Blog 5

In Blog #4 I talked about ‘living words’.  How can we have living words that will impact us on the inside and change us from the inside-out.  It begins with audacious hope and giving oneself permission to look at an old solution in a new way.  I am discovering there are other possible ways to embrace what I once was taught were truths from only one perspective.  Before I gave myself permission to ‘think for myself’ I felt like Neo before the red pill.  Everyone around me spoke and believed certain things so I adopted those things as my truth.  Before you bail because you think I am a heretic would you at least read to the end of this blog before you leave?  My disillusionment arrived when I was exposed to possibilities outside of my narrow thinking.  Don’t get me wrong, narrow thinking feels safe; however I was constrained by fear.  What could happen if I ‘thought for myself’ rather than adopting explanations of others?

There is always danger in this.  Two possibilities are:  I could discover there is ‘more’ available to me.  The other possibility is that I could be led away into falsehoods that could destroy me.  How do you determine the correct path?  What I had done all my life was unfulfilling; never completely satisfying.  I had lived my life just short of lasting joy and fulfillment with only glimpses of happiness.   Then another possibility began to rise up in me as I read a simply written book.  A quote from the book gave me a lobotomy in my entrenched learned thinking.  The quote stated:  “we cannot judge others by their actions while at the same time judge ourselves by our intentions. (Grace Shift, David Huskins, pg.   ).  I had lived my life doing this very thing.  Maybe you have done that as well.  Something was awakening inside me that I had to explore. That quote reached into the depths of my being and touched a place I rarely revealed to anyone.  Be honest, it touched something in you too if you really think about it.  You have either judged others or been judged by others.    That takes me back to an earlier statement-Think for yourself.  I am independent, strong minded, a deep thinker and yet in the most important areas I had not thought for myself. .  I had to explore the word grace.  I will speak more about that later. 

If something is congruent that means everything lines up with it and it reinforces itself.  I had spent my life making excuses for incongruent teachings from others about a Word that was said to give life.  When incongruences would arise I would dismiss them concluding it was probably something in my understanding.  I would swallow the ‘blue’ pill and carry on.  That is, until I was confronted with challenges to my thinking I could no longer ignore such as the one listed above about judging actions and intentions.  I will continue to share these with you in future blogs. 

For now let me close this blog with a challenge to think about how it feels to follow a set of rules to achieve the right behavior to be accepted or acceptable?  Come on, really give it some thought.

See you next time…and again, thanks for investing some of your time reading my blog!