Category: Parenting/Father Mother God

Living Love

Published on by lindseybiggsLeave a comment

“True prayer is not asking God for love; it is learning to love, and to include all mankind in one affection. Prayer is the utilization of the love wherewith He loves us.”

– Mary Baker Eddy

I listened to an inspiring podcast today about learning to love and utilizing the love that God has given us.  Even the fact that this Q&A chat was taking place was heartwarming to me. Sincere questions were asked and responses were given about the general question “how can we love more?”

In the face of disease, limitation, violence and fear, love is the great healer of all. The New Testament refers to this “love” in Greek as agape love. Agape love is the unconditional, divine love with which God loves us.

Does this mean that God sees us a frail, limited humans with many faults, but loves and pities us anyway? I don’t think so. I feel that God sees us as His image and likeness, totally spiritual, living completely above and beyond the frailty of matter. God sees our true, spiritual identity before any human history, limitation, or mistakes have been assigned to us.

And the more we align our view with God’s, through humility and quiet confidence, we can see ourselves as innocent; as unfallen; as the pure, spiritual creation of an all-loving, infinite, creative Deity.

It is actually our original spirituality – you could say our spiritual perfection – that enables us to love – to express the tender, heartfelt compassion of God – towards others. This love is powerful and healing because it is the “utilization of the love wherewith He loves us.”

So, if you are feeling down today or a friend is sick or any other circumstance is going on, consider expressing and feeling the love of God surrounding you, embracing you, healing you – and your friends, neighbors and family.

Reblog: Grateful teens

Published on by lindseybiggs1 Comment

from CSMonitor.com

It’s not about the money.

A recent study focused on the effect of gratitude on teenagers. There are a lot of reasons teens are grateful. And being rich isn’t necessarily one of them. Similarly, there are plenty of reasons teens might act as if they had a gratitude deficit. Being poor doesn’t necessarily seem to be one of them.

The study suggests that regardless of a teenager’s socioeconomic background, he or she can experience the benefits of a grateful heart, including the benefit of better mental health. Through a few changes in outlook, attitude, and behavior, he or she can make big gains on the gratitude front. Teens who are the most grateful find a number of benefits multiplying. Such as? Things like improved academic performance, a sense of purpose, more hope, and more happiness. As these take root, they grow more common to a teen’s outlook and more natural to his or her life. On the flip side, things like hopelessness or depression – which are at times linked to suicide in teens – grow less prevalent. Read more

What is your identity?

Published on by lindseybiggs1 Comment
Some might say these are unlikely friends.

Recently, a friend shared how she was praised at church while serving in a particular capacity. The praise was given by a fellow church member. Knowing both of these individuals, I admired their ongoing friendship and the way they appreciate the God-given qualities in one another such as integrity, dependability, honesty, forthrightness, compassion, and care. These individuals have served in church together for many years.

If I look at just the material surface of things, I might wonder how these individuals could be friends since they are so different: you could say one is a conservative, upper-class man while the other a liberal, middle-class lesbian.

How can these two different individuals serve together for decades in church and share a friendship that dives so much deeper than a material sense of things? By truly appreciating one another as God’s child – as brothers and sisters of the one Father-Mother God.

“…man is not material; he is spiritual”, wrote Mary Baker Eddy (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 468). If our identity is spiritual, that means it isn’t made of anything temporal (or temporary). We are made of God’s thoughts, ideas and qualities. This certainly makes me want to get to know who and what God is, so that I can know who and what we are – what we are made of.

“God’s being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss.” (Ibid, 481)

“God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.” (Ibid, 465)

Meditating on each these synonyms and attributes for God gives us a greater understanding of who God is; and it tells us about what we are made of since we are made in God’s image and likeness. It also reveals how our human relationships can transcend material confines and be harmonious, united and long-lasting.