Good morning…
Today Betty Skinner turns 93 years old. She wakes in Ponte Vedra, Florida. I wake in Atlanta, Georgia. We both wake increasingly more whole.
In the fall of 2007, I met The Hidden Life Awakened in its original 2006 form, a captivating book chronicling the fascinating faith journey of Christian mystic Betty Skinner. For reasons way beyond my understanding, I poured through these holy pages and God stirred my soul. The Spirit compelled me to teach this book a handful of times, to eventually blossom a life-giving friendship with the book’s soulful authors, and to travel six hours to meet Betty, once, twice, a third and fourth time.
Reading short snippets, can you sense why the Author of this book is expanding to take over more and more of my life?
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Excerpts from The Hidden Life Awakened by Kitty Crenshaw and Dr. Cathy Snapp
It difficult for us to grasp the truth that Jesus came not to astonish us with the great power and high visibility of God, but rather to show us the way of hiddenness and humility. In contrast to our culture that applauds upward mobility, the inner life affirms that God’s path is the descending way. Humility is the way of Love. The descending way of humility is the movement toward the true self’s realization. It leads us to a deeper understanding that, in His eyes, the most significant is often the most hidden. (xv)
As I look back on my life’s journey – and retrospect is such a beautiful view – I have learned that just as the mist of our uncertainty coalesces and then opens us to glimpses of brilliant hope and vision, so too our times of darkness and pain reveal and illuminate the mystery and beauty of our true self hidden within. Faith is a pilgrimage of the heart, a walk in the dark. It is an endless letting go toward the Light. Faith carries us along on a tide of God’s promises beyond the mire and desolation of our own despair. It is God ringing our hearts like a bell, a holy summons asking us to take the next step into the unknowing. (10)
Jesus is not primarily a teacher of information or morals. His teachings go much deeper than that. He is a teacher of a way or a path that leads to change and transformation and a new heart brought about by a surrendered life deeply centered in God. Jesus challenges us to abandon the wide, easy path of conventional wisdom and embark on the long, difficult, and narrow path of divine wisdom that leads those of us who choose to follow away from temporal values centered in ourselves toward eternal values centered in God. He is always lovingly and compassionately inviting His followers to a different way of seeing and living. (11)
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Along with Betty and me, do you hear a holy summons, God ringing your heart like a bell? As we take the next step into the unknown of God’s descending way, we each wake today increasingly more whole.
For you died [to this world], and your [new, real] life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3, AMP).
Happy new birth day, Betty!
…Sue…
