Coffee, FB “Likes” and Me

The alarm rings and your hand frantically searches for the source of the sound so you can eliminate the immanent day and slip back into a more pleasant dream state. We love sleep! But the snooze function does its thing and you reluctantly push back the covers. It’s amazing how familiar this pattern is.

We need the first cup of coffee or teeccino to set us on “engaged,” followed by checking up on sports stats, and making a note of how many likes we received on Facebook. Then we are good to go. The day continues with numerous distractions to drown out the sound of difficult questions roaming in our head. God seems too huge to figure out anyway.

It’s remarkable; we spend an inordinate amount of time filling ourselves up to avoid recognizing that something is missing. If you delve into scripture there are all kinds of promises but how real are they? For example, take Ephesians 3:19-20:

“May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.”

This promise doesn’t always resonate with the reality of our day-to-day lives where we try to manage emptiness with coffee, the delightful sarcasm of twitter, sugar and some less savory bad habits! However, sooner or later we end up running on empty.

Turning off the “do more” button

Are you full of God’s love?

Ironically, that feeling of emptiness should not be seen as an invitation to simply “do more.” We have a tendency to try to add more activities to our already crazed schedules in the hope we’ll bridge the gap. Suddenly we are signing on the dotted line to join a small group or frenetically looking for a way to join a local service project. But all the extra activity doesn’t seem to give us the feeling of fullness we are seeking.

It’s interesting to note that the translation of the original word for “filled” used in Ephesians should really be, “being kept filled.” That small change in tense opens up a whole new understanding.

It’s not about doing more but being more connected. Our glass is sometimes empty or at best half full. Nevertheless, we need to find a way to connect to God’s love which is always flowing, ever refreshing and never runs dry.

It’s about connection

Finding your personal connection with God is what the first blessing, “to be fruitful,” in Genesis is all about. Without a connection to God we run dry and attempt to function on empty. We hope that by going to church we’ll get the shot in the arm we are looking for, but then Monday comes around and sometimes we feel like we are back at the starting gate. We lose energy and motivation. So the question is how to stay connected in a more consistent way to God’s love.

It starts by stopping!

We have to STOP limiting God’s ability to connect to us. God is the designer of the entire cosmos in all its amazing form and scale. There is an element of God’s essence inside each and every human being on the planet – all 7 billion people. He or she is a force to contend with.

Sometimes, you just try to run away and when you think you have run far enough, you turn around and God is right there in the love of another person, or God’s love leaps off the pages of a book and you have this eerie feeling it’s more than coincidence.

Have you ever run away from God? I know I have. We say, “I believe” but we don’t live like we believe.

Unfortunately, there’s a disconnect between what I say I believe and how I live. The question is how do I close that gap?

Closing the gap between belief and action

If you did a word search in Rev Moon’s sermons you would probably find that the words “mind-body unity” are among the most frequent because this is at the very heart of our difficulties as people and sons and daughters of God. The first blessing identified in Genesis, “to be fruitful”, describes a person whose mind and body are in harmonious relationship, reflecting the nature of God. This type of person’s actions would consistently reflect beliefs and values that are rooted in God’s love. However, we struggle with the belief that God can have a personal and loving relationship with us, and that we resemble God.

“Many Christians today think that because God the Creator is unique and absolute, the Supreme Being, it is impossible for human beings to relate with God in full partnership. They reason that people are profane while God is absolute and holy. Consider this matter, however, from the concept of love. To form relationships of love, even the lofty and supremely good God, and lowly created beings must share common attributes of character. To love they must share the same heart. That is, the personal God must have the same qualities as the human personality.” – Sun Myung Moon

Part of our disconnectedness with God is based on fear and a lack of trust. We don’t know God and people tend to be afraid of what they don’t know.

Martin Luther King noted, “We hate one another because we fear one another; we fear one another because we don’t understand one another; and we don’t understand one another because we refuse to communicate with one another.”

To overcome our fear of God and engender our belief in God’s love we need to communicate with God. Knowing more about God is helpful. This is where the Divine Principle can help. It provides profound insights into the nature of God. I encourage you to study it.

We want God’s love to flow in our lives

What does it mean for love to flow from God to us, or down through the generations from God to Adam and Eve and eventually to you and me? A recent blog post from Gerry Servito titled: Creating Love from One Generation to the Next,  spoke to me concerning this question.

“I helped my son learn violin, then later fiddle, then later mandolin, then finally even singing. There’s one song that’s become our favorite duet; it’s called “Now It Belongs To You” and it’s about a new Dad who inherited a fiddle from his Dad, who’d in turn been given that fiddle by his Dad, who’d made it 3 generations back. So the 2nd Dad left that fiddle with his boy when he went off to war and didn’t come back. Now, that boy has grown and become a young Dad himself and looks forward to teaching his new son how to fiddle, on that very instrument that’s passed through three generations of their family. So you see there’s a lot of love in that old fiddle….

Well, one time my son and I were playing that tune, it suddenly dawned on him that what it actually meant was that everything I’d ever inherited from my own Dad was in fact waiting for him, in full, whenever he wanted or was ready for it, regardless of any missteps he might have made growing up. That realization hit him pretty hard, so he played the ending solo in a way he’d never done before: he said that every note was meant for me. So now, whenever we play that song, the reality of the parental realm of heart and the children’s realm of heart can crystallize into 5 minutes of transcendent clarity.”

God is the parent of all humankind and wants more than anything else to inherit ALL of his love to every single person on the planet and can if we pass it on.

Loyalty & Filial Piety – a heart with a center

We often admire loyalty from a distance. We think of soldiers and of other servicemen and women who give their loyalty as a matter of conscience and duty. So loyalty seems something that is difficult, a sacrificial denial of self which is noble because it is difficult and unnatural. It’s true, loyalty does have this element. I don’t know whether you have seen, “Lone Survivor” yet, but it is the gut wrenching story of a group of Navy Seals who gave their all with loyalty.

Nevertheless, there is also an aspect of loyalty that is simply the natural expression of a grateful heart that has been blessed with months and years of benevolent love. If someone has loved and invested in you over and over again with benevolent, parental love, your heart’s natural response is to feel loyalty toward that person. You want to love back. A child’s gratitude for their parent’s love is expressed as filial piety, which is loyalty plus the desire & effort to “make good” on their parent’s investment.

God’s love for us is benevolent love. God wants to pass everything onto us if we want to receive it. We simply have to let God’s love flow in our hearts. We have to believe in it, know it, remind ourselves of it and refuse to settle for less.

Refusing to settle for less

This week we are celebrating Martin Luther King Day. Just as he took a stand for all humanity in demanding that blacks and whites and all God’s children be treated the equality, with the same passion we have to fight for our relationship with God.

God wants to bless us infinitely but we have to open up. That means being an open book. Not just trusting God on the big days like Christmas, Easter or Foundation Day, but every day and with everything.

God has the power to replenish and fill you all the time.

It’s easy to open up to others or even God in the areas of lives where we feel we are succeeding. But to really know God’s love is to take a risk and open up the areas of our hearts where we are struggling. It’s easy to allow God to love the “good” you, but to really taste God’s benevolent, unconditional, parental love you have to let God love all of you; the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful.

This week ask God for help in the areas in your life that are difficult, because God wants to help. Allow yourself to be filled.