At Any Given Moment…

“What manifests in front of us at any given moment is actually something truly extraordinary– it is the end result of all the forces that have been interacting together for billions of years.

We are not responsible for even the tiniest fraction of what is manifesting around us.

Nonetheless, we walk around constantly trying to control and determine what will happen next in our lives.

No wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear.

Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation. ”

Michael A. Singer

Daily Readings for Wednesday, April 17th

24 Hours a Day

Meditation for the Day

I gain faith by my own experience of God’s power in my life. The constant, persistent recognition of God’s spirit in all my personal relationships, the ever accumulating weight of evidence in support of God’s guidance, the numberless instances in which seeming chance or wonderful coincidence can be traced to God’s purpose in my life. All these things gradually engender a feeling of wonder, humility, and gratitude to God. These in turn are followed by a more sure and abiding faith in God and His purposes.

Prayer for the Day

I pray that my faith may be strengthened every day. I pray that I may find confirmation of my life in the good things that have come into my life.

Language of Letting Go

Taking Care of Ourselves

We often refer to recovery from codependency and adult child issues as self-care. Self-care is not, as some may think, a spin off of the Me generation. It isn’t self-indulgence. It isn’t selfishness – in the negative interpretation of that word.

We’re learning to take care of ourselves, instead of obsessively focusing on another person. We’re learning self-responsibility, instead of feeling excessively responsible for others. Self-care also means tending to our true responsibilities to others; we do this better when we’re not feeling overly responsible.

Self-care sometimes means, me first, but usually, me too. It means we are responsible for ourselves and can choose to no longer be victims.

Self-care means learning to love the person we’re responsible for taking care of – ourselves. We do not do this to hibernate in a cocoon of isolation and self indulgence; we do it so we can better love others, and learn to let them love us.

Self-care isn’t selfish; it’s self-esteem.

Today, God, help me love myself. Help me let go of feeling excessively responsible for those around me. Show me what I need to do to take care of myself and be appropriately responsible to others.

Life–An Experiment

I heard someone mention the other day that life is nothing more than an experiment and I’ve done some thinking on that since. It seems that’s the case with most of life situations we find ourselves in these days.

Like any good science experiment, we open up to observations with what we see going on around us. As we observe, we develop our own ideas, our own hypotheses, about why things happen as they do and why things are the way they are.

Perhaps my way of dealing with things in the past have served me well, perhaps not. There’s always time to try out a new way of thinking, a new way of doing. And to put that into practice.

Sometimes the newer way of doing things works out quite well…sometimes not so well….but there’s always something to be learned, some new perspective to explore.

The experiment of my past sixteen-plus years is to go without consumption of alcohol…that experiment seems to have worked quite well. No telling where I would be today or if I even would be around today if I hadn’t stopped.

Sometimes our experiments in life are by our choice,,,,sometimes not. Our lives, being in constant change, thrust upon us new situations and new circumstances and force us to experiment with new behaviors, new perspectives as to how we view the world.

And so in my own life, I’ll enter the experimental phase at the end of the current school year. The job I’ve held for the past two years is being phased out at the end of the school year. And so other options must present themselves and once again, a grand experiment begins.

Will I be offered some other similar position in the system? Will I go back to substitute teaching? Will I look for work in some completely different area? Or will I finally claim retirement as my own and not do any of the aforementioned?

I’ve got some time to decidr and the world has its chance to perhaps open up some new doors for me…or not. Regardless, I’ll once again be the central player in a grand experiment of what constitutes my life.

***Note from me – I received my annual notice from the Social Security Administration just after receiving word that my current teaching position is being phased out, with details on options that I have for selecting payments. Although that’s still nearly three years out, I don’t think its appearance at this particular time was a coincidence.

David Lee