"Thy will be done..."

"I'm so confused.
I know I heard You
loud and clear.
So I followed through,
somehow I ended up here.

I don't want to think
I may never understand,
that my broken heart,
is part of Your plan.

When I try to pray,
all I get is hurt,
and these four words:

Thy will be done..."

This afternoon, I stumbled on Hillary Scott's beautiful song,  "Thy Will." And in the span of watching her video, I was transported -- sitting alone, in an almost empty flat in the middle of the city -- wondering how I got there.

Only months before, I'd been a modestly well-respected wife and mother living in a 3,000 square foot multi-level house in a suburban neighborhood. Now here I was. And I couldn't imagine how eleven months of listening humbly and importunately for God's direction -- and getting it, loud and clear -- could feel this terrifying, confusing, and lonely.

I was not -- at all -- unclear about what God had said to me. I'd felt His Love-impelled power of it in every molecule of my being. I wasn't naive, I knew it would not be easy, but I also knew that it was the most loving thing that I could do for everyone in my life. So why, if I had been obedient to Love's unexpected direction -- did it hurt so badly? And it did. It hurt in the marrow of my being.

This wasn't how being Love's bidding was supposed to feel. And I had no doubt that I had heard God's voice -- mostly because the message with so clearly not what I thought God would say. But in the instant I heard it, without cross-questioning it, I fell on my knees and wept aloud:

"Thy will be done."

I was not naive. I knew that in my circle of family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, what God was asking me to do would be questioned, judged, speculated and whispered about. I just didn't think it would be as devastating as it was.

I had truly hoped that my devotion to God would have spoken for me. That those who knew me would have at least asked me, "what the hell are you doing?" Then I would have, at least, had someone's arms to weep in. But instead, it seemed as if everyone was quite willing to assume that I'd gone off the rails and blown it. The shame was crushing.

This isn't about the what I did, or why. Because, to be completely honest -- the only why is, "God said." And exactly what God said, is still so deeply holy for me that I cannot write about it. If you were to call me, and it seemed spiritually relevant, I would tell you -- it's not a secret. But to type it here -- or anywhere -- has not been something I can do. It's just too sacred.

Sitting alone at my kitchen table in the city that day, I begged God for direction, "Dear God, how do I defend myself from all the swirling misinformation and judgment?" And God's answer was just as clear as his earlier direction:

"He opened not his mouth
in defense of himself."

I got it -- thoroughly, and quickly. If I wanted to follow Christ, I had to be willing to be questioned, scoffed at, speculated about, and misunderstood. It terrified me. Didn't God understand that I was the ultimate people pleaser. Didn't He get that my early life as a stepchild -- who was forced to ingratiate herself in order to "earn" the right to be sheltered and fed -- had made me this way.

Disappointing people was my greatest fear, making them happy was my drug. And here I was disappointing everyone I loved and knew. Again, I turned to the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. I opened her primary text, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures to page one and read:

"Prayer, watching, and working
combined with self-immolation,
are God's gracious means for accomplishing
whatever has been successfully done for
the Christianization and health of mankind."

And yes, in my copy of the book, the word "self-immolation" was bolded -- or at least it was that day. I knew what it meant. I'd been studying Eddy's work for decades. I knew that she recommended this practice of "suicide by fire," six times in her writings. And no, I didn't think she was encouraging me to grab a can of kerosene and a match -- she was urging the self-inflicted destruction of the ego.

In that moment, I understood. It wasn't going to be good enough for me to have my ego slayed by childhood circumstances, other people's choices, or chance. It was imperative that I took ownership of this humbling walk into the fire.

So I did. The ego wanted to run, to find a small rural community in Kansas to disappear into. To take my daughters (something I would never do) and change all of our names. Buy a farm and raise chickens.  But I knew better.  I'd lived that nightmare as a child.  Love demanded that I stay, walk with grace, live with courage, love with compassion, serve without hesitation, parent with dignity, and own my spiritual journey -- however scary that was.

It was not easy. In fact, there were many, many nights when I cried myself to sleep begging God to give me courage and strength to face the next day of averted glances, dismissal, and scorn. And He always did. My relationship to Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy was more strengthened by this time -- than any other experience in my life. I turned to their words and examples of grace -- continually -- for clues on how to navigate my own life.

Over and over again, I came back to:

"Thy will be done.
Thy will be done.
Thy will be done."

Long before this time -- when going through a physical challenge that had driven me to my knees -- I called someone who had been such a wonderful spiritual mentor. I needed encouragement, I needed for him to promise me that what I was going through was not spiritually right -- and to tell me that I could expect to be free of it. He didn't say those things. What he said was that "someday you are going to look back, and miss these days of being so hungry for God's touch in your life."

I thought he was mad-as-a-hatter at the time and told him so. But you know, he was right. The hard times -- those days when we are on our knees longing for answers, praying to feel the presence of grace -- they are the very best days.

Someone asked me recently why I do what I do -- take calls from people who are in pain, fearful, sad, confused. They couldn't understand why I would be so happy to get up in the morning, if I was just going to spend the day on the phone, Skyping, reading texts and emails from people who were struggling.

This is why. These challenges are not personal. When I am willing to sit with someone who is needing a "friend" to witness what they are facing, and willing to discern what is true -- I get to hear the angels with them. I discover how ripe with divine blessing our lives are when the fruit is most heavy. I get to watch the ego being slayed by the presence of divine Love.

God's will for us is to know Him in every moment of our lives. In I Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 18, we are encouraged:

"In everything give thanks,
for this is the will of God..."

When we are willing to let go of a mortal, ego-centric sense of pride, accomplishment, acceptance, approval -- we find that everything -- and I mean everything -- is simply an opportunity to drawn nigh unto God and feel His nearness.

To those family members and friends who held me, let me weep, comforted me, trusted and encouraged me during those years -- I will never, ever, be able to say thank you with enough depth. My gratitude is unfathomable.


offered with Love,

Kate

"tired of failing..."

"we pray for blessings,

we pray for peace,

comfort for family, 

protection while we sleep. 

we pray for healing, for prosperity,

and we pray for your mighty hand 

to ease our suffering; 

and all the while You hear 

each spoken need, 

yet love us way too much

to give us lesser things..."

Laura Story's incredible song, "Blessings" still fractures every splinter of ego-preservation.  And this live performance is one I cannot listen to - without having the last linch pin of all pride removed.

Here goes:  I am so tired of feeling like a spiritual failure. There, I said it. There was time when I would have been afraid that if I posted a statement like that, I would have signed my own "death" warrant as a spiritual healer. I have since learned that this is not only not the case, it is actually the opposite of what is true.

There are a few things that have, over the last few decades, become supremely clear to me:

1) when judging one's relationship with God -- according to the model propounded by a prosperity gospel culture -- Jesus, Mary Baker Eddy, Gandhi, Mandela - and almost every spiritual luminary that I admire -- is a failure.

Jesus didn't heal Judas of his betrayal, Mary Baker Eddy didn't "heal" the lawsuits filed against her by her son and closest confidants; Gandhi wasn't able to stop the violence perpetrated against his people, and Mandela didn't escape from prison.

2) Measuring one's spiritual growth by human accomplishments, achievements, and the accrual of possessions is, at best, a false model. It takes only the most cursory reading of the gospels to discover that "things" are not indicators of God's love for us.  Otherwise, Jesus just didn't cut it -- no home, no camel, few possessions.

3) The spiritual can only be seen and experienced spiritually.  It is one thing to know the spiritual nature of "home," it is quite another to equate that knowing with bricks, mortar, mortgages, and deeds.  I keep coming back to "I have a body, I am not my body."  And in kind, "I have a house, my sense of home is not validated by a house."

Having once lived in a small spiritual community -- where everyone thought they knew what was absolutely and  unequivocally true for everyone else -- I discovered that although spiritual cultures grow out of a common love for a  fundamental Truth -- they often resort to judging one another to give a false sense of structure and order to their community.

What seems to have occurred, throughout history, is that cultures do what egos - individual or collective -- always do.  They form hierarchies in order the sort their "members" into bad, good, better, best.  And in order to do that, they have to decide what practices and measures will be used to assign individual placement within those hierarchies.

Within "spiritual" cultures, most of these measuring indices are based on judging the words and behaviors of "others" in ways that that can be quickly sorted by one's compliance to culturally determined policies and rules.  Instead of temperance, we rely on abstinence.   Abstinence is easy.  Abstinence allows us to make a black or white assessment based on what we see -- or assume. We can look at someone and quickly determine if they are practicing abstinence.  In contrast, temperance is almost impossible to judge from the outside.  It is a practice that relies on self-knowledge and self-control.  It is contingent on one's relationship to an inner moral compass.  Only the person his/herself truly knows when they are being temperate in their consumption of chocolate -- vs. gluttonous or abstinent.

For example:  Imagine that your model is temperance. And the behavior in question is drinking coffee.  You walk into a restaurant and see a member of your community sitting in front of a cup of coffee.  You might even see them pick up that cup and take a sip.  Where abstinence is the model, you can immediately judge that person's compliance to the cultural "rules."  But where temperance is the model, you have no idea whether it is their first or fifteenth cup of coffee.  You can only trust that there is divine sovereignty governing their every choice.  You greet them, smile, and turn to your own practice of what is right - for you!

It is relevant here to note, that in her definition of the word "Moral." on page 115 of Science and Health with Key the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy lists these qualities of thought, word, and action:

"Humanity, honesty, affection,
faith, hope, compassion,
meekness, temperance."

But cultures resist accepting these qualities as the true standard of free moral agency.  Primarily because they cannot be measured from the outside -- only from within the sanctuary of one's relationship with the divine. Not having an easy measuring stick for where someone fits, is frustrating to cultures that thrive on hierarchies of behavior to determine place and power, achievement or failure. How do you know if you are better than someone else, if you can't decide how good (or bad) they are.  Cultures feed on comparisons.

Now let's take it a little further -- with an experience I had some years ago.

Being in the public practice of spiritual healing is humble work.  Our daughters were navigating the twists and turns of a community -- one that truly believed it had established its standards - for judging one another - on Jesus' teachings.

An opportunity to participate in an activity was presented to the girls.  But it was one that was costly.  The girls were concerned that the expense was more than our modest family budget could absorb. We prayed about how to proceed. When they were asked if they would be participating, they said, "probably not, this might be too much for our family."  The person in charge of the activity said -- without hesitation:  "Then your parents might want to pray more diligently about how to demonstrate the supply necessary for you to go."

There was no recognition that our daughters had prayed, and that they had been given the humility and grace to say "no," to the invitation, and that they were bringing remarkable courage to the moment.  There was little appreciation that this was an opportunity for "growth in grace' -- one that far-outweighed the activity in question. There was no acknowledgment that our family was demonstrating abundance -- in how we shared our resources and lived simply -- a lifestyle that honored our highest reading of scripture.

What if, as Laura sings, our blessings come as tears -- not peals of laughter.  What if our healing comes in the form of a deeper peace, rather than the "fixing" of a human situation that we have deemed as a spiritual failure.  What if, what society measures as a failure is actually the highest achievement in Christ -- the opportunity for growth in humility, patience, meekness, charity, forgiveness.

I am reminded of another statement that Mary Baker Eddy makes in Science and Health:

"Our disappointments and ceaseless woes,
turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love,
then we begin to learn life in divine Science."

What if, our disappointments and ceaseless woes are not an indication of our failure to understand the Science of Being, but are actually the starting point for learning deeper lessons of spiritual consciousness -- the impartial and universal law of Love.

I refuse to let a false measure of what constitutes life in divine Science, make me feel like a failure any more.  I demonstrate my love for God, by my love for God -- not in any other way.  I demonstrate my understanding of Life through my moment-by-moment trust in the eternality of consciousness, not by more human days spent in this particular chapter of my eternal story.

I refuse to let the measuring stick of a culture - any culture - tell me anything about the strength of my relationship with God. This human experience is just a laboratory. It is not my "home." And at the end of any day spent in this laboratory, I return to my "home" -- my consciousness of Love.  It is here that I am loved and nurtured - impartially and universally. This is where the only true measure of my worth is found in the eyes of my first Love -- my Father-Mother God. Here I am enough. And that is enough for me.

offered with Love,

Kate

"and Love never fails you..."

"Love will protect,
Love always hopes.
Love still believes,
even when you don't.

Love is right here.
Love is alive.
Love is the way,
the Truth, and the Life..."

Brandon Heath's "Love Never Fails" always comforts -- always gives me hope.

There are days when I have felt like such a failure. In my eyes, I've fallen short. Past mistakes that seem to impact the present, opportunities to be more loving that I let slip through my fingers, a discipline committed to, and not met -- these suggestions leave me feeling unworthy, incapable, and faltering.

If it weren’t for a number of statements of encouragement by Mary Baker Eddy, I think I would have given up on myself a long, long time ago. But in the presence of her profound humility, there is an arresting selflessness and compassion. She brings an understanding of the human condition that shatters self-doubt and hopelessness -- an unfailing love:

“The Discoverer of this Science 

could tell you of timidity, of self-distrust, friendlessness, 

toil, agonies, and victories, 

under which she needed miraculous vision to sustain her..”

and

“The practitioner may fail,
but the Science never.”

 Without Eddy's honest humility -- characterized in statements like the above -- I’m not sure that I would have been able to get out of bed some days.  Sharing that, at times, she has felt humanly inadequate to face the challenges of “just showing up” gives me hope when I, too, feel helpless.

And, humanly, we are all pretty helpless on our own.  But we are in such good company.   John reports Jesus as having once said:

“I can of mine own self,
do nothing,
but what I seeth the Father do...”

When I remember these words, I feel capable again. There is something I can do -- I can do nothing.  Yes, that's what he said, "I can of mine own self do nothing."   Nada. Not a little bit. Nothing.

So what am I capable of?  Well, I am capable of witnessing what the Father is doing moment-by-moment -- through His presence and power.  His omnipotent goodness is operating unspent, at all times, and in all places. That's what I can do. I can see what the Father is doing.  Period.

And to know that God's goodness is a law, a science that never fails -- even when the “scientist” makes mistakes, and come close to blowing up the laboratory -- is a gift of mercy so deeply kind, that it takes my breath away.  Much like the law of gravity, this science is always in operation.

And divine good is a law. It doesn't need us.  We don't have a hand in its operation, in contributing to it, or creating it. It doesn't need the permission of our thinking any more than gravity needs for us to agree with the laws of physics, in order to hold us safely on earth. As Eddy says, "the practitioner may fail, the science never."

This science is the unconditional law of Love in operation. It is a behavioral (rather than theoretical) science. It is the law of "how" Love behaves, or operates, in our lives -- and in our world. It just is, and it just does.  And this Love is so powerful, that It never fails. Surrendering to this Truth of Love's control over Its universe is as easy as trusting the buoying properties of water.

I hope you enjoy Brandon Heath’s "Love Never Fails." For me, there is a blessed reminder in its title alone. To know that even in my darkest moments, foundering on the waters of deepest despair, I can always trust Love.

As long as I am loving -- reflecting God’s nature as Love -- yes, at least in this one thing -- I am not a failure. And, to be honest, this means everything to me.

unfailingly, and with Love,
Kate