Tag: grace

Being awake to God’s goodness and love

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It can be hard to keep awake mentally and spiritually with so many technological and other distractions. Even though Christ Jesus lived so many years ago, he gave us practical wisdom to deal with these distractions. He said,

“what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.”*

Watch our thinking. Be mindful. Be proactive in thought. Watch what is going and coming from our consciousness. Much of our spiritual practice consists of being watchful of our thought: what am I focusing on? Is this really helping me progress? How is my relationship with God? How am I thinking about my fellow humans? Is this promotive of my spiritual identity? What am I believing truly has power in the world?

Being watchful and aware of our consciousness is a great practice to cultivate. Better health, more harmonious relationships, and greater opportunities come from being alert. They stem from our oneness with God and are inherent in our relationship with God.

God’s will for us is freedom, harmony, and joy. We can experience these as we draw closer to God and become more aware of God. This is a daily practice — moment by moment. We can always be checking in — am I focused on divine Truth, Life, and Love right now? How can I be a healing presence in this moment? Can I magnify the good? As we are more mindful of our own thoughts, we inevitably bring healing and bless those around us. We will uplift the atmosphere at the office, we will bring healing to our family relationships, we will comfort and strengthen ourselves and others.

When his students asked Jesus what some of the essential ingredients were to healing, he replied “prayer and fasting”. (Matthew 17:21) Fasting doesn’t have to be only about food. The definition of fasting can be expanded to include anything that would detract our attention from Spirit; anything that would take our focus off good. This could mean depriving ourselves from being news junkies and tuning in to what God is saying; or depriving ourselves of selfishness and being more generous; it could mean depriving ourselves of worry and doubt by focusing more on faith and trust. We can fast from materialism and anything that would try to captivate our attention — anything that doesn’t allow our thought to move forward towards progress, health, and healing. This type of fasting doesn’t deprive us of anything. Rather it allows us to “feast” on God! It keeps us so focused on God, that we become better, more satisfied, healthier, and happier.

Spiritual author and teacher, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote to a student,

“Keep awake by loving more.”**

Loving God primarily, and loving our neighbor as ourselves, keeps us awake to God’s presence. It keeps us tuned in to God, to be aware of all that God, good, is saying to us. God’s guidance and love are like radio waves filling the atmosphere — we just need to tune in to hear exactly the right message. Being awake to Spirit, enables us to see and know who we really are, helps us feel the love and peace of God’s presence, and inspires us with right activities that bless and heal the world.

So, we don’t have to blend in with the crowd — doing what others do and thinking what others think. We have power and authority over our life and consciousness. We can take our thinking into our own hands and feel the peace, love, and assurance coming straight to us from the Divine. We know that God’s will for us is only peace, only goodness, only love, courage, and strength. And we can bring these into our experience by keeping them close in our thought.

Know, then, that you possess sovereign power to think and act rightly, and that nothing can dispossess you of this heritage and trespass on Love.***

*Matthew 13:37
**We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Vol II, p. 117
***Pulpit and Press, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 3
Image by Vural Yavaş from Pixabay 

Put more weight on your spiritual side

Published on by lindseybiggsLeave a comment

Spiritual sense is the discernment of spiritual good.

We don’t hear the words “spiritual sense” used too often, but spiritual sense is essential to our peace and wellbeing. Spiritual sense is how we perceive beauty, goodness, love, affection, tenderness, satisfaction, and fulfillment.  These are spiritual qualities and because we are ultimately spiritual beings we have the capacity to use, see, and feel them now.

Spiritual sense is a conscious, constant capacity to understand God.

Spiritual sense is how we perceive the divine nature. It’s how we perceive the transcendent reality that is above the physical, material senses. This is important because everyone wants lives that reflect peace, health, wellbeing, and satisfaction. Gaining a daily dose of spiritual sense helps us have a consciousness that is uplifted and receptive to perceiving peace and wellbeing.

Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality.

When a consciousness that is imbued with spiritual sense reflects on the body, it manifests health, holiness, and wellbeing. Why is this so important? Because thinking and living with our spiritual sense releases anxiety, fear, and stress. It assures us of our oneness with God, divine Life, Truth, and Love. It shows us that we can never be separated from that Love no matter what the physical senses say. And as we hold to the spiritual fact, the wisdom, confidence, and courage that our spiritual sense communicates will take over. As we believe God more, and believe in physicality less, we tip our mental and spiritual scale. This allows God to tip the scale on the side of the divine and it brings blessings, healing, happiness, wholeness, and peace in our lives.

Material sense does not unfold the facts of existence; but spiritual sense lifts human consciousness into eternal Truth.

—

All quotes in the quote boxes are by Mary Baker Eddy. You can read her seminal work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, here.

Photo from Pixabay.

Overcoming self-justification through love

Published on by lindseybiggs1 Comment

Self-justification leads us astray. Sometimes we may feel like justifying our bad day, or treating someone poorly, or acting out of impulsive human will. If we feel that we are justifying something in our lives, it may be an indicator that listening to God, yielding to divine Love, can open the way to making us feel at peace and revealing even better solutions than we were thinking of.

I recall a time when I was having a rough day. I began ruminating and thinking about all the reasons why I was justified in feeling that things were going so badly: our preschool age son woke up at 3:30a.m., my husband was out-of-town, our new cat was being troublesome. All I was focused on was: how can I make my day, my life, easier? Well making our life easy wasn’t exactly Christ Jesus message to us. He certainly didn’t take the easy road and I didn’t have to be tempted into thinking that was the solution either. I could meet whatever challenges came my way with Christ-like confidence, courage and conviction.

Whenever I find myself ruminating on something — getting stuck in thinking that the solution will come in one specific way, I pray. Jesus said “the kingdom of heaven is within you” (Luke 17:21). I have come to realize that the kingdom of heaven — the experience of health, harmony, love, dominion, joy, and freedom — can be found here and now, through our oneness with God, infinite Mind, all the time. We don’t have to wait for human circumstances to change. It may seem like a different income level, or job, or location, or family status is going to solve our problems. But the Christlike activity of God is always revealing in human consciousness revealing the Way — the way to see, know and experience the kingdom of God right here and now.

Well back to my rough day. Although I don’t like to admit it, the thought from the carnal mind that was supposedly going to make everything better was that maybe we should give the cat back (we had recently adopted him from a shelter) — after all, there was the litter to clean up, the cost of the food, keeping us up at night, etc. Wouldn’t my life be better if we didn’t have a cat after all?

I don’t like to make blind decisions out of human will or self-justification so I decided I would pray about it. I talked to my husband about it that day, and he alerted me to see which option I felt I needed to justify more: keeping our cat or returning him? Well, there were what seemed like a million practical reasons as to why I was justified in returning him.

But as I reached out in prayer, the message that came was: what if you just loved him? Yielding to that message brought such a sweet sense of calm and trust.  This was a whole new thought. I had been listening to all the  justifications going on in my thought about all the reasons this cat was making my life difficult instead of focusing on the love and affection that had impelled us to adopt him. Through prayer, I began to see our cat, Joey, as a beautiful, spiritual idea of God and I felt compassion and humility toward him. I was also able to feel a greater sense of calm about the day in general despite my lack of sleep and frustration and family not being around to help. The frustration of the day completely melted and everything that day became more harmonious. My sister and some friends called and invited us to participate in a fun activity with the kids. And I was able to book an earlier flight home for my husband (instead of the 2-day bus ride across country that we had originally booked for him) at no additional cost.

It was clear that Love was embracing and meeting the needs of all of us, and it was my job to yield to this feeling of Love, loving us all. What a joy and relief that brings!

A few days later, I realized I was feeling so settled and peaceful that I hadn’t even thought about our home as being anything less than harmonious. Our cat, Joey, was seen as just another member of the family. Out of the blue, our son said “I don’t want to take Joey back to the Humane Society”. I said, “Me neither.”

In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error, — self-will, self-justification, and self-love, — which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death.

Divine Love dissolved the self-justification that I had been feeling. Just the other day, Joey was laying on our son’s playmat while our son gently rolled his cars and trucks over Joey’s back. Joey lay still and peacefully content as the cars rolled over “Mt. Joey”, as our son called him.  Later, Joey gently licked our dog, giving her face a “bath” as she lay peacefully resting. I was awed by the sense of peace and harmony present between all of us in our home.

____

Mary Baker Eddy SH 242:15 In