I wanted to post some new paintings you may have missed! Click on the painting to find out more about it!
If you’re interested in purchasing the above one, info is available here in my Etsy store.
And you can click below and read my update to find out where “My Innocence” will be ending up.
I’m trying to get in all the painting my little heart desires before flying out to Maine to meet up with my husband Joel on his last day of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Hope you have a greet weekend!
I’m not going to be talking about prayer in groups or at meetings. Just you and invisible other party. Welcome to the land of our imaginations. This wonderful, mysterious, curious place within our minds that absolutely no one else can see. Sometimes words are the form of communication that is seen or heard in our minds. There are endless other ways we communicate internally, feelings, physical sensations, pictures, colors, actual scene sequences, actual memories, our skewed memories viewed through feelings, songs, sounds, melodies, listening, waiting, just being, imaginary future conversations or interactions, premonitions, out of body experiences, dreams, waking thoughts, and a plethora I’m sure I have no idea about or haven’t mentioned here.
All of the above listed experiences communicate something about ourselves and God, back and forth with one another, God experiencing everything our internal spirit experiences, with us. Immanuel, God with us, not just here on earth, but inside our very selves. Our spirit is one with God’s spirit. Everything encompassed in this communion I would consider as “prayer,” others use the terms like meditation or spirituality.
God’s kingdom is gloriously unseen. It’s not at a place that has GPS coordinates. This is wonderful, because instead, it is everywhere. No matter what dirty hole in the earth a person finds themselves in, there God is fully alive within them. No matter about the people around us or circumstances, there, in all his fullness, is God’s beautiful self abiding in our hearts. Sometimes we have a harder time remembering this or experiencing it when we get distracted with ourselves, our performance, our strivings, our failures, and we believe lies about ourselves or the God that lives inside of us. But this never the less, makes all of the above no less true. The fullness of God lives within you. How awesome is that!
The first step in prayer is getting past our own religious performance involved with our interaction with God. God’s kingdom I imagine is a lot more like a children’s outdoor jungle gym than a church service. Modesty and restraint are not necessarily going to help us here. I would say the beginning of prayer is basically being completely and 100% honest with this God that lives inside us and this also involves 100% honest with ourselves. This concept sounds easier than it seems. Our minds are filled with justifications and self-perceptions that sometimes aren’t true. But no mind, moving forward.
Honesty with ourselves and God is just the foundation of relationship. Prayer is simply relationship. This does not exclude asking things and communicating needs, but involves so much more. God watches movies with you, rides bikes with you, cooks dinner with you, rides in the car with you. God lives with us! I enjoy expressing my feelings and verbalizing my questions and frustrations with God. When I intentionally chose to share life with him is often when I also get to enjoy his participation in mine. God will communicate love to however you are open to receiving it. He will tell you he loves you and he is with you daily.
Maybe you are more a picture person, or a word person, or feeling person, but when you engage with God in your imagination it may be unseen but it is possibly more real than any relationship you have living in these tents of flesh called bodies. Engage with God and have fun with him. He wants to set you free of your fears but he also wants to make you laugh. He is a gentleman and will not force you to engage with him, but he is looking forward to every moment you do. Love is the great mystery of our inner world with God, his kingdom of beauty and strength inside of us. He loves to respond to all that you offer himself of you.
I’ve been around the idea of trust for sometime, but I didn’t really begin to think about rest until listening to a series on it maybe seven years ago. I never realized how powerful rest is. When we strive and fear and fret, its not only so exhausting, its just simply a less fun way to be alive. I think it helped me to answer the question, what does trust look like? It can and often, looks like rest
Our imagination can cause our heart to tighten up and our breath to shorten when we imagine some undesired outcome. Sometimes this process of fear is actually worse than even what we’re fearing! Most times, these imaginings never come to fruition and they are nothing more than a haunting illusion. But the goal of fear in our lives is to cause us to become our own Gods. This is never in our job description.
The only thing that interrupts this is a living relationship with the one who is God. When we know he is good and we know he is in our future situations and events as much as he’s in our immediate moment, we will rest in the face of illusions of possible frustrations or disappointments. I think one of the ways God displays his greatness is actually in the personal details of our lives. He’s really good at.
In the kingdom of God, a living relationship with a good father, brother, and friend (just a few of the dimensions of our relationship with God) keeps our heart at rest. Because we experience his love for us, we believe it, we remember it, and we trust rather than react like someone who is alone and needs to fix/control things when there could be an event or situation outside of our expectations.
In God’s kingdom, peace doesn’t have to be forsaken. If there is a thought or conversation that threatens it, when you recognize that feeling, it is okay to let go of control, to change or fix something. It is okay not to figure everything out or why something went wrong. It is okay not having everything figured out for things to come. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. You are living loved. And there is someone very capable with you sharing in your experience who is not worried, not fretting, not far away, and who understands and loves you very much.
Trust/Rest is just one more wonderful attribute of God’s wonderful invisible kingdom. I have forgotten this in certain situations and events in my life. I can feel his tangible love even now. And just recently I have been able to completely let go of things in the past I don’t understand, aren’t fixed, and can’t change. I can trust/rest God completely with the past as much as we can with illusions of our future. He really is good and moves on our behalf. It is a beautiful journey of courage that only love creates: surrender.
For those of you not on facebook or not linked to my account:
A congratulations to my husband Joel who is not done with the Appalachian Trail, but just scaled Mt Washington in New Hampshire on his 120th day on the trail! He is on the hardest part of the trail past the 1,850 mile marker with less than 350 miles left to go and many mountains in between.
He’s got some awesome photos coming in you can check out on his Instagram account whether you Instagram or not by clicking on his photo links to the right. Don’t forget to scroll to the right or left because he puts up multiple photos at once. Happy viewing! So proud of you honey!
happyreign 