Good morning…
“Sue, I’ve been so moved by your posts this week,” wrote Dr. Cathy Snapp, dear friend and co-author of The Hidden Life Awakened. “This incredible meditation, from page 10, came to mind. Here are Betty Skinner’s words straight from the book.”
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“For most of my life, I have been a seeker, searching and longing to live from a deeper place. On a rainy day many years ago, I stood silently and gazed at the mist that had crept in and covered the inside of my window so completely that I could barely see outside. As I contemplated the patterns the fog created, several tiny droplets came together and formed a single drop of condensation that slowly made its way down the pane of glass, clearing the mist from a narrow strip on the window and allowing me to see with clarity the astonishing beauty of my rain-refreshed backyard.
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.
As you will see, I have been through the dark and lonely places, but I also have come to know the One who continues to lead me through them. As we choose to embrace the joys and the sorrows of each necessary season in faith and trust, the fog shrouding our soul slowly lifts and we behold, as in a glass, His glory and our glory in Him. Gradually then, we begin to mirror this eternal light of Love, claiming our true nature. After all these years, I still can’t explain it, but I can tell you that it is so because I have experienced it.
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.”
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Are you also a seeker, searching and longing to live from a deeper place?
It is God ringing our hearts like a bell, offering a holy summons, asking us to take the next step into the unknowing. We follow the narrow path blazed by Jesus, a path leading us away from temporal values centered in ourselves toward eternal values centered in God. Jesus is always lovingly and compassionately inviting us to a different way of seeing and living.
Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely (1 Corinthians 13:12, NLT).
Faith is a walk in the dark, an endless letting go toward the Light. I am grateful to be journeying toward God with you, morning by morning.
…Sue…
