i'm a rock star!

I am always a sucker for a "blog thing". Found this one over at Zena Musings . I love the description although I am certain my teenagers would beg to differ!!!

You Are Liz Phair!

Sexy tough indie girl... Who's not afraid to be a little girly "I am extraordinary, I am just your ordinary Average every day sane psycho Supergoddess"

Who's Your Inner Rock Chick?

Messy

"God of mystery, help me to hold the questions, lead me to live them, bless me to bless them for disturbing my path." --Jan L. Richardson, Night Visions

Yesterday was messy. The above words and the ones I share below were penned before I even got out of bed. Little did I know how much I would need them today.

Honor the questions. Hold them lightly. Let them guide but not overwhelm and obstruct. They may disturb the path—the journey not to look how I think it should, but that’s what I get for thinking.

Follow the path like a butterfly dancing across the garden. Touching here. Lifting there. Following the breeze and scents. There is a plan perhaps, but it is not mine. Is it God’s—the man with strings in the sky? NO. I think not. It is mystery. Life force. God.

It is not the God of my elders. A God who controlled with fear and condemnation. It is the God of love. Serendipity. The God who is with me in tragedy, but who does not push a button and make it happen.

The journey is one together. The questions will always continue. Hold them lightly. Honor them well. Life is messy.

photo by lucy 1.13.08

love & fear...love & hate...not so different

Lucy, Charlie Brown & Linus make this great statement for love & hate. I found the cartoon at Experimental Theology where he is doing an online book on "The Theology of Peanuts." (It's a quite thought provoking series aside from the fact that he equates Lucy to the Satan figure ☹.) I thought it fit quite nicely with the discussion on love & fear.

(fyi--if you have trouble reading the cartoon, click on the photo and it will be enlarged.)

Shall we all practice leaning a little to one side? Now would that be the right or the left?? Hmmm....Let's all lean toward the love side, what do you think?

More thoughts on Love

Thought I would share a couple more thoughts from others on the topic of love. These two excerpts "sandwiched" the writing of my post on love and fear.

Maturity doesn't come with age or intellectual wisdom, only with love.
--Ruth Casey

We may have thought being mature meant being "grown-up." This meant acting rationally, showing good judgment, no longer exhibiting childish behavior. It's doubtful that we ever considered the expression of love as an act of maturity. However, we are learning that the key to sustained growth is the ability to love one another and ourselves.

It seems so much easier to focus on others' faults than on their assets. In childhood we learned to compete with our classmates, and this taught us to be critical of one another. No teacher tested us on how we expressed love; rather, we worked on spelling and multiplication tables, and we were pitted against other students for the gold stars.

Now we are discovering how much more comfortable life is when we all get gold stars. We are handling every situation more sanely now that we have realized the gift of serenity that accompanies our expression of love.

My growth, my maturity in this program, can best be measured by my attitude today. Am I loving, or am I still competing with the others?

You are reading from the book:

A Woman's Spirit by Karen Casey

This next quote is from actor, Val Kilmer. It appears in the January issue of O...The Oprah Magazine.

What if we made it mandatory to teach love in schools? It would be a subject you study, like algebra. You'd have to pass a test to get married or have a baby, after learning how to love. Our children would learn to be nurturing. It would be safe for boys to be loving. I heard a quote once: "Men have come and for a time made evil victorious, but they never win...Love always prevails." If we taught love, it would do more than prevail. It would manifest through our actions. Total love would liberate us all.

And here are those questions again: What if we taught love in schools, instead of fear and competition? What if we chose to act daily from love instead fear? What if we started right now with a hug instead of judgment? How would the world change?

In closing, here is one of my favorite videos that I have shared before. Think about it, please.

Two Choices. Love. Fear.

Two choices. Love & Fear. We all live there. We make those choices daily in a multitude of situations, but we are usually not conscious that is what we are doing. While we would like to profess that most choices we make are out of love, I choose to differ.

One of the most profound examples of this comes from personal experience and the time my husband and I decided to send our son to Mexico to a therapeutic boarding school. Easily, we would say we did it because we loved him and wanted the best for him (which is, of course, true.) However, at the deep root of this decision was our terror (big fear) that he would not live to see another year if we didn’t do something drastic. So, truthfully the choice was made from fear disguised as love.

How often do we see that in the world today? This post began when a friend let me know she would not be allowed to teach in a Catholic church unless a priest “supervised” her program. I was reminded of another fabulous woman I knew in times past who spent 40 plus years on the mission field in Africa, but was not allowed to teach a protestant adult Sunday school class without a male partner. Personally, I was declined leadership in a women’s Bible study because I was divorced and might encourage others to leave their husbands (indirectly, of course ☹.) It would be tempting at this point to rattle on with a multitude of other examples such as war, prejudice, etc. but I shall not. I hope you can start to see in these examples where “well-meaning” people have disguised their fear in terms of what is best for others (so-called love.)

I am feeling close to being in over my head here, but I would like to pose the following: What would it look like if each day, each moment and each interaction we asked the question: “Am I acting out of love or fear? What is my motivation?”

This doesn’t mean that fear needs to go away (for there is no chance of that anyway). Fear can be very helpful and healthy and often keeps us safe. For example, I believe it is good to have a healthy fear of drinking and driving or having unprotected sex. (I am, after all, the mother of two teenagers.) Fear, however, can also keep us trapped inside a box—immobilized and stuck in old patterns of living. Stuck in fear!

We cannot change the past or the future which are both great feeders of fear. The only thing we can affect is this moment. The past is gone. The future will never arrive. All we have is right now. We have two choices in how we will live it. Love. Fear.

So, what might happen if each day, each moment and each interaction you asked yourself the question: “Am I acting out of love or fear?” How would your world change? I hope you will ponder that.