Look Around

I heard somebody say once, "Want to see what your thoughts look like? Look around!" This morning as I was having my quiet reading and writing time in the breakfast room, the dogs happily ran in and out through the open door. It was dark and drizzly--the ice on the pond out back melted away days ago and the 60 degree weather (in December in Indiana? Amazing) left in its wake a spring-like scent and the mud to match.

I took a long look at the thoughts I see manifesting in my life right now. Life is good. I am learning. God is close. I am opening more and more each day to receiving more beauty, care, fullness, love, abundance in my life. And those aren't just words. Over the last several years, God has thawed and set free many numb and frozen places in me--my childhood fears about worth and existence; my stoic insistence on hard work; my tendency to put myself last and make myself invisible, denying my own needs and choosing to focus instead of the needs of those around me. God has gracefully opened those mistaken ideas and touched them with life; not making me wrong but showing me where I'd limited my view of myself, the world, and the Divine working in it.

As Don, my new CPE director, said, "Just like there is a God of Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, there is a God of Katherine, you know." Today I can say I feel that. And even when I don't feel it, I know it to be true. The God of All loves each of us with an all-encompassing, all-freeing love that we can only barely grasp. The Divine will for us is beauty, care, tenderness, fullness, life, love in abundance--not when we've done enough good in the world or we've netted all the bugs out of our personalities; not when we've solved all our problems and begun making better choices; not even when we resolve to treat people better and can say that we're (pretty much) living up to the Ten Commandments. Right now, as we are, flaws and wrinkles and all, God loves us with a never-ending, never-dulling, unconditional, transformational, life-giving LOVE. It's your God, the God of Abraham, entering your world. Just look around.