Healing

When the children were babies, I’d wake at 3:00 am-ish, and instead of tossing and turning, I got up and wrote. I wrote about my feelings, thoughts, and reflections on being a parent. I considered it my special time with God. Oftentimes, I felt as if I were just a conduit and writing down what was downloaded.

This morning was a bit like that time, only this morning I awoke at 3:47 a.m., tossed and turned until four-something-a.m., and sent a text to my daughter in a group text, careful not to wake the pups. I did not immediately start writing as when they were babies, but who knows, maybe this sacred time is back.

Yesterday, I received a text asking for prayers for my ten-week-old granddaughter who was in an Irish hospital with some sort of infection. I forwarded the text to my extended family for added prayer strength and waited.

I looked at more potential places to live in Denver, was cursed at whilst on my way to a job interview, had the interview, and when I felt I had waited long enough sent a text asking how things were going. I hadn’t realized that she had been unresponsive and that she had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. How terrifying. She was put through many tests, including a spinal tap to test for meningitis. As a parent, you feel helpless. As a grandparent, across the pond and time zones, all you can do is pray.

“Our God is an awesome God” is how the song goes, and it’s true. Our God can and will take care of everything if we only ask. The one thing we must remember is that we must accept, trust, and surrender to His way of taking care of everything, and sometimes, that can be difficult.

She was given antibiotics and as of this morning, is responding to them and getting back to her smiley self. God is good.

Yesterday, I also drove by a medical center and noticed the serpent wound around a staff that is the medical logo. The logo comes from the time of Moses in the desert when the Jewish people turned away from God, so the Lord sent poisonous serpents that began biting the people and they died. When the people saw the consequences of their actions, they asked Moses to pray to God for them and he did. God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole in the middle of the camp. Anyone who looked upon it was healed.

As we approach Palm Sunday, and Good Friday, we can’t help but see the similaritiy of Jesus on the cross, the ultimate healer, to the serpent on the pole, and the medical logo.

Thank you, Lord for this day, for your healing love extended to all who look upon you.

Surrender

In the days, weeks, and months before I got married, I couldn’t walk. Initially, I thought I had a bruised heel, but that’s not really a thing. It turned out I had a bone spur in my heel, and a few days before I walked up the aisle, I received a cortisone shot. It did the trick. It masked the pain.

The pain came back with each pregnancy and after the birth of my third and last child, it came back with a vengeance. I crawled to the bathroom in the mornings and walked with crutches. According to Louise Hay (who healed herself from cancer by flipping the switch from negative to positive thought patterns), I had a fear of moving forward in life. My affirmation was, “I move forward in life with joy and with ease.” It became my mantra.

At one point, I went to the doctor and asked him to cut the thing out. He didn’t. First, he asked if I could be pregnant. No, though, when I got home, I counted days, and was it twenty-one or twenty-eight days between cycles? Anyway, he instructed me to take anti-inflammatories and to stretch. The combination of the affirmations, anti-inflammatories, and stretching worked and finally, I was able to walk upright, with only a few episodes after the divorce.

This last bout of illness with me and my Lucy, potential schedule changes, and what-if scenarios left such a pain in my neck that I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t bend down to put the antibiotics into Lucy’s mouth, and couldn’t turn my head whilst driving. I took anti-inflammatories, tried to stretch, and continued with my morning meditation. I tried to concentrate on my throat chakra, which is all about God’s will, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,” and the intentions of surrendering to God’s will, giving voice to God’s will, the freedom that comes from doing God’s will, and His divine, infinite, and unconditional presence. All the while, my brain whirled through my human habitrail about the logistics of everything in my current predicament of what to do with Lucy if she didn’t get better.

A very wise friend led me to realize that I was not surrendering myself to God’s will. I was going through the motions, even spending extra time on my throat chakra in meditation, but not heeding the intentions around that chakra, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” Somehow, I must have switched Thy will with My will. They sound so similar, thy and my. You can see how easy it would be to make such a mistake.

In Louise Hay’s book, You can Heal Your Body, it says that the neck represents flexibility, and the new thought pattern/affirmation is, ” I am peaceful with life.” To be absolutely transparent, I didn’t look at the until just this moment, but it makes me think of the book of Genesis when God referred to his people as “stiff-necked” when they didn’t trust God enough to surrender to His will. Aren’t we all God’s people?

I took a deep breath, then a few more, and I surrendered it all to God, the dogs and Lucy’s illness, the schedules, the what-ifs, the logistics of everything, and while not instantaneous, within a day, the tension released. To seal the deal, and reinforce surrender, today, I will receive a reiki session from another wise friend, who introduced me to chakras decades ago.

Today, may we realize that freedom comes from surrender.

As of Yet

I’m not going to say anything new when I say that we are all working on something; sometimes, it’s even multiple things. Who says we can’t multi-task? We’re all working on how we view the world and our place in it.

Especially during this time of Advent, we are called to look at how Jesus shows up in our lives. Will we recognize Him in the opinionated relative? How about the judgemental neighbor? How about the aggressive driver? How about the drug addict on the corner?

If we are all Divine Beings, then we all carry the Divine within us, do we not? What is it that triggers us not to respond as Jesus would when we encounter said relative, neighbor, driver, or addict? I might venture to say that it all stems from how we see Christ in our own lives/hearts/selves. Is Christ our best friend with whom we have endless conversations or the one we just feel obligated to visit every so often?

For me, my intentions started out great, with great zeal, a little like my New Year’s Resolutions, which I stopped making because they made me too stressed if I did not adhere to them. The disappointment hovered over me like a thick, heavy fog, and it became a reflection of how I viewed myself, as a disappointment, that I couldn’t see something through the year and make a permanent change for the better.

Once I started loving myself a little more by cutting myself some slack, I realized that many of those resolutions were superficial, and what really mattered wasn’t if I lost that pesky ten pounds (twenty), but what and how I saw myself. If I loved myself as Christ does, warts and all, then I am on the right track. If I can simply honor God each day by spending some quality time with Him, then my life will unfold as it is meant to. Only then will I be able to make better choices in my life, and just maybe I’ll become more aware of what I am actually putting into my body and ultimately putting out into the world. Maybe I’ll turn down that second glass of wine because does it really serve me in this moment? If I start looking at just this moment, how I fit into just this moment, I have enough, I am enough.

If I look at money the same way, in this moment, I have enough, then those judgmental folks who say, “You can’t afford it,” go by the wayside. I can see clearly that they are more afraid for themselves than for genuine concern for me. I see that they are coming from a place of fear and scarcity. They haven’t evolved to a place of abundance and enoughness. Unfortunately, they are stuck and want to share their stuckness with others instead of uplifting them. Those are the folks who can’t be alone, who need to have others wallow in their fear.

How would Christ see them? As a famous saint once said, or at least said something to the effect of; for the only eyes Christ has are our eyes, the only hands, our hands. One of Christ’s big topics in the Bible is money (and not to fear). So, if we look at the fear-centered folks through Christ’s eyes, we might see a scared child who doesn’t have two coins to rub together, who doesn’t know where the next meal will come from, who hasn’t fully surrendered their life to Christ. Or maybe Christ sees a child who wants to control everything in their lives because they grew up where things seemed out of control and who hasn’t surrendered anything but a handful of Sundays to God because they don’t trust that anyone, even God, can take care of things the way they can. Regardless, Christ will look on that child/sibling really, co-heir, with compassion, patience, and love, because He has wiped away all our hurt, imperfections, and our sins, so there are no more excuses. We can keep our focus on God, who loves us beyond all understanding, and keep Him our primary focus.

We all have something on which we are working so maybe the next time we encounter that difficult relative, neighbor, driver, or addict, we can look at them with compassion and realize we are all works in progress, and that as of yet, we don’t have all the answers, there are many things out of our control, and that ultimately God has the plan and we just have to surrender everything (including our finances) to Him.