I Can Feel Because....

"Jesus wept."  - John 11:35

It is because I have the hope of eternal spiritual reunification with God, that I can fully grieve over the losses I experience here on earth.  

It is because I have this hope in the upcoming new heaven and earth that I can feel and acknowledge all my human feelings, without fearing and therefore avoiding me feeling them.

It is because I have this hope, that I can face the pain and grief of the suffering I encounter here on earth where there is still death, pain and brokenness.

Feelings are for feeling, not for fixing.

I will reiterate: feelings are for feeling, not for judging or rating my overall:

• "goodness" or "badness"
• "strength" or "weakness"
• "maturity" or "immaturity"

One of my primary pet peeves that I encounter often, inside and outside of the church, which tends to grieve me far more when I encounter this inside of the church, is when feeling certain feelings is admonished through spiritual bypassing.  It infuriates me because it's such a double-bind that results in further strengthening shame, instead of disarming it.

Jesus knew that Lazarus would be raised from the dead.  So, why did he weep?  Was this some fraudulent display of human emotions?  

No.  But for the skeptic in me, let me ask...

- When did Jesus ever appear to be operating from a need to deceive his onlookers so he could feel good about himself based on their opinions of him?  

- Why would Jesus disown himself through being inauthentic, for the sake of conning others?

These are often what we do, albeit subconsciously, so it's hard not to project that onto Jesus here.  But then I think to myself; Jesus was crucified because of his unashamed authenticity, which either attracted or repelled people from him.  Jesus lived an open and transparent life on purpose, so that he could pull down the subtle veil of people's misconceptions of God that were portrayed through religion that abused its power and authority.  He wanted to reveal God's true nature, through how he lived and used his God-given power and authority on earth namely; to set captives free, not to acquire more captives.  

Jesus lived his values out in the open, which was problematic for those who preached living one way for God out in the open, yet didn't value living this out in the most critical area of their lives: how they treated the vulnerable; be it the poor, the outcasts, children, foreigners, women in a largely subversive patriarchal society, the lepers, etc.

I've heard it say that Jesus wept so loudly in this account, that people who were not in immediate proximity, could hear his weeping.  He held nothing back while he mourned.

This solicited two responses that were contrasted with one another, in which I believe both responses could find people who can relate to them today.

"Then the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" - John 11:36

I find it interesting that from what these Jews were witnessing in Jesus' weeping, they took note of how much Jesus loved Lazarus.

Then there is another response from some of the Jews...

"But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" - John 11:37

Good question.  I wonder though, if these Jews said this because they were uncomfortable with openly expressing grief or emotions in general?  I don't know, but I do wonder.

There are two different responses here from the Jews, to Jesus' grieving.  One seems to empathize with how Jesus grieved.  The other response seems to ask a very logical question and comes from a more analytical viewpoint, in response to Jesus' grieving. 

To this blog author's modern-day-analytical-chic (me) who is much more comfortable in intellectualizing her feelings, than in fully feeling them, I am wondering about this.  Either way, I am still finding it to be a pet peeve of mine to encounter this de-spiritualization of feelings (spiritual bypass) in order to avoid feeling and/or expressing emotions, when in contrast, it is because of my spiritual life's source, that I am empowered to feel my feelings fully, not ward them off with Bible verses.

The Cross: Love > Control

Who is this God of my understanding?

He is all-powerful and sovereign, yet is trustworthy with how He uses His power and sovereignty...how so? By not operating out of any fear-based need to control everyone and everything, in order to arrive at the outcomes He desires.  He does not exchange love for control.  God's ability to do this is rooted in His power to love, not in His power to control.  

"There is no fear in love.  But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.  The one who fears is not made perfect in love."  - 1 John 4:18

Love is powerful.  

That is something which is taken for granted because of my distorted assumptions of love and power, and me just beginning to question these assumptions with God and others I trust.  I confuse receiving love with earning and receiving rewards, and power with wielding control. 

When I fear punishment, it's because I fear suffering, and who doesn't?  Punishment isn't punishment, unless there is suffering involved.  If I deny my fear of suffering, I do so out of shame or pride, which leads to hiding, as denial (hiding) is bonded to shame.  I do not want to suffer, because I fear I do not have what it takes to endure it, for suffering renders me vulnerable and dependent.  That is a valid fear.  If none of these elements were present when suffering takes place, I would not fear suffering and I would not fear punishment.  

So, the question which will lead me out of this prison of fear is not a question that's based on the validity of my fear, for it is valid fear.  The question which will lead me towards freedom is: what will drive out this valid fear of punishment, that involves suffering?  The surfacing answer: receiving valid love.  Being validly or perfectly loved results in me not having a fear-based compulsion to control others, in order to get what I need, which is ultimately love.  This doesn't mean that when things do not go the way I desire, that I'm not grieved over it, or that God isn't for that matter, for I can still feel emotions without meaning I'm driven by fear, and I submit to you God is not different in this respect, He's not made stoic because He isn't driven by fear.  In fact, when I am being driven by fear, I usually will not feel my feelings, especially grief.  So, when I do suffer and grieve, I can suffer and grieve knowing that I can endure, because of the power that comes from receiving perfect love, not perfect control.

Love drives out fear, not control.

It takes a supernatural power to becoming willing to choose to relinquish control over every person, place and thing, and I believe this is what God did in creation and in creating humans to be made in His image and likeness.

Love involves taking risks.  Making choices which involve taking high risks happens when it's been determined that the desired goal can only happen if the high risk (to relinquish control of the things beyond God's own personal will) is taken.  The risk is taken when the desired goal outweighs any desire to control to gain security/certainty.  When the risk is not taken, there is a 100% chance that the desired outcome will not be realized.  God took this risk when He created humanity with free will.  He has chosen to honor this boundary, though doing so has also caused Him to feel deep grief and pain.  This is a love that involves taking high risks, but the desired possible outcome, which is humanity having the possibility to accept Him and choose to trust Him in return, is worth it to God.  

The cross is God's solution to our problem of being powerless to be both perfectly liable and faithful in making amends for our sins.  The cross is how God demonstrates His use of power; which is foolishness to those who are convinced that using power over others to get what you want depends on using control over others.

God's power and sovereignty does not equal control.
Love is the most powerful resource in the world, which drives out fear and its need to use control to perfect it.

As I proceed on my journey of solidifying my understanding of God to be a little more concrete, yet not rigid, but fluid, yet unique and distinguishable, I've noticed the pattern of cyclical disorganization before reorganization.

My understanding of, and relationship with God bends but doesn't break, whereas religion, to my understanding, doesn't bend, but easily breaks.  As always, take what you want and leave the rest.

Peace.

Behind the Logic of Sin

It's hard to trust in God outside of my native homeland, where He designed me to be.

Before my physical body was born into this physical world, my spirit was conceived in my homeland. That place is the garden of Eden; Paradise.

Within my inner-sanctum, there exists evidence of my homeland, where I was originally conceived. When I acknowledge this evidence within me, I am also faced with the undeniable yet subtle feelings of alienation and of being a foreigner in the ways I experience this beautiful, yet broken world.

There are two realities within me.  Their existence is not mutually exclusive, although they operate from two different governments which experience polarity and are mutually exclusive in their origins.  Both of their existence is felt within. Their wills, desires and fears can both be experienced within any given day, over a multitude of times, even though they function under polar opposite governments.

God designed me with the capacity to exercise free will, inside and outside of Paradise.  It was not revoked as a consequence or punishment for using my free will in a way that grieved Him.

God takes dramatic and intentional actions in doing what He must do with the desire for me to see that He is absolutely trustworthy, inside and outside of Eden.

There are no laws, rules or edicts that God needs to follow, which depend on Him taking actions to reveal His trustworthiness, with the exception of the royal law of Love: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Love is the only law God chooses to follow.  If He chose to break it, He would be untrue to Himself by going against Himself.

God is love.

There is a subtle and pervasive lie that Satan fathered, and used to gain power and control in the spiritual realm where Earth is.  He successfully deceived and therefore robbed humanity with our cooperation.

The deception was and still is predicated on human beings, one at a time, believing three fundamental lies...

1. I must be defective.
2. The "solution" to my believed problem of being defective, is being secretly withheld by God.
3. The "solution" is within my reach, if I bypass trusting God's provision, and honoring His prohibition (judgement).  

It worked, and it is still at work within humanity, one human at a time.

The two existing governments within me polarize each other with either their agreement or disagreement regarding each fundamental lie.  Believing the first lie (that I am defective) is a prerequisite for me to be faithful to the second and third lies which assure me that I will need to sin for my own good.  The result of being in agreement with, and exercising my faith in the three fundamental lies is sin.

A very rational and logical reason to sin is provided:

I need to sin if I am to repair myself, because I am on my own, even if I am to repair myself for God's sake.

Sin becomes purely logical and rational.
Rationalize ~ "rational lies"

Dawn of a Spiritual Awakening

At my very core, before I was a "sinner" I was intentionally created in the image and likeness of God, my Creator.  I was born bearing His image, crafted to crave and have my cravings satisfied through receiving His love.  So simple, yet here we are in a world that is so broken, but there are those whom are awakening to the basics.  I am one of them, one day at a time, I am waking up. 

When I've come to see that God desires me to be receiving what I was created to receive, which is a love that feels so safe and secure and of which my body, mind and spirit holistically absorbs and fully processes, I can surrender life itself, under His care.

I'm seeing that there's a natural flow that results, that entirely transforms the basis or starting point within my own inner life in which I enter into relationships from.  This isn't as obvious to me when I'm living less than mindfully, and am unaware of my own inner life, or when I'm on auto-pilot.  It's likely I will also be met with certain people who are well adjusted to my auto-pilot form of living, to feel offended and thrown off guard by this shift, because it's so unnatural and unexpected.  Another reason this may upset the usual flow of my relationships is that it significantly diminishes the amount of power I give away to others to control and manipulate me, largely because it collapses the need that's driven by my false-self.  When this false-self is in the driver's seat of my life, my subconscious codependent, self-sabotaging survival skills are calling the shots.  When these shots are no longer being called, my natural propensity to control and manipulate others has been hugely disabled.

I see my humanity having so many rich meanings.  First off, my native origins are in the garden of Eden, even though I experience the reality of being born and raised outside of the garden of Eden.  When I say garden of Eden, what I'm referring to is simply paradise, where there's unbroken fellowship with God, self, others and creation and where shame is not experienced.  In this current world's reality, it doesn't take long after a baby has been born, to feel fear.  There's a disconnect or a gap between the experiences which I was created to need and have met, and the feeling a newborn experiences within their relationships outside of Eden, even with the most loving and well-attuned parents.  As far as I'm aware, newborn babies feel fear, even though they are safely being cared for, there is no way for a newborn to communicate explicitly what their needs are and immediately have the parent be able to meet them on an ongoing basis.  When an attuned parent attempts to meet the baby's needs, there is still a level of guesswork.  There is a felt gap or a disconnect, and parents are powerless to prevent their newborn from feeling that gap for too long, no matter how nurturing and attuned they are to their newborn. 

The shift in this basis of my survival needs being dependent on other people who feel familiar to me (usually emotionally unavailable people) to meet my needs, are gradually being shifted over to the care of God, as I understand God.  Often, He uses people to meet this need in me, but they are conduits of His love and provision, not independent sources.

As a recovering codependent, I'm coming to see that I've spent pretty much all of my child and adult life negotiating relationships with usually emotionally unavailable people, based on my survival needs, instead of trusting these needs to the care of God.  It is because the God of my understanding wasn't so trustworthy, even though I intellectually assented to that belief.

I still live in a world which I broadly describe as a place outside of the garden of Eden, far from the paradise of my native homeland, but am learning to thrive in this world, not just survive.  I'm currently a foreigner, taking residence in a foreign land.  It's a foreign spiritual dimension of living on earth, which has been so greatly corrupted from its original design.  I wasn't created to find spiritual solidarity in this world that's outside of the garden of Eden, which does not fully manifest the presence of God, and the absence of sin, death and decay.  This is my "home away from home", but I will be going home one day.  For now, I am studying abroad, how to walk by faith, in a broken world that only has glimpses of paradise that are seen and felt.  This is the world after sin, which is under the reign of Satan, sin and death, and before the kingdom come of God's will being fully done on earth.

As I live and study "abroad", I'm now aware that I have a false-self to be the master over in this foreign world, in place of me being mastered by this false-self, mainly through denial.  I have come to realize that I have either proudly or ashamedly identified with this false-self, out of not being aware of my true self.  Being awakened to, and made consciously aware of my inner life, has been playing a very active and vivid role in my recovery at the present time of me writing this post. 

A Spiritual awakening is where I come out of my denial and wake up to who I truly am, at a core and spiritual level, not identifying with the false self as my true-self.  The false-self has been created out of a subconscious survival need that still gets relied upon when trusting only God is not my consciously chosen survival mechanism.  My relationships with others then gets perceived through the lens of pain and wanting to stop or decrease the painful ripple effects of not fully trusting in God.  My feedback loop of pain is getting shorter and shorter, which is great training for getting me back to consciously choosing to put myself under God's care, as I understand Him. This circumvents my relationships getting evaluated based on how much others can meet my needs.  These needs are the invisible frame I see people through, whether I am aware or in denial of it.  This way of seeing people and relationships has been so natural and familiar, that it was extremely hard to see through the denial.

As I'm becoming aware of the denial, I'm realizing it's just the dawn of a spiritual awakening for me.  I can recover and learn to trust in God to meet my needs.  I'm learning that He often does this through people, and to experience this without trusting in people in place of God, one day at a time.  Even though I'm also seeing that this may cause an upset to some of my current relationships, because it doesn't register on our previously unspoken, but implicitly agreed upon, relational barter system.  I am better off for it though, and so are others I'm in relationship with.

Jesus lived like this. And he died because of it.  The life he lived was interpreted as highly offensive and upsetting.  It bucked the spiritual system of group think that feeds off of successfully selling the illusion of needing to need certain people in certain places and gaining their favor, including especially God's, by practicing certain practices and/or believing certain beliefs, all doing this as a substitute for trusting in God. .  

Living this way will likely cost me, but I am well fed when I feed off of God's provisions for me, and not trying to substitute my own version for his provisions.  Jesus did basically say, "eat me" because He's the bread of life, (John 6:35).

Before, I was so unaware that I could easily be busy and preoccupied, yet rarely present in each moment.  Many, not excluding me, can appear from afar, to have life figured out, but not seeming to make it work for long.  Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, there are countless ways in numbing out of feeling feelings, and staying in denial.

The dawn of this spiritual awakening is waking me up from the anesthesia of denial.  I'm now desiring and starting to experience living my life in a conscious and present way with God, myself and others, one day at at time.

Spiritual Quest-ioning

I am a complex being, consisting of mind, body and spirit.  My mind and body are what's presented to the outer world; what you can see, size up and evaluate, based on your own criteria and grading system.  You can hear my mind being expressed through words and can come into contact with my mind in that venue, that is what you are doing when you read this, its my mind, trying to explain my spirit, using words.

My body is made up of physical material, you can see it and touch it, and sometimes...you can smell it.  Each part of me is unique and distinguishable from the other parts, yet operate in relationship to one another.  My mind is connected to my body, my body is connected to my mind and my mind and body are connected to my spirit.  The more I acknowledge this and cooperate with this reality, I will experience harmony and wholeness.  The more I try and defy and deny this reality, the more dis-ease and disharmony I will experience, and perhaps will try to numb out from having to experience this reality.

My spirit is unseen to the physical eyes, and depending on either how whole or fragmented I am within, my spirit will be connecting likewise to others and their spirits.

My spirit isn't completely mysterious and elusive, though it's not made up of physical material.  My spirit is my authentic self.  It is who I am, not what I do, what I have, and what I look like on the outside.  My spirit transcends all elements of physical characteristics, yet is true and real, just as my body and brain are real.  My spirit was given to me through another spirit, and that is the spirit of my Creator.  My spirit is what mirrors the likeness of my Creator.

In knowing my spirit, and acknowledging my spirit, is to know and acknowledge my Creator.  This is what I have experienced and come to realize as I remove the barriers of shame and pride, as I integrate my mind, body and spirit with one another....

My spirit has deep longings.  My spirit longs to be loved, to be known, to be seen, to not only be acknowledged, but to be profoundly valued and cherished.  My spirit longs to be made alive as I experience the longings being met, one day at a time, one moment at a time.  Shame and pride keep the barriers up which prevent me from to acknowledging this reality, because then vulnerability is seen as an insane risk.

As long as I am alive in my body and mind, my spirit will be relentless in the pursuit of its longings.  My spirit does not long to solely identify with a gender of being male nor female, for my spirit transcends those physical elements and cannot be constrained within those, but acknowledges those as valuable parts of my body, and therefore parts of my spirit.  My spirit does not long to fully find its identity and fulfillment within an ethnic race, for it transcends those visible characteristics which my spirit finds too confining, though a valuable part of my mind and body.  Because my body and mind do not find the former characteristic too confining, my spirit does acknowledge and accept these present elements, but my spirit does not find ultimate rest in them, because those are all temporary, and my spirit is eternal, but can still appropriately value the temporary, without shaming and disowning those temporary parts.

Spiritual consists of the activity in the realm of the spiritual,
Mental consists of the activity in the realm of the mental,
Physical consists of the activity in the realm of the physical.

Wholeness consists of the activity in the realm of integration of these realms.  Me being open to the life that consists of integrating my inner and outer being has been the ongoing results of me experiencing pain, and coming into conscious contact with a Power greater than myself who I've found to be worthy of my spirit's trust and can find rest in.  His name is Jesus.