs this previously latent disease to attack us – right when we have become vulnerable. It seems unfair, but that is the way it is. Call it survival of the fittest.

As the body has its viruses and bacteria, which it seeks to hold in check, just so the soul has its inner negative voices, which can harass and plague us. Examples of negative inner players and their tormenting words, with which I am personally familiar: self-doubt (“You are worthless; you’ll never succeed”), inadequacy (“You are not good enough; others are better than you”), nihilism (“It’s all for nothing; it’s useless”), depression (“Things will not get better; you’ll never get out of your pit”), and anxiety (“You are going to go off the deep end; you won’t be able to keep things together”).

Almost paradoxically, it seems that the more we take on and attempt to fight off these personal doubters, the stronger they tend to resist. They love attention, as it were, and seem to seek all of ours. As the poet Gibran says, we live in half-embrace with what we most dread.

Psychologist Rollo May offers another way to grasp personal daemons. He says that a daemon is any natural function capable to taking over a whole personality – at least for a time. An example would be anger: when you are in a rage, your perceptions alter and you are not really yourself. The anger can seem to possess you; you temporarily lose the freedom not to be angry. And whenever you deal with the daemonic, you are dealing with the loss of freedom, the onslaught of psychic bondage. Just look at addiction and the demon of alcohol.

Other examples of natural functions which can lead to our becoming “dis-eased,” are lust, greed, envy, jealously, pride, sloth, and fear. Who among us has not at times been harassed by fear? FDR was right when he said, as WWII commenced: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

The really good news about these horrendous inner dialogues with our own personal negativity is that we do not have to engage with them. You do not have to begin walking down the path toward inner discord. You can say, “Hush!” or “Be quiet!” to these inner tormentors, then you can turn the other way, move your mind elsewhere, find something more positive on which to focus. You do have that power. And when you practice it, you find it gets easier. The quicker you learn to say “Stop!” the better off you will be. It is easier to get back onto the right path after taking just one as opposed to twenty steps off course.

We will always have both inner promoters and detractors, offering comforting encouragement or defeating doubt. Which is the truth? Both and neither. Your life will be what you make of it. Choose well to whom you listen.

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Without forgiveness and its power to restore us and our relationships, we are destined to become hard of heart. And hardness of heart is anathema to God. The Good News is that Jesus Christ brought God’s forgiveness with Him. Yet there is an important catch to receiving God’s forgiveness: in response to God’s forgiveness, we must become forgivers ourselves. Remaining unforgiving means refusing God’s priceless gift of forgiveness. When you let in God’s blanket forgiveness, you cannot help but forgive yourself and others, because of the freedom of heart and soul forgiveness brings. You do not want to hold onto unforgiveness any longer.

At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus cautions us:
“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors…. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:12, 14-15).

Elsewhere, Jesus continues to connect being forgiven by God and with the necessity of forgiving others:
“Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses” (Mark 11:25).
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37).

Being forgiving is a central characteristic of being Christian. Paul continues the instruction of our Lord:
“And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32).

“Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Colossians 3:13).

Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto His disciples after His resurrection, along with the authority to forgive sins. Imagine how the breath of Christ must have felt on the disciples’ faces. In this breath prayer exercise, breathe in Christ’s forgiving Spirit, and accept God’s forgiveness in Christ. Then as you breathe out, let go of all unforgiveness, turning everything and everyone over to God for God’s justice and mercy. Let God take care of what is beyond you.

Breathe in with the word, “forgiven” (by God). And breathe out with the word, “forgiving” (by yourself). The truth is, you have to let in God’s forgiveness before you can truly become forgiving. And that includes not only forgiving those who have wounded you, but also forgiving yourself as well. Many of us have greater difficulty forgiving ourselves than we do forgiving others. Forgive yourself as God in Christ has already forgiven you.

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Does God speak to us in dreams? According to the Scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, yes, absolutely. God or God’s representative may speak to us in sleeping dreams, and also in visions, which can happen both awake and asleep. I have known persons who reported such dreams to me. And I have been blessed with a few “God dreams.”

Dreams are one of the most overlooked forms of communication used by God. God has consistently spoken to people through this universally experienced and mysterious phenomenon. The Lord uses dreams for different purposes. A few Biblical examples:
– To warn global leaders of future events (Genesis 41:1-8).
– To provide revelation to His prophets: “Then the LORD came down in a pillar of cloud, and stood at the entrance of the tent, and called Aaron and Miriam; and they both came forward. And he said, ‘Hear my words: When there are prophets among you, I the LORD make myself known to them in visions; I speak to them in dreams’” (Numbers 12:6).
– To warn us against certain decisions: “So after they had gathered, Pilate said to them, ‘Whom do you want me to release for you, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?’ For he realized that it was out of jealousy that they had handed him over. While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him’” (Matthew 27:17-19).
– To reveal His divine destiny for our lives: Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 37:5-8).
– To answer our recent petitions and prayers: Solomon and his prayer (1 Kings 3:5-15).

Acts 2:17 confirms that God continues to use dreams as a means of communication in the New Testament age. Since this is the case the question must be asked, “Are all dreams from God?” Are we to wake up every morning looking for some hidden, spiritual message in our dreams? The answer is no.

How can we tell whether a dream is from God? The difference between a natural and spiritual dream can sometimes be difficult to discern. No doubt it is a very subjective experience. But most of us have had the feeling that some dreams are not like the rest. The images linger, the emotions are strongly affected, and we get this feeling that what we just experienced is a message from above; a message that needs explanation. When we do receive a spiritual dream it is usually one of three types.

Warning Dream – This type warns us about some difficult time ahead. This could be a warning about a friend, spouse, or child. These are given so that we might pray and intercede for the individual. Often the calamity is not decreed from above and through prayer the hardship can be avoided. A Scriptural example is when “an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him’” (Matthew 2:13).
Confirmation Dream – This dream confirms what you believe to be true about yourself or another person or situation is in fact true. The dream can give you the impetus to act on what you now believe to be true, but needed some confirmation. An example from Scripture, when God confirmed Jacob’s place as the next Patriarch. Jacob “dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12-15).
Prophetic Dream – A dream which reveals the future concerning yourself, another individual, a nation, etc. An example from Scripture: As a 17-year-old, Joseph dreamt about his future place of honor and high governmental service (Genesis. 37: 5-8).

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Love is the greatest of all the gifts of the Spirit of God. In truth, love is more than a gift; it is God, for “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16). God’s love for us makes possible our love for God in response, as well as our love for humanity. The words of the Apostle John make this quite clear:

“Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love . . . So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. In this is love perfected with us, that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:7-8, 17-19).

The question is, how best should you approach God in prayer? The answer is as simple as it is profound. When I was completing my 2022 book, Pray This Way to Connect with God, I woke up one morning and was addressed immediately by a seemingly awaiting sentence from above: “Approach God, as you approach love itself.” Like a mystical key, that sentence opened up what would become the final section of the book.

In hidden fact, that is just what we are doing in prayer, approaching love itself. As you do so, listen for love as you would listen for God. And believe in that voice; let it serve as God’s affirming voice. I sometimes wonder whether love represents God incognito here, working in and through our hearts and lives.

In this breath prayer, sitting comfortably in a straight-back chair and “belly-breathing,” breathe in God’s love, which is constantly with and around you, awaiting your discovery. And when you breathe out, breathe out your love for God, in response to God’s love for you. Then as you are able, give yourself to that love. Let the words of the poet Tagore inspire you: “I am only waiting for love, to give myself up at last into his hands.” Those words really speak to me.

Receive then the greatest of all God’s gifts, God’s love, love for you and love through you to others. This love seeks to be freely received as a sheer gift, ever undeserved and unwarranted—yet there for you, nevertheless. There is no more essential “leap of faith,” than to believe in, even to overflowing, this wondrous gift of God’s love. It is only God’s love which can fully empower your love for God, love for others, and also love for yourself, freely rendered as a spontaneous reaction to God’s incomprehensible love for you.

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“May every sunrise hold more promise, and every sunset hold more peace.” That is an anonymous blessing on a “quotable magnet” my wife and I purchased some years ago at a gift shop near what was then close to “ground zero” of the former World Trade Center in New York City. The blessing touched us sufficiently to buy it and put it on our refrigerator door, and have taken it to heart over the years.
How many of our mornings hold promise for the day ahead? I had a conversation with a friend the other day, who confessed that he felt as if each day was pretty much like the one before it. He said he felt as if he were in a rut, running on a treadmill, going nowhere while exhausting himself. To this I said, “Been there, done that.” I suppose most of us can identify with this man’s sense of being in a rut, of being stuck in repetitive days of boring predictability.

It can sure be depressing to feel as if we are glued to sameness, rather like how music records used to get stuck on the same lyrics, forcing us to hear the same few words and music over and over again, until we were able to get to the phonograph and move the needle forward – to where it would hopefully not get stuck again.

As I told this friend, after sharing that I have been “rut-bound” before, every day is in fact different and new. We just need to look for it, be ready for the unexpected and the novel, the stranger and the strange, when they show themselves. No day is ever really the same, and even if we feel as if we are the same as we were yesterday, that is not quite true. Question: are you the same person you were a year ago? Six months ago? Surely not exactly. You are in perpetual transition, as your body continuously ages; expected and unexpected events and circumstances impact you in ways both sensed and not sensed.

Therefore, if and as you are able to risk faith in the yet-to-be-revealed promise of each new day, depressing clouds of sameness will part and the warming sun of the “could-be” will show its hope-driven face. Such faith energizes and prepares you to at the very least, enjoy the precious non-repeatable gift of that day.

I believe that a day which ends in beauty will likely dawn in hope. And further, that a day which ends in hope will likely dawn in peace. And how many sunsets find us in a state of peace? For most of us, far too few. We fret, worry and obsess about this or that, what happened today, what could happen tomorrow. We let in the demons of the “what-ifs” which harass us with the warning: “You’d better get ready, just in case.” So we find ourselves putting on our armor at the very hour we should be doing just the opposite: removing all armor and protectiveness, so we can at last find some rest in the shadows.

To attain peace, you must let go of, detach yourself from, the stresses and strains of daily life, and enter the release of an ending day. Risk believing that sunrise will hold promise for a better day. Hold on to that belief, and it will most often prove true by the end of the day.

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Pain is an essential mystery. That means, we cannot get to the bottom of the why, but only of the who, the what, the where and the when of pain. Add to that the how of pain, the dynamics of suffering.

It appears that pain and suffering are built into creation. And at the same time, that this creation is not the only sphere of life we shall know or are destined for. We are created or designed by God for an eternal life together, in that realm called heaven, which really means the place wherein God is perpetually present with a directness and intimacy only promised and dreamed of here. As Paul said, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

As one of my seminary professors put it, “Salvation is our eternal well-being as defined by God.” God knows why and toward what end we have been created; therefore, when we approach the subject of pain, we must ask not only the why and wherefore of pain in this life, but also its likely meaning for our eternal life.

First of all, in the world to come there will be no pain or suffering. God will wipe it all away. We learn this decisively at the end of the Bible:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’

“And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life’” (Revelation 21:1-6).

What does pain do? It breaks us; it humbles us; it reveals to us or need for and dependence on God. Not as if we ever want to give God thanks for our pain and suffering – at least not during our trial or tribulation.

One thing pain fosters is the development of our endurance or perseverance:
“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:1-5).

“My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).

The suffering that is particularly lauded in the New Testament is the sharing in the suffering of Jesus Christ, brought about specifically by our participating in His ministry:
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:10-12).

Finally, Paul and the early disciples considered suffering for Christ as an honor:
“As they left the council, they rejoiced that they were considered worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name. And every day in the temple and at home they did not cease to teach and proclaim Jesus as the Messiah” (Acts 5:41-42).

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Treasure moments of pure love, moments when the fullness of your love for another arises and streams out of you, as if to surround the other. You experience a gravity-like bond between you, for which there are no words or means of measurement. And you sense that nothing in heaven or on earth can severe that bond of love.

At times of remembrance, you can look back and gather those moments around you, holding them tightly together, and giving thanks for their presence in your life. Shortly before her death, my mother Millie wrote a poem that began, “I’m making a quilt of memories, and throwing away the bad ones.” At the end of the poem, she gathers that love-quilt around her, and prepares to pass on, clinging to her treasured moments of pure love.

I remember saying a final goodbye to her as she lay dying in a hospital in San Diego, California. The time had come when I had to return home to Des Moines, Iowa. How difficult to say goodbye to your mother, knowing you will never see her alive again. I did so in tears, with pure love, albeit aching love, pouring out of my heart.

I have also been present as a pastor at the death of beloved family members. An unforgettable instance: One of my wife’s fellow teachers, Beth, asked Kitty if I could visit her dying father at a nursing home in the town where I served as a pastor. They were Catholic, but had been unable to get a priest to visit her father, Henry. Beth said he was nearly comatose, but was waiting to see a priest before he died.

I got to his room and gently knocked on the closed door. Beth answered, thanking me for coming. She was there with her husband, two brothers and their wives, and her mother. As I stepped in, Beth turned toward her father, lying seemingly comatose in his bed. And she said, “Dad, the priest is here!” Henry immediately sprang to life; and gazing up at the ceiling, he attempted to sit up. While Henry struggled to say something, all seven family members quickly gathered around him, loudly exclaiming their love for him. Their cries filled the room with pure love. Then of a sudden, Henry fell back down, dead. Out of his right eye, a single tear slowly cascaded down to his cheek; half way down it stopped, as a sign of his own pure love. The entire sequence lasted perhaps thirty remarkable seconds, almost as if it had been staged.

I have also been blessed by moments of pure love with my wife and children. In the spring of 1968, my wife and I exchanged “I love you” for the first time. It happened at dusk in the unlocked church where we would be married later that year. Kitty said it first, and taking her hands in mine, I said, “And I love you, too.” We stood silently looking at each other, letting pure love dance between us. We have been together ever since.

Then there were the moments of pure love when I got to hold our children, right after their births. There is no purer love than that of a father and mother holding to their new born infants of promise. These moments are like gold nuggets panned from the streams of your daily life. You gingerly place them into your heart’s hidden pouch of treasured moments of pure love. Whether you get to take them with you, possibly to be fulfilled on the other side, remains a clouded mystery.

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You may not laugh as you pray, or pray while you laugh, but prayer and laughter have some crucial elements in common. Both help to lift you out of a situation, or the feeling of being trapped by the circumstances of your life. That is, they offer you an immediate way of stepping back from, if not transcending your current conditions. Prayer and laughter free your inner being, even if it is only for a time.

Some of the best laughter I have been fortunate to share, has been with families at hospitals while awaiting the results of surgery, or worse, an expected approaching end of life for a loved one. It is not of course as if the circumstances were anything less than grave, or that they were laughing at its seriousness. Rather, the humor, just like prayer, gave them temporary relief, a brief lifting of burdens, a short forgetfulness, helping to re-balance their listing souls.

In philosopher Frederick Nietzsche’s view, the religiously stiff and hypocritical persons were those who claimed that there were things about which one must never laugh. I have known such humorless persons, and I felt sorry for them, even if my own sense of humor was upsetting to them and their sad misunderstanding of the Christian faith.

I had a very real dream, if not a visitation, during seminary in which an angel was sitting above me on our bed post, legs crossed and looking down at me. The angel said one thing, which woke me up immediately. Even though it was many years ago, that statement from heaven remains vivid. Though I could not see the angel’s face, the words were spoken with apparent understanding and warmth. The angel said, “Yes, Hal, God does have a sense of humor.”

One of the greatest laughs in Biblical history came out of Abraham’s wife Sarah, when, at age 90, God said she would finally, after twenty-five years of waiting, give birth to a son. Though she denied laughing to God, God told her to name the child, “Isaac”, which means “he laughs,” or simply “laughter.” Rather than criticizing Sarah for her laughter, God wanted her laugh remembered and celebrated. Nothing is impossible for God.

The one who laughs last, laughs best. In your destined tomorrow, the best laughter will yet be yours. The Psalmist said, “When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, ‘The LORD has done great things for them.’” (126:1-2).
Even in his suffering Job believed that, “He will yet fill your mouth with laughter, and your lips with shouts of joy” (Job 8:21). This goes along with Jesus’ promise: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh” (Luke 6:21b). As laughter can transform your mood, so too can prayer.

Like prayer, laughter may be good medicine. That is what recent studies are suggesting, confirming what sages have been saying for millennia. Researchers recently reported that a daily dose of laughter can be beneficial to the heart because, just like exercise, it makes our blood vessels work more efficiently. Depression, on the other hand, can increase the risk of dying from heart failure, yet another study found.

Laughter has been called “inner jogging,” and its total health benefits are impressive. Laughter elevates mood, revs up the immune system, improves brain functioning, protects the heart, enhances creativity, lowers blood pressure, reduces pain, fosters relaxation, connects you to others, and spawns an overall sense of well-being. A session of giggling also reduces stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine, helping you to cope better with daily tension.

Prayer offers many of these benefits. Prayer calms and uplifts the heart, strengthens hope, and elevates your mood and brain function. Just as you need to laugh a little every day, so too do you need to pray.

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Augustine of Hippo (354-430), famously said: “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” And Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) added, “I do not seek to understand so that I can believe, but I believe so that I may understand; and what is more, I believe that unless I do believe, I shall not understand.”

It is as if belief opens up an inner treasure-trove of understanding impossible to attain without prior faith. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews said, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 NKJV). And the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), wrote about the necessity of taking a “leap of faith,” with understanding coming after the faith-risk of leaping. The amazing truth is that faith is self-authenticating; sufficient proof reveals itself only after the risk of believing.

As you meditate on this ancient insight, pray with Saint Anselm his prayer seeking the knowledge of God:

“O my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You, where and how to find You.
You are my God and You are my all and I have never seen You.
You have made me and remade me, You have bestowed on me all the good things I possess,
Still I do not know You.
I have not yet done that for which I was made.

Teach me to seek You.
I cannot seek You unless You teach me or find You unless You show Yourself to me.
Let me seek You in my desire, let me desire You in my seeking.
Let me find You by loving You, let me love You when I find You. Amen.”

While none of us has ever seen God, we are nevertheless capable of sensing God as directly as our skin senses the wind. When you risk believing in God and God’s active, actual presence with you, God will in God’s timing and way, authenticate your faith. Guaranteed. In August, 1967, I risked belief in Jesus’ words about seeking and finding, risked belief in a yet unknown God. I then began searching, seeking God with my whole heart, as Anselm’s prayer so beautifully expresses it. In late November of that year, God’s Holy Spirit, the very wind-love of God, breathed upon me, changing my life forever.

Many years later, while praying during a time of troubling doubt, Jesus said to me: “To see Me, you must first believe that I am with You. I show Myself only to the eyes of faith.”

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The only thing we really have is today. And just as importantly, today has us. We are all passing through this fragile ecosystem on a mysterious journey, which no one can take for us. We don’t know for sure when and where we began, whether at the moment of conception, or even before that, heaven only knows where. Nor are can we be certain where we will end up, whether simply ceasing to be at death, or going on, heaven only knows where.

The only thing that is fully real is this moment, as it unfolds, minute by minute. Yesterday is merely a memory, and a selective one at that. Tomorrow is but a dream, whether of pleasant or fearful bodings. We are no longer where we were yesterday, though we may act and think as if we still are, as if our relationships and jobs are exactly the same. Yet seen or unseen, sensed or unsensed, everything is evolving day by day, different as the date; only the present abides.

We do not know what tomorrow will bring. In a real way tomorrow never comes; only the next today emerges, ready or not. As Carl Sandburg wrote, “Life is a gamble; take a chance. Anything can happen in these sweepstakes. Around the corner may be prosperity or the worse depression yet. Who knows? Nobody. You pick a number, you take a card, you shoot the bones.”

It has been said that we humans are the only animals which can anticipate, if not to some extent live in, the future. There is an up and a downside to this. The upside has to do with the advantages of imagining and planning for this or that future. Should it arrive, you are prepared. People rightly plan for retirement. Thank heavens I did, because it is here now, and I was prepared to move forward into it.

The downside is that we can seem to begin to live in a possible tomorrow. This can boost our hopes as well as our fears. Jesus of Nazareth warned us against this; He said to stay in the present moment, to “let the day’s own troubles be sufficient for today.” Live fully in today, which is the really real, and let God take care of tomorrow.

Truth is, freedom dwells in the present, in today. Your memories won’t make you free; rather, they bind you to them when and as you face them. Neither will your dreams make you free; even the dream of some yet-to-appear freedom would prompt you to wait for it, freezing you in anticipation. Real freedom exists only in the present moment; when and as you are able to enter into your today, bringing with you all that you are, forgetting what lies behind and leaving alone what tomorrow may or may not hold. Then and only then can you fully experience your own existence, which is forever here and now.

My wife and I now live along the Pacific Ocean, in central coast, California. There are several beaches both to our north and south. We take frequent walks along one or another beach, breathing in the subtly salted air, absorbing the sunshine, listening to and looking at seagulls, sandpipers, and pelicans, and silently slipping into the rhythm of the waves. Whatever came before, whatever will come after was not present with us along the sands of our shared path. We were simply present, fully, to each other and to what nature gloriously offered us.

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It is as if belief opens up an inner treasure-trove of understanding impossible to attain without prior faith. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews said, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 NKJV). And the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), wrote about the necessity of taking a “leap of faith,” with understanding coming after the faith-risk of leaping. The amazing truth is that faith is self-authenticating; sufficient proof reveals itself only after the risk of believing.

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The soul of religion is compassion. God is often said to be compassionate and merciful, gracious and abounding in steadfast love. Without compassion, love does not mean very much in practice. All the great world religions espouse compassion for others as essential for the practice of their respective faiths.

In Hebrew, “compassion” comes from the word meaning “womb-love,” how a mother loves that which issues from her womb. And how could Mother God not desire that Her children have compassion for their own siblings? Jesus said that however we treat the least of His family, we are in fact treating Him, even though we likely will not be aware of it (Matthew 25:40).

Yet many view their religion in terms of how it excludes people as much or more than how it includes them. Can a genuinely compassionate person take comfort in the exclusion of others from the paradise for which we all yearn? Such exclusion should be a source of sorrow rather than satisfaction. Father God wills that all turn and live, that not one of His children remains an unredeemed, unrepentant sinner.

Heaven is a place of immeasurable inclusion, where we are at last all able to pray together, to stand before the throne of God, regardless of our prior tradition, regardless of how we got there. I remember a horrific rain storm on a major highway in Italy, back in 2002. I was afraid to pull over, because I might get hit from behind, from a car or truck which could not see me sitting there. So I had no choice but to keep on keeping on slowly and most carefully, praying for a place to pull off the highway. Finally, I saw a sign for an approaching rest stop. Fortunately, we made it. Once safely inside, we were met by more than a hundred Italians, all crammed together, all just as thankful to have reached safety as we were, a place to wait out the storm. It did not matter how each of us got there; what mattered was that we had arrived safely.

So it shall be in heaven: do not ask or judge how anybody else gets there; give thanks that you and these others have made it. And have compassion for what they weathered from the same life-storm you drove through. Life is most difficult; and as the French say, to know all is to forgive all. True religion is not about our casting forth our judgments of others and of what they must do – make that what God must do – to receive them into the same wondrous realm we seek to find ourselves. Nobody but God can put a period after the name of another; God alone will judge.

Jesus explicitly warns us against judging others. He goes farther than this: He tells us that we shall be judged by the same exact measures we use to judge others (Luke 6:37-38). In the end, Christianity is not about our personal salvation, but about who we bring with us, about the height, depth and breadth of our compassion, mercy, forgiveness and love of others. If God keeps giving us new chances, we must not deny this opportunity to others. Even if we can no longer have a relationship with certain persons due to past history, we must nevertheless continue to pray for them and their well-being, especially their ultimate salvation.

It is most important to understand that Jesus said the “way to the Father” was through Him (John 14:6), not the only way to God. While I am a Christian, I believe that there is more than one road to heaven, and the Way of God is through compassion and mercy. As Jesus said, what God wants is “mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew 12:7). God asks us “to do justly and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Keep it simple. Receive God’s compassion toward you, and pass it on others.

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Love goes beyond the grave. I have seen enough to be convinced that love does not end but awaits fulfillment in that mysterious realm beyond the pale of this pleasant place which faith calls heaven.
When we die, we cannot take the things of this world with us. But I believe we can take love relationships with us. Where in this life wealth is usually measured in terms of money and material possessions, where we are going, wealth is measured by love relationships.

I have been blessed by numerous testimonies and have personally experienced communication between the living and the dearly departed. Mostly through dreams, contacts have been made between parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, members of extended families and friends. Life and death are more connected than we imagine.

I have space for only a single example. I’ll let it be the poignant story of Elizabeth. The year was 1975. She was a Britisher in her seventies, a frail woman of rare intellect, dignity and grace. She resided at the Swedish Retirement Home in Evanston, Illinois, where I served as a part-time social worker, while working on a doctoral program at Northwestern University. Elizabeth’s husband had been a British fighter pilot during World War II. He was shot down in a pitched battle in 1941. She had never remarried, nor as it turned out, had she ever let go of her beloved Jack.

One day when I got to work, I was told to go posthaste to Elizabeth. She had been found wandering in the hallways during the night, agitated and disoriented. Though under mild sedation, she was still awake and alert. I asked her what happened. Elizabeth described a powerful dream, which she reiterated time and again was “not a dream.”

We had the following haunting exchange:
“I was wandering out of doors. It was very dark, and I went from house to house, taping gently on each front door. Nobody answered. I felt all alone. Then I was standing in the middle of the road. I couldn’t see anything. I whispered, ‘Are you there?’ A man answered, ‘Yes, I am here with you.’ On hearing his voice, I awoke, and found myself in the hallway outside my room.”
“Why did you tap so gently and only whisper, Elizabeth?”
“Because I didn’t want just anybody to hear me.”
“But only that one man?” I inquired.
“Yes,” she replied, as if clearly aware of the intent of her search.
“Did you know who that man was?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Was it your husband?”
“Yes, it was Jack. I knew his voice immediately. He had come for me.”

Shortly after that conversation, Elizabeth lapsed into a peaceful coma. She died two days later.

I believe hers was not a dream; it was a genuine communication with her long lost husband. I believe Jack had come back, so they could begin again in a new way, in a new and better place, what had been tragically terminated in their youth. I believe the best is yet to be, beyond our vision, and just as matter is not created or destroyed, neither is love.

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In the middle of his setting forth the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Paul turns to the highest gift of all: love. But not just any form of love; rather, the love which comes down from heaven. The Greek term for this love is “agape.” It appears almost exclusively in the New Testament in the Greek speaking world of this time. It refers to God’s own love, which we are first to seek receiving, and then to share it with others.

Perhaps the best analogy of agape love is that of pouring water from a large pitcher into an empty glass. If you do not stop pouring, the water will eventually overflow the glass. That is the point at which love becomes agape love: when you have received more love than you can take it, when your heart is overflowing. Like the best of all possible news, you will simply have to give it to and share it with others.

Paul’s description of God’s love is the most magnificent of all time:
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:1-8).

Paul says, if you are going to receive any of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, start here. Without receiving and living out of God’s love, nothing else you can do for Christ will be of any benefit in God’s sight. Why? Because you will have diverged from following the path of love, continuing instead to move in the wrong direction. Every gift of the Spirit must begin with, remain and end in, God’s own love, an ever self-giving and overflowing love toward others.

Pray for this gift above all. It is the very love with which God has loved you from your beginning, and will love you forever. Imagine such an utterly unconditional, pure love of you. When this love Paul celebrates finally fills you, it will overflow your heart. And when your heart overflows with this love straight from God, you will greatly desire to give it to and share it with others—without conditions or counting the cost. That is agape love.

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In the middle of his setting forth the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Paul turns to the highest gift of all: love. But not just any form of love; rather, the love which comes down from heaven. The Greek term for this love is “agape.” It appears almost exclusively in the New Testament in the Greek speaking world of this time. It refers to God’s own love, which we are first to seek receiving, and then to share it with others.

Perhaps the best analogy of agape love is that of pouring water from a large pitcher into an empty glass. If you do not stop pouring, the water will eventually overflow the glass. That is the point at which love becomes agape love: when you have received more love than you can take it, when your heart is overflowing. Like the best of all possible news, you will simply have to give it to and share it with others.

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One of the most important concepts of the Christian understanding of God is grace. God is said to be gracious, full of grace. Also, fortunately for us, God is also said to be full of mercy. Perhaps the best brief definition of both mercy and grace is this: “Mercy is when you don’t get what you deserve; grace is when you get what you don’t deserve.” Salvation ends up being a gift of sheer grace, to be received by faith in Christ.

Grace means that God does not have to do what God does, that God does not operate out of necessity but total freedom. Imagine a person choosing to be kind and considerate who does not have to be, so that the attention is on that person’s actions, rather than on the recipient. Grace may be defined as “an unmerited gift, typically from a superior to a subordinate.” An example would be a boss giving a significant raise to an employee, not because of the worker’s merit, but because the boss felt like being generous. Here the attention would be on the unexpected, unwarranted generosity of the boss, rather than on the employee.

This however is so difficult for us to understand. As employees, we would want to have earned or merited the raise, so that the congratulations would be on us as our just reward. That is, we have difficulties with “freebies”: what we get, we want to have earned. That includes love; we want to somehow deserve or warrant whatever love should come our way. We are not sure what to do with love that simply shows up, like an unexpected but loving Lord, at our doorstep.

The term “grace” comes for the Latin “gratus,” meaning pleasing. The best response to God’s grace is that of “gratitude,” which comes from the same Latin root. If God chooses to be gracious, our response is to be that of gratitude. If God is pleased to save us in Christ, which we could never earn by our works, then the response most pleasing to God is our pleasure at God’s grace. This is a pure arc of giving back to God something of what God gave to us.

Just so, in my own life, a gracious God showed up right when I absolutely had to find a gracious God. Here is what I later wrote to God, in a prose poem or prayer called, “Grace”:
“You did not have to do what You did for me: reach out and pluck me dying from the dark burning of boundless despair, from the mocking meaninglessness that exists apart from the light of Your love.
“You did not have to revive and restore me, living now for You, in the tender atmosphere of the Spirit between us, the gentle Holy Spirit of Your love, which is better than life.
“Why did You save me at the very hour of my going under, feeling then instead of the last wrenching of death’s insensate claws, the first healing, knowing touch of Your rescuing fingers?
“That You, the living God, should be for me, who had not been for You; that You would reach out to hold and heal me, who can offer You only gratitude, and that inconsistently, inadequately, is the never diminishing wonder of my life.
“That You did for me what You did not have to do, at the time when it had to be done, if it was ever going to be done, is the source of the ever-welling spring of life You birthed in my heart, the ground of my cleaving to You in hungering trust.
“Precious Savior, returning grace for grace, I give You my life; I give You what I, too, do not have to give but choose to.”

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If you want to have friends, you must first be a friend. Call it a “boomerang effect”: whatever signals you send out, will sooner or later come back to you. Here are twelve principles for being a friend, especially when another is in need of a friend:
1. Follow the Golden Rule. Be the friend to the other you want the other to be to you. Apply your self-understanding to the other, for we share a common humanity. Yet never assume that the other feels just like you, or you like the other. Respect, do not gloss over differences.
2. Be present for and with the other. Here is a key to friendship: be fully present as a caring and non-threatening person to the other. By doing so, you invite the other to self-disclose and become fully present to you. Just invite; do not push.
3. Be honest and be yourself. You are yourself the gift the other needs. Do not try to be something you are not; your caring and presence matter most. If you put on a front, you will have to hide behind it.
4. Listen and give feedback. Speak the truth in love. Above all, work on being a careful, active listener. Everybody wants to be heard, sometimes desperately.
5. Ask questions rather than assume you already know the answers. You need to draw out and affirm the other, rather than to control or dominate the conversation. Help the answer to emerge from the other instead of from you. Trust that the truth is in the other and your task is to assist in their realization process.
6. Have both empathy and sympathy. Empathy means to feel with and sympathy means to feel for, another. It is alright not to be able to empathize with another because you lack similar experiences. Then you can sympathize and seek to understand as best you can, taking the other’s viewpoint seriously and respectfully. The other will appreciate your honesty and attempt to understand, as well as the respect you show.
7. Take risks through self-disclosure. Share of yourself sufficiently so that the other feels you are there and also risking self-disclosure. Let it become a two-way relationship. We cannot ask or expect one person to disclose personal things without reciprocity. Reciprocity is the soul of friendship.
8. Let the other be the center of attention. Remember that you are there to be the other’s friend. Let the focus of caring be on the other, with periodic reference to yourself and your situation.
9. Accept the other unconditionally. Even if you do not agree with all that is said, accept the person nevertheless. You are not there to argue, nor to compromise your own convictions. If you disagree, be diplomatic, while seeking what you can agree with first and foremost.
10. Look for the common, and build from there. Seek to find things and interests in common, for that creates the conditions for trust and “fellow-feeling.” Stay in a mutual comfort zone as much as possible.
11. Caring is carrying through. If you say you will do something, then by all means, do it. Yet do not make promises. Let your yes be yes.
12. Make referrals when necessary. If the other wants to share something personal and confidential, show your caring by silent, supportive listening. Only after the other has shared should you make a suggestion that they should seek a professional counselor, if that appears needed. If it does, make specific suggestions, but let the other determine whether or not to make the call. That person must want, and be willing to seek, healing.

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Many persons think that being a Christian is about what you have to give up, rather than what treasure you might receive. Yet the truth is, what may appear as a sacrifice from the outside, will in fact be anything but a sacrifice from the inside, for the persons making it. Does God seek sacrifice from us? Are we supposed to get rid of all our possessions, so that we may possess the kingdom of heaven, whatever and whenever that is? God says through the prophet Hosea that God desires “steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6). Jesus slightly amends this, telling His listeners, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (Matt 9:13).

For an important example, to those looking from the outside, what a couple does and willingly gives up after falling in love may appear foolish and immature. Yet it is anything but that to the couple. I remember two white-haired persons in their seventies, whose spouses had died a few years before. They met and fell in love on a cruise ship. In their unexpected romantic love, it was as if they returned to their young adult stage of wide-eyed optimism and sheer joy in each other. Being around them was a pure delight; they were truly in love. I know, because I got to conduct their premarriage counseling and perform their marriage ceremony. They ended up having nearly twenty years together, and I conducted their funerals a mere two months apart.
As I have written:
“To fall in love includes both losing and finding, letting go and binding together. You lose yourself as a sole entity to find yourself as a partner in a relationship greater than you alone.
You let go of singular life to be bound together in mutual life.

We are designed to fall in love, yet almost as if by the same design or designer, we by nature resist what we most seek:
Giving ourselves away to a greater power, losing personal strength for the sake of a mutual power.

To fall in love means to risk your heart and even your life to attain what may bless or blister you, cherish or crush you, with no going back to being the same person you were before exposing and expressing what is most precious and sensitive in your being:
Your heart, temporarily unguarded as you risk faith, seeking fulfillment.

Yet with God, falling in love is one with falling into faith, trusting your all to the one true Beloved, with Whom alone, there is no loss but only gain, no fear, but only fullness, absolute safety in God’s hidden sanctuary of Love.

Fall here, and only here:
For the One who has already fallen for you.
Give your heart into no one else’s keeping.”

My point is this: when you fall in love, you will do whatever is necessary to enter fully into and fulfill that love. At that time, giving up singleness and independent living is not a sacrifice but a joy. The same dynamic holds true for Christians. As Paul said, “But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). Who would guess from the outside the treasure which is ours on the inside?

Jesus puts this together in two brief parables:
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matt 13:44-46).

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God is not only our Father. God is also our Mother. God is in truth, our Single Parent. And we learn right away in Genesis 1:27 that both male and female are made equally in God’s image: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” That means the one God functions as both our Mother and Father. Through Isaiah, God says:

“Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the LORD has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones. But Zion said, ‘The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.’ Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me . . . As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (Isa 49:13-16; 66:13).

It is most significant that the word for “compassion” in Hebrew literally means “womb love.” Rare is the mother who would reject the child of her womb. And the fact that we children issue from Her, is the basis for Mother God’s compassion and unconditional, unending love.

In short, that means you can also pray to God as your loving Mother. In Psalm 131, we get a wonderful image of God holding us like a mother holds her beloved child.
“O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore” (Ps 131:1-3 NRSV).

Reminiscent of Psalm 131, Dorothy M. Stewart wrote a beautiful prayer to God as Mother:
“Settle my silly heart, good Lord,
Hold me still in your motherly embrace,
enfolded by your wings of peace and love,
and total acceptance. Soothe me,
love me into peace,
like a weaned child snuggled
in trust on her mother’s lap.
So hold me, Lord,
and let us enjoy this time together.
Speak to my heart if you will,
but most of all be present to me,
and me to you.”

I know that our experiences with our mothers can vary as much as our experiences with our fathers, positively or negatively. So the question for you is this: which would be easier and more comfortable and comforting to pray to, your heavenly Father or Mother? Though God is both and yet beyond both, focus right now on praying to God as your heavenly Mother. See where God leads you.

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Through Isaiah, God says:“Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the LORD has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones. But Zion said, ‘The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.’ Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me . . . As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (Isa 49:13-16; 66:13).

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A great spiritual issue, right after “Where is God?”, is “Where is the kingdom of God?” This exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees addresses that question:
“Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you’” (Luke 17:20-21).

It is significant that the Greek preposition Jesus used to indicate the place of God’s kingdom, (entos), means both “within” and also “among” or “between.” Both. Not one without the other. God’s kingdom, which includes heaven itself, is not only “there” and “then”; but it is also “here” and somehow, “now.”

A somewhat parallel passage is Matthew 18:20, where Jesus says: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Most significantly, the Greek word used for “among” in this verse is meso, which also means “in the midst of,” or “between.” This signifies that what is between us is as real and important as what is within us. That is, the Holy Spirit not only enters into us, but just as significantly, comes to move between us, invisibly gathering us together in God’s silent kingdom.

As I have written:
“Heaven is between us.
If you do not get that, you do not get heaven.
One day you will get heaven, hopefully while you are still here, to enjoy and prepare for the greater heaven, where nothing will stop the flow of love between you and God and those of God.
Look for heaven inside you, you will not see or sense it.
Look for heaven beyond you, you will come up short,
As there is no place to point at something beyond life’s rainbows.
But fall in love with your other, or better still: fall in love with God, beginning with God’s beauty of sight and sound, nature and music, grandeur and glory, and you will connect with currents not of this place,
But which will come across from the great Otherness and like a magnetic field, will hold you safe in Love’s sacred space.
Then you will know and know you know that whatever else it may be, heaven is between you and God, and those of God.
And once that field of Spirit has been entered, and has embraced you, it will slowly transform what is within and beyond you.
Heaven is that final abode where what is between, within and beyond you will attain Love’s blissful union.”

How would it affect your life if you sensed heaven between you and your loved ones? And right here and now, not just there and then? Surely you would grasp and be grasped by, the sacredness of the present moment. Pray for that grasping now, while you still have time to fully love and be loved by God and humanity.

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A great spiritual issue, right after “Where is God?”, is “Where is the kingdom of God?” This exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees addresses that question:

“Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you’” (Luke 17:20-21).

It is significant that the Greek preposition Jesus used to indicate the place of God’s kingdom, (entos), means both “within” and also “among” or “between.” Both. Not one without the other. God’s kingdom, which includes heaven itself, is not only “there” and “then”; but it is also “here” and somehow, “now.”

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The Apostle Paul offers us a remarkable step-by-step process for how to gain “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding.” These inspired words present a pathway to the protective peace of Jesus Christ:
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:4-7).

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” In the beginning is rejoicing, not just about anything in your life, but specifically rejoicing about and in, God. When you rejoice in God, you will sense and accept your own humbled humanity. You are not in final control of your life or those of your loved ones. God is; and God in Christ has come to reveal God’s love and offer of salvation. Therefore, rejoice in this inestimable Good News.

“Let your gentleness be known to everyone.” Rejoicing opens your heart to your own gentleness, even tenderness about that for which you rejoice.

“The Lord is near.” Once your humbled heart is open, you can sense the presence of God. God dwells “with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isa 57:15b). God draws near to and exalts the humble.

“Do not worry about anything.” Sensing now the presence of God, you will realize that there is nothing to fear. Now you can rejoice with the Psalmist: “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps 27:1).

“But in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Rejoicing, humbled, sensing God’s presence, encouraged to be fearless, you are truly ready to offer your requests to God, in the blessed context of trusting thanksgiving.

“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” After you have made your requests known to God, in your heightened sense of God’s presence, a peace will descend upon you like a misty cloud, beyond your grasp or comprehension, which will silently guard your heart and mind in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is for you to continue to let God guard your heart, which is above all, precious to God.

As you pray these inspired words of Paul, remember the four basic questions:
1. What does the passage say? (Reading)
2. What does the passage say to me? (Meditating)
3. What do I want to say to God? (Praying)
4. What does God want to say to me? (Contemplating)

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PSALM 121: YOUR TRUE HELPER In an emergency, when you need help, sensing that you cannot make it on your own, that you are suddenly not in control of impending events, most all of us turn immediately to God for help. That is why it is said that there are no atheists in fox holes. […]

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THE DARKNESS We are called by the Light of eternity to be the light of the world. We tend to view darkness as evil, since evil much prefers darkness to light. Yet darkness is as light to God, who sees equally in both temporal domains. As the Psalmist said, in utter awe of the omnipresent, […]

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THE TRUTHS OF GOD Whatever else I am, I am a seeker after truth. Wherever that leads me, there I will go. Like a loving spouse, I want to be ever faithful to truth. I detest lies and half-truths, and the devil, who Jesus calls “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). There […]

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ON LOVING CHRIST Do you love Jesus Christ? I mean for who Christ is, rather than for what Christ can do for you? Here is dialogue between Christ and me about this issue: The Lord said to me, “Do you love Me for my power or my Person, For what I can do for you, […]

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The key to opening the human heart is acceptance. That recently hit me like an epiphany. If you’ll just take a minute and imagine how it affects you when you feel truly accepted by another, I suspect you will sense a softening, an easing, a relaxing of your heart. I suspect you will realize how […]

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The question of how to treat others has received the same singular answer in most every religion and ethical tradition since the sixth century BCE. For example, in ancient Hinduism we are told, “One should never do something to others that one would regard as an injury to one’s own self. In brief, this is […]

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Love is a circle with three phases. These phases blend into one another seamlessly, around and around again, potentially lifelong, and maybe even beyond. The phases are as the sweeps of a second hand, beginning at 12: first downward, then across, finally upward toward closure – and repetition. For love’s satisfaction, love’s perpetuation, all three […]

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God has taught me a contemplative form of prayer which I practice every morning, and during brief periods of the day. I call it “Abiding Prayer,” and it is based Jesus’ directing us to: “Abide in me as I abide in you…. Abide in my love” (John 15:4,9). Abiding prayer is less something you do, and more something you permit to happen. That means, Abiding Prayer is God’s prayer in and with you.

The focus of Abiding Prayer is on Christ and entering into a heart-to-Heart mutual life with Christ during the prayer itself. Abiding Prayer offers a pathway toward attaining what Christ fervently prays for all disciples: “that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one” (John 17:22-23).

Abiding prayer seeks to act on Jesus Christ’s direct invitation to abide in Him through the Holy Spirit. The center around which abiding prayer revolves is Christ: His person, presence, power and love. It is Christ who says: “Abide in me as I abide in you. Abide in my love.” To abide in Christ and His love includes abiding in the Holy Spirit, and in the Trinity as such.

To use an analogy: two magnets and a magnetic field. When a positive and negative magnet become proximate to each other, a magnetic field is generated between them. The two poles seek to unify as one. Just so, your heart will become as a magnet when God draws near; it will stir as a spiritual field is generated between you and God. To abide means to remain in that field between your heart and Christ’s heart. That field is the Holy Spirit of God’s love.

What is sought in Abiding Prayer is beyond words or images: it is pure presence and togetherness with and in God. You may begin with words and images, but during the silent time of mutual life, when the field has come to exist between you and God, you will sense God with you. You will not likely sense God’s approach, but when your heart begins to stir, God is there.

Here is the process of Abiding Prayer (which is an adaptation of Centering Prayer):

Begin by granting permission for God’s presence and action within you.
Sit comfortably in a straight-back chair, with both feet on the ground, arms on thighs and your eyes closed (although if you prefer, you may keep your eyes open).
Imagine Jesus being with you, perhaps sitting right across from you. Hear Him calmly address you, repeatedly: “Abide in me as I abide in you. Abide in my love.” Rather than you initiating the prayer, imagine that you are instead hearing and responding to Christ’s words of invitation to intimacy and love. Give Jesus time to make this real and sensed for you. You may in time come to reduce Christ’s address to a single word, which will convey the substance of Christ’s invitation and your heart-felt acceptance: “abide.”
Hold on to the word “abide” as if issuing between you and Christ. Let your heart’s raw desire for God and union with Christ propel you toward and keep you invested in, attaining and remaining with and in Christ. You can let this become a breath prayer around the word “abide.” If so, simply breathe in “Abide in Me,” and breathe out “As I abide in you.”
When thoughts, feelings, images or desires distract you, ever so gently return your attention to Jesus and His inviting words: “Abide in me as I abide in you…. Abide in my love.” Do not get upset with yourself about these distractions, as they come to us all. Learn to let them pass without resisting them, and then return to abiding.
After about twenty minutes of prayer, ask Christ to continue abiding with and in you and you with Christ. Following a time of calm reflection, open your eyes.

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This meditation comes as close as I have come to describing the ineffable event of union with God, albeit temporary in time, though not in effect. It is an analogy, but a somewhat accurate one. I invite you to come along with me and meditate on an inland sea. Find an imaginative place from which to image stilled waters, whether from the shore or from a boat, drifting atop its inviting and silent surface. When the unseen God draws near, both your heart and the water will stir to announce the holy. If and when that happens, do not fear, but open freely, fully, and fondly to the Beloved One whom you already know, yet forgot until such an awakening moment:

Meditating on a calmed inland sea,

Letting go and letting be before its beckoning presence,

My heart stirs at an approaching Other.

I can but wait in hushed stillness,

Breathing in the salted air of promise,

Sensing that Something is about to be.

From the edges of my awareness

Arises a summoned wave of focused water

Washing me overboard into Itself.

Pulled deeper and deeper by a Power unseen,

Into a strangely breathable darkening water,

Encircled and caressed by ineffable

Bubbles of life and love,

I leave language behind on the fading surface.

All motion ceases:

Floating now in the depths of peace,

Engulfed completely by the knowing water,

I yield myself to its naked now,

At unexpected home in the First Place.

Losing myself in what has found me,

With no lingering self-concern,

I simply am, in what I am,

With Whom I am.

After a time between the seconds,

I find myself on a humbled shore,

Dry but awakened,

Walking along the lonely sands

Of driftwood memories.

You may seek but cannot enter the waters of the Spirit of God without God parting those waters and guiding you in. God will do so when you are ready. Let your desire for God and the wondrous waters of the Spirit increase. Loose your hungering heart to fly arrow-like toward God, for it is born knowing the way. If such a desire bursts forth in you, do not tarry, do not let shyness, doubt or uncertainty delay you. Show God by your persistence that it is “God or bust.”

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You are what you share. Sharing affirms and ushers you into the present, something we need to enter constantly. It is easy to get lost in yesterday’s memories or tomorrow hopes. Yet all that is, is right here and now. But you must risk sharing yourself with others to make accessible the nourishing treasure-trove of love, hidden until moments of sharing, of mutual life. Only shared love is fulfilled love.

What we share determines the height, depth and breadth of our daily life. Sharing unfolds only in the present, in the now. It fills our present as air fills a room; indeed, sharing grants to the soul something akin to and as essential to the body as, oxygen. Sharing is food for the common life, the life which is love’s ever-fixed goal.

If you want a satisfying daily life, you have to share yourself, you have to connect with and be confirmed by, significant others. There’s no substitute for it: meaning and motivation spring from common life. What you have shared with another cannot be taken from you; what you have not shared cannot be redone, relived. Moments of sharing are the true treasures of memory. And each day brings fresh opportunities to reach out and share yourself, your heart and life and love with others.

The mystic Osho wrote a beautiful statement about sharing. It’s entitled “Sharing.” It speaks about the freedom, the joy and power of sharing: “As a flower gives its fragrance to the winds, and the lamp gives its light to the night, and the clouds give their rains to the earth — if you go on sharing, your whole life becomes an immensely beautiful dance of energy. And each day, you will have a thousand and one new births.”

Life is a dance. We are always in motion, within and without; life’s melodies linger and lap at our heels. The dance of sharing energizes. Sharing yourself with others generates psychic energy, which in turn sustains the soul as electricity the home. Those who do not share themselves slowly lose the energy which can only come from sharing love. When I look around, I see faces of fatigue. Many have chosen the silence and isolation which enervates, perhaps due to fear and self-protection, to having been punished rather than praised, wounded rather than rewarded for sharing themselves. Yet the only resolution for loneliness and emptiness, the only healing, comes from sharing. To re-energize, you simply have to share yourself.

You are here not only to give yourself to others, but perhaps even more importantly, you are here to share yourself with others. It is something like the difference between giving away uneaten a meal you have prepared, and actually consuming it with others. Eating is essentially communal; sharing is more mutually satisfying than giving. The risks of sharing may be greater than those of giving, but so are its fruits. As I once wrote:

“Only by sharing can you confirm your own existence. When you share with another, you create a foundation from which you both may transcend this world.

“Sharing is greater than giving. Only when sharing may you look into the eyes of your beloved; only then may you sense the presence of a Spirit whose name we are yet to grasp.

“Only equals share. And in the heart of life you are all equal.

“Love can exist only between equals; it can take root only in the common ground of sharing. And when there is sharing, love shall be present, even if it go unnoticed.”

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Among the most haunting words of Scripture are those of Psalm 73:25-26. After wondering why the wicked prosper, God shows the psalmist that they will be swept away at the end. Realizing then how ignorant and foolish he has been, and that God has in hidden fact been with him all the time, even holding on to him in secret, he realizes how important God is to him. He prays:

“Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25-26).

Imagine God as the strength of your heart. And how intimate are these words, addressing God one to one, granting us permission to pray this way. What is more private than personal prayer? When you enter into your quiet inner prayer space, be grateful that what transpires is strictly between you and God. No one but God hears and knows and loves you in your totality, including your past, present and also future. That God loves you now, means God, knowing the future, loves you forever, including the you who you are becoming. So everything is going to be just fine, eternally.

I remember walking along a beach on the west coast of Florida with my wife some time ago. The sun was setting, and both of us were looking for interesting shells to take back to our home in landlocked Iowa. Kitty was about ten yards ahead of me. I stopped and looked west, at the glorious setting sun above the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. There was a shimmering path of slowly darkening rays of reddish orange seemingly between me and the sun, as if for just that moment the two of us were in a silent “I-You” connection. Then I looked ahead at my wife and asked her to stop and wait for me to catch up to her. Once together I looked, and sure enough, she seemed to have the same one-to-one audience with the sun. Next I imagined what it would be like if the beach were long enough for all of humanity to be standing there gazing at the setting sun. We would each have our private moment with the sun, at the same time. So it is with our astounding God: we can and do have private audiences simultaneously. How God can do this is beyond me; but then, so is God.

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