Joshua 0034 ~ Unrestrained

The Spirit dwells among us and where invited, dwells within us. The conquering spirit of the Antichrist seeks the perfect storm to ride into power and manifest in human form. The Spirit has raised human resistance throughout Christian history when various types of European (Rome’s iron and clay hybrid with the surrounding barbarians) dictator’s have risen up. In recent history, I suspect the US world power has been used to restrain the rise of the Man of Lawlessness. It appears that one of the underlying missions of President Obama was to move us out of the way. Is it time for the Nicoloations to find their new European champion, rising out of this current chaos?

(II Thessalonians 2:6-8)

If the Man of Lawlessness is now unrestrained, even more so are those who live in union with the Spirit. We both grow in strength until the day of reaping. We have no reason to fear the reaper. We too shall find our unrestrained expression.

(Matthew 13:24-30)

 

Joshua 0033

Always Come Back to the Solid Place

You must believe in the yes that comes back when you ask, “Do you love me?”  You must choose this yes even when you do not experience it.

You feel overwhelmed by distractions, fantasies, the disturbing desire to throw yourself into the world of pleasure.  But you know already that you will not find there an answer to your deepest question.  Nor does the answer lie in rehashing old events, or in guilt or shame.  All of that makes you dissipate yourself and leave the rock on which your house is built.

You have to trust the place that is solid, the place where you can say yes to God’s love even when you do not feel it.  Right now you feel nothing except emptiness and the lack of strength to choose.  But keep saying, “God loves me, and God’s love is enough.”  You have to choose the solid place over and over again and return to it after every failure.

(Inner Voice, page 8)

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I never hear a No to the prayerful question, “Do you love me?”  Yet that does not secure the Yes for me.  Silence often sounds like apathy during my anguish.  I fear being ignored more than being hated.  So, I must always, under all circumstances, hear my God’s affirming and passionate Yes.  I must know it is there.

I often feel guilt no matter what I do.  I think this comes from my home of origin with its co-dependence and emotional trip wires.  I think what is revealed most to me in considering my fear, is that when I ask myself, “Do you love me?”  The answer is almost always a definitive “no.”  What would happen if I made it a habit to say yes? Would it be easier to believe it when my Lord says yes, I love you?  Holy Spirit, Help me find this solid place of Yes.

Joshua 0032

Cry Inward

A split between divinity and humanity has taken place in you.  With your divinely endowed center you know God’s will, God’s way, God’s love.  But your humanity is cut off from that.  Your many human needs for affection, attention, and consolation are living apart from your divine sacred space. Your call is to let these two parts of yourself come together again.

You have to move gradually from crying outward — crying out for people who you think can fulfill your needs — to crying inward to the place where you can let yourself be held and carried by God, who has become incarnate in the humanity of those who love you in community.  No one person can fill all your needs.  But the community can truly hold you.  The community can let you experience the fact that, beyond your anguish, there are human hands that hold you and show you God’s faithful love.

(The Inner Voice of Love, page 7)

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If I remain split the only solution I can grasp is to seek people to fulfill my needs.  This leads to futility.

If I recognize that my call is to allow inner union between my spiritual and physical manifestations, my solution is to look for connection with a community that helps reinforce the God my spirit is so intimately acquainted with.

Apparently I am expending energy in keeping these two manifestations of the spirit-energy and the organic-human apart.  I need to let go, and let them come together.  This implies a third and powerful manifestation of my self.  It is that part of me that believes its source of power is in the division of spirit and physical.  Is this true, or am I wondering a bit.  I speak the emptying of that which divides me out of me, so that spirit and physical can unite, and I can exercise my knowing to connect with God through spirit and through humanity.

 

Joshua 0031

Trust the Inner Voice

Do you really want to be converted?  Are you willing to be transformed?  Or do you keep clutching your old ways of life with one hand while with the other you beg people to help you change?

Conversion is certainly not something you can bring about yourself.  It is not a question of willpower.  You have to trust the inner voice that shows the way.  You know that inner voice.  You turn to it often.  But after you have heard with clarity what you are asked to do, you start raising questions, fabricating objections, and seeking everyone else’s  opinion.  Thus you become entangled in countless often contradictory thoughts, feeling, and ideas and lose touch with the God in you.  And you end up dependent on all the people you have gathered around you.

Only by attending constantly to the inner voice can you be converted to a new life of freedom and joy.

(The Inner Voice of Love, page 6)

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I experience depression and anxiety more frequently than I would care to admit.  I do not like the terminal reality of my mortality and limitations.  If there is an opportunity to transcend this heavy, binding world I would be a fool not to seek it out.  Yet my trust falters and my fear masquerades as the voice of God.   Often times it seems that trusting God runs parallel to trusting myself with God.  When I get in the habit of second guessing my ability to connect with Him, that tendency bleeds over into the union between me and  the Lord of my covenanted life.  My areas of powerlessness must be answered with the growth of my intimacy with He is infinitely powerful.

Joshua 0030

Stop Being a Pleaser

You have to let your father and father figures go.  You must stop seeing yourself though their eyes and trying to make them proud of you.

For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity.  You need  not look at that only in a negative way.  You wanted to give your heart to others, and you did so quickly and easily.  But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you.  You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self.

(The Inner Voice of Love, page 5)

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In order to catalyze the transformation from pleaser to a free self, I will need to let my father and father figures go.  I cannot just release claim on my earthly father and transfer my dependence for approval to some other significant carrier of masculine energy.  Does this include the ultimate Father, my loving God?  How can it not.  What does it mean then, to let go?

I think it is more powerful if I walk away with that final question than it would be to forge some limited and quietly desperate answer.  Let the searching inquiry take root within me as I wait and listen.  Joshua, the Anointed, did this question find You as well?  Please teach me to let go of pleasing and become a free self.

Maybe God is enough for me when I am free and not seeking approval.

Joshua 0029

Cling to the Promise

Do not tell everyone your story.  You will only end up feeling more rejected.  People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.  The more you expect from people’s response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.

You have to close yourself to the outside world so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain.  God will send you the people with whom you can share your anguish, who can lead you closer to the true source of love.

God is faithful to God’s promises.  Before you die, you will find the acceptance and the love you crave.  It will not come in the way you expect.  It will not follow your needs and wishes.  But it will fill your heart and satisfy your deepest desire.  There is nothing to hold on to but this promise.  Everything else has been taken away from you.  Cling to that naked promise in faith.  Your faith will heal you.

(The Inner Voice of Love, page 4)

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I have been put at a distance with even my most intimate of relationships of late.  In my post-marital apocalypse I felt unjustly punished in my periods of isolation, but this most recent stripping away of human support feels strangely intimate.  I hear God in these words, “People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.”  It seems to me that the most powerful promises in a relationship are not xerox copied in triplicate and affirmed in legal signatures.  They are whispered in the ear, in a connection of unapologetic passion.  Then those who are so entwined work together in quite appreciation of being changed in the co-creative process.  The naked promise of faith embraced with my God will heal me.    And somehow, it will fulfill a craving from the One who desires me.

Joshua 0028

 

 Work around Your Abyss

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss.  You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible.  You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes.

Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.  There are two extremes to avoid:  being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

(From The Inner Voice of Love, page 3)

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I pray for help in finally sealing the power of this abyss in my life. Paralyzed by the dark tendrils that reach out and suffocate me in my bed, I am unable to solve the exact value of Pi required to leave my room.  I search for the most fulfilling conclusion and discover the multiverse of possibilities. If I chose one, I abort millions.  Yet if I chose none, I abort them all.

In the end, is it just one gaping wound that needs to be addressed incrementally?

I pray to my Lord (meaning, the Master of my Covenanted Life), and ask you Joshua, to help me learn to work around my abyss.

Thank-You.

 

Joshua 0026

“Try again, fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett

“Try not, do or do not.”
Yoda

“Making your mark on the world is hard.  If it were easy, everybody would do it.  But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way.  The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t.  It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”

Barack Obama

Joshua 0025

From one I love, after reading the previous entry and considering the self-made crucible I face with the PT Test:

“There is no secret to success.  It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure – Colin Powell.”

Joshua 0024

Joshua ~ good morning. 

In my budding adolescence, and my early manhood, I explored my christianity.  I could tell that something was missing.  As children in our sunday schools we were shown a relationship between God and man that was magical and inspiring.  It was an intense interaction, full of dangerous passions and unfolding power. 

Yet what I saw then, and what I see now, is a society whose very foundations, it bricks and mortar, are all built with fear.  On the instinctual, gut-level, reality of daily living people are more reactive and motivated by what they are losing, what they may suffer, than on what they may gain.   In this world, the prophet of doom is our protector, the messiah of utopia our tormentor.  The latter will only lead us to disappointment as we face the ticking clock of our mortality. 

I had a history professor in college who said something I have never forgotten.  When observing historical events, ask all the questions a journalist ask; who, what, where, why, and how.  But as a good historian, you must ask one more question, so what.  What was the significance. 

I have often asked that of you, Joshua.  What was your significance?  What was the relevance of your earthbound visit?

Human beings tend to be “fear cattle,” and it is easy for me as one of those beasts to get lost in this construct we call reality, to believe that the world we have manufactured to buffer us from our deepest fears is the real world. 

But what happens when a single human being quits being afraid?  What happens when a self-aware being unplugs from the daily routines of controlled panic that pass for life?  What will he or she see?  Will it be like Neo in the Matrix, when he had experienced his mortality’s natural conclusion and realised there was more?  Is this where the holographic exploration is taking us, to a world of energy crafted by perspective? 

The significant moment of you walking on the water, was not that you were a god-being, but that you were a human-being.  This was demonstrated by Peter’s request to be able to do the same thing, by his momentary willingness to see himself in a different light.  He stepped outside the boat and stood on the water.  For that moment, Peter was more energy than mortal.  The surrounding construct did not rule his existence.  But as soon as his mind plugged back into his environment bound by fear, he fell into the water and was subject to the surrounding storm. 

This Saturday, I will take this body that I have, with all of its limitations, and run again to test it for the US Army, to see if it has the necessary minimum requirements of speed, endurance, and strength that we mortals have deemed as necessary to enter the battlefields of earth.  I see that event playing out in two ways.  Either I unplug from my surrounding fear construct, and run as energy, and a miracle happens, or I experience the natural conclusion of my mortality and fail the test.  I can see either option provides some benefit to the unfolding of my personal mythology.  Failure can provide redirection of my efforts, and a release from a struggle that no longer belongs to me.  But living, even for a moment, as an energy being, will greatly strengthen my faith in its possibilities. 

Joshua, I have often found that you are a guide who helps me discover a third door.  And that is also a possibility here.  In my struggles to decide whether I am Christian or not, I know that other Christians would look at me and see me as too heretical and iconoclastic to be one of their number.  But any atheist who finds me praying, teaching, and believing as I do would quickly wrap the religious mantle around my shoulders and dismiss me as one of your followers. 

I don’t know what I really am, or what you really are.  And that embracing of not-knowing is the basis for my freedom in spiritual pursuit. 

I do believe in a perfect path.  There is a way to go that is perfect for me and fulfills every element of my inner council.  Spoken word is interactive.  Written word stays here.  and Created word unfolds.  My spoken word is the foundation of my relationships.  My written word is my only real legacy.  And I am the created word.  When all three of these are together, then it is true that the  Word gives life.  I believe that.

My perfect path appears to involve writing.  It seems to be the purpose of my existence here, my earthly visit, at least for this time around.  I am to observe, understand, clarify, and express what I see in written form, words that will stay behind and take on a life of their own. 

There are three writings that have been within me for a while, and I am going to privately build the note-base for those writings here on this site:

THE WORD

IRON AND CLAY

EAGLE FLIGHT

Keeper of the third door, I connect my life with yours, as best I can, day by day.  Tomorrow, I may not believe what I do today.  So let’s do what we can just in this day.