THE CALL

• The Call

I have heard it all my life,

A voice calling a name I recognized as my own.

Sometimes it comes as a soft-bellied whisper.

Sometimes it holds an edge of urgency.

But always it says: Wake up my love. You are walking asleep. There's no safety in that!

Remember what you are and let this knowing take you home to the Beloved with every breath.

Hold tenderly who you are and let a deeper knowing colour the shape of your humanness.

There is no where to go.

What you are looking for is right here.

Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand.

There is no waiting for something to happen, no point in the future to get to.

All you have ever longed for is here in this moment, right now.

You are wearing yourself out with all this searching.

Come home and rest. How much longer can you live like this? Your hungry spirit is gaunt, your heart stumbles. All this trying. Give it up!

Let yourself be one of the God-mad, faithful only to the Beauty you are.

Let the Lover pull you to your feet and hold you close, dancing even when fear urges you to sit this one out.

Remember- there is one word you are here to say with your whole being.

When it finds you, give your life to it.

Don't be tight-lipped and stingy.

Spend yourself completely on the saying.

Be one word in this great love poem we are writing together. 

A WOMAN IN NEED OF A HUSBAND

In a brief conversation, a man asked a woman he was pursuing the question, 

 "What kind of man are you looking for?"She sat quietly for a moment before looking him in the eye

 and asking,"Do you really want to know? 

"Reluctantly, he said, "Yes."She began to explain..."As a woman in this day and age, I am in a position to ask a man what he can do for me that I can't do for myself. I pay my own bills. I take care of my household without the help of any man...or woman for that matter. I am in the position to ask, "What can you bring to the table?"The man looked at her. Clearly he thought that she was referring to money.She quickly corrected his thought and stated, "I am not referring to money. I need something more. I need a man who is striving for perfection in every aspect of life."He sat back in his chair, folded his arms, and asked her to explain.She said, "I am looking for someone who is striving for perfection mentally because I need conversation and mental stimulation. I don't need a simple-minded man.""I am looking for someone who is striving for perfection spiritually because I don't need to be unequally yoked... believers mixed with unbelievers is a recipe for disaster.""I need a man who is striving for perfection financially because I don't need a financial burden.""I am looking for someone who is sensitive enough to understand what I go through as a woman, but strong enough to keep me grounded.""I am looking for someone who I can respect. In order to be submissive, I must respect him. I cannot be submissive to a man who isn't taking care of his business. I have no problem being submissive.. .he just has to be worthy.""God made woman to be a helpmate for man. I can't help a man if he can't help himself."When she finished she looked at him. He sat there with a puzzled look on his face. He said, "You're asking a lot."She replied, "I'm worth a lot."

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I AM THE CHILD

Dear Caregivers,

Whatever challenges you face in caring for your loved ones today, know that with the passage of time these challenges will change.

The current issues will fade, and there will be a new set of challenges awaiting you to solve . . . or at best, survive.

When you’re feeling like you can no longer persevere, remember you are warriors and time and patience are your allies.  Hang in there!

I am the child who cannot talk. You often pity me, I see it in your eyes. You wonder how much I am aware of. I see that as well. I am aware of much ... whether you are happy or sad or fearful, patient or impatient, full of love and desire, or if you are just doing your duty by me. I marvel at your frustration, knowing mine to be far greater, for I cannot express myself or my needs as you do. You cannot conceive my isolation, so complete it is at times. I do not gift you with clever conversation, cute remarks to be laughed over and repeated. I do not give you answers to your everyday questions, responses over my well being, sharing my needs, or comments about the world about me. I do not give you rewards as defined by the world's standards - great strides in development that you can credit yourself; I do not give you understanding as you know it. What I give you is so much more valuable... I give you instead opportunities; opportunities to discover the depth of your character, not mine; the depth of your love, your commitment, your patience, your abilities; the opportunity to explore your spirit more deeply than you imagined possible. I drive you further than you would ever go on your own, working harder, seeking answers to your many questions with no answers. I am the child who cannot talk.

I am the child who cannot walk. The world seems to pass me by. You see the longing in my eyes to get out of this chair, to run and play like other children. There is much you take for granted. I want the toys on the shelf, I need to go to the bathroom, oh I've dropped my fork again. I am dependant on you in these ways. My gift to you is to make you more aware of your great fortune, your healthy back and legs, your ability to do for yourself. Sometimes people appear not to notice me; I always notice them. I feel not so much envy as desire, desire to stand upright, to put one foot in front of the other, to be independent. I give you awareness. I am the child who cannot walk.

I am the child who cannot see. My world is forever dark. I cannot imagine sight or what seeing even means - for all I of know of people or food or clothes or pets or anything at all, I know only through fingertips and touches, smells and sounds. Sometimes noises scare me for I can’t see what it is. Often my smile seems strange or out of place to seeing eyes. Fortunately, I cannot see how people pity or judge me with their stares. I give you the gift of colorful communication - for I count on you and you alone for explanation and description of a world I live in, but cannot see. I have no other option – my “vision” is limited only by your willingness to tell me what you see. How will you do it? Explain sight to the visionless, color to one who knows only black, a sunset of endless hues? It is your privilege to communicate – to describe the indescribable majesty of what you see every day and take for granted. I am the child who cannot see.

I am the child who is mentally impaired. I don't learn easily, if you judge me by the world's measuring stick, what I do know is infinite joy in simple things. I am not burdened as you are with the strifes and conflicts of a more complicated life. My gift to you is to grant you the freedom to enjoy things as a child, to teach you how much your arms around me mean, to give you love. I give you the gift of simplicity. I am the child who is mentally impaired.

I am the disabled child. I am your teacher. if you allow me, I will teach you what is really important in life. I will give you and teach you unconditional love. I gift you with my innocent trust, my dependency upon you. I teach you about how precious this life is and about not taking things for granted. I teach you about forgetting your own needs and desires and dreams. I teach you giving. Most of all I teach you hope and faith. I am the disabled child.
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I walk by you today

I did not look away

A story around every corner

The gentle art of hearing

Your truth

Your thinking

Your inner spirit

No different to me

LIFE IS A THEATER~INVITE YOUR AUDIENCE CAREFULLY

Not everyone is spiritually healthy and mature enough to have a front row seat in our lives. 

There are some people in your life that need to be loved from a distance.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you let go,

 or at least minimize your time with draining, negative, incompatible, 

not-going-anywhere relationships, friendships, fellowships.

Observe the relationships around you.
Pay attention to: Which ones lift and which ones lean?
Which ones encourage and which ones discourage?
Which ones are on a path of growth uphill and which ones are going downhill?
When you leave certain people, do you feel better or feel worse?
Which ones always have drama or don't really understand,

 know and appreciate you and the gift that lies within you?

When you seek growth, peace of mind, love and truth,

 the easier it will become for you to decide who gets to sit in the front row

 and who should be moved to the balcony of your life.

You cannot change the people around you but you can change the people you are around.

Ask God for godly wisdom and discernment and choose wisely the people who sit in the front row of your life. 

DID I MARRY THE RIGHT PERSON

DID I MARRY THE RIGHT PERSON?

Just something to meditate on for those that are married, those thinking about it and those newly weds.

During one of our seminars, a woman asked a common question. She said, “How do I know if I married the right person?"

I noticed that there was a large man sitting next to her so I said, "It depends. Is that your husband?"

In all seriousness, she answered “How do you know?" Let me answer this question because the chances are good that it's weighing on your mind. Here's the answer.

 EVERY relationship has a cycle. In the beginning, you fall in love with your spouse. You anticipate their calls, want their touch, and like their idiosyncrasies.

Falling in love with your spouse partner wasn't hard. In fact, it was a completely natural and spontaneous experience. You didn't have to DO anything. That's why it's called "falling" in love... because it's happening TO YOU.

People in love sometimes say, "I was swept of my feet." Think about the imagery of that expression. It implies that you were just standing there; doing nothing, and then something exciting just engulfed you. Falling in love is easy. It's a passive and spontaneous experience.

But after a few years of marriage/courtship, the euphoria of love fades. It’s the natural cycle of EVERY relationship. Slowly but surely, phone calls become a bother (if they come at all), touch is not always welcome (when it happens), and your spouse's idiosyncrasies, instead of being cute, drive you nuts.

The symptoms of this stage vary with every relationship, but if you think about your marriage, you will notice a dramatic difference between the initial stage when you were in love and a much duller or even angry subsequent stage. At this point, you and/or your spouse/partner might start asking, "Did I marry the right person? Or am I dating the right person?" And as you and your spouse reflect on the euphoria of the love you once had, you may begin to desire that experience with someone else.

This is when marriages/relationships breakdown. People blame their spouse for their unhappiness and look outside their marriage/relationsh ip for fulfillment. Extramarital fulfillment comes in all shapes and sizes. Infidelity is the most obvious (mostly men). But sometimes people turn to work, a hobby, a friendship, excessive TV, or abusive substances.

But the answer to this dilemma does NOT lie outside your marriage/relationsh ip, it lies within it. I'm not saying that you couldn't fall in love with someone else, you could, & TEMPORARILY you'd feel better. But you'd be in the same situation a few years later. Because (listen carefully to this):

THE KEY TO SUCCEEDING IN MARRIAGE/RELATIONSH IP IS

NOT FINDING THE RIGHT PERSON;

IT'S LEARNING TO LOVE THE PERSON YOU FOUND.

SUSTAINING love is not a passive or spontaneous experience. It'll NEVER just happen to you. You can't "find" LASTING love. You have to "make" it day in and day out. That's why we have the expression "the labour of love"; because it takes time, effort, and energy. And most importantly, it takes WISDOM. You have to know WHAT TO DO to make your marriage/relationship work. Make no mistake about it. Love is NOT a mystery. There are specific things you can do (with or without your spouse) to succeed with your marriage/relationship. Just as there are physical laws of the universe (such as gravity), there are also laws for relationships. Just as the right diet and exercise program makes you physically stronger, certain habits in your relationship WILL make your marriage stronger.

It's a direct cause and effect. If you know and apply the laws, the results are predictable. ..you can "make” love. Love in marriage/relationship is indeed a "decision".. .. Not just a feeling.

Remember this always "

God determines who walks into our life; it is up to us to decide who we let walk away, who we let stay, and who we refuse to let go."

LOVE AND EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCE

How to distinguish between love and emotional dependence

The word ‘love’ is perhaps one of the most casually used terms in the English language – so much so that it has become an umbrella term for a whole variety of very different emotions! There is one thing we all agree on – that love is what makes the world go round, and that without it, the world is but a dry empty shell of a place. On the other hand, it is a word we very easily twist around to our own purposes to justify our emotional dependence on a person. If we can learn to distinguish love from emotional dependence and put this distinction into practice, then we make life more beautiful not only for us, but for everyone we come into contact with.

1. Learn to love yourself first
Often when we are emotionally dependent on someone, we are looking to them as a ‘filler’ to cover over and distract us from unresolved emotional issues in ourselves. In order to truly love someone, we first have to discover and explore what love is, and that means starting with the person you spend the most time with – yourself! We can often name our shortcomings far quicker than our positive qualities, and we are very quick to beat ourselves up for anything we didn’t do to our satisfaction. This all has to change. Try every day to identify your positive qualities and bring them more to the fore and increase them, and when you do make a mistake, try and see it as a ‘work-in-progress’ rather than an absolute failure. When your own self-love and self-respect increases, you are then able to approach relationships with others with much more equanimity.


2. Use the heart
There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame of that heats our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.


- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Along with the word ‘love’, the word ‘heart’ is often dragged in to many conversations and used to describe all manner of behaviour good and bad. When we talk about the heart we mean the space in the middle of the chest we point to when we say ‘this is me’ – the place we feel the essence of our being more than anywhere else. It is also where most of our higher and nobler qualities emanate from – empathy, kindness and love.


Emotional attachment, on the other hand is a tangled up array of feelings from the mind and also from the emotional part of our being located closer to the navel. Because the sources of love and emotional attachment are located so lose together, they can and are often confused by the undiscerning person. However, setting aside some time each day for a practice of self-discovery and self-enquiry (e.g. meditation) will very quickly enable you to distinguish one from the other.


3. Don’t expect
“When your love is pure or spiritual, there is no demand, no expectation. There is only the sweetest feeling of spontaneous oneness with the human being or beings concerned.”


Social anthropologists often describe many human relationships like a contract – we give our love to a person and at the same time we subconsciously place all kinds of expectations on that person which we want them to fulfill. And then when the other person fails to sufficiently satisfy our demands (which will definitely happen from time to time – we’re all imperfect) we feel let down and angry with the person, our insecurity and fear of not being loved come to the fore, and we often resort to some kind of emotional manipulation to try and get them to fulfill our demands.


True love, on the other hand is like the sun. The sun shines its rays and gives its warmth to all and sundry, without anything in return. This may sound like naivety to the calculating mind, but when we live in the heart we feel exactly like the sun does – we just want spread our love and goodwill anywhere we can. With this kind of love we have detachment – we have no fixed ideas about what way this love should be taken by others, the mere act of giving love satisfies our heart immensely.


4. Learn to let go
Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.


Often we place mental restrictions on people we love, whether it be parents ‘living their dreams’ through their children, or someone ‘trapped’ in a relationship. True love means loving people for who they are, not trying to channel them into who you want them to be. The greatest service you can do to one whom you love is allow them to grow in to their soul’s highest potential – sometimes this will mean actively helping them, but other times this will mean recognising when you are standing in the way of that happening and getting out of the way!


5. The inner strength: patience and forgiveness


“Patience serves as a protection against wrong as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you.”


To develop love, we also have develop forgiveness and patience. To forgive someone, it helps to see beyond their surface imperfections and appreciate the beauty that lies deep within. Love always goes hand in hand with this recognition of inner beauty inside a person, and when we can see this inner beauty in a person and appreciate it, we help bring that beauty to the fore and perhaps prevent whatever unfortunate thing that person might have done from occurring again.


This world of ours can seem like a downright unfair place at times, but developing this quality of love for everyone you meet allows you to rise above ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ that people might throw at you and still keep your faith in humanity intact.

TIPS FOR BETTER COMMUNICATION

Smiling helps any conversation

Sometimes silence is a much underrated quality but, everything has its time and place. Good communication is essential for dealing with others.

These are some tips for better communication. Tips for Speech / Conversation.

Avoid unnecessary words.

We peppar our speech with unnecessary words. “you know some people say….” I mean…” Sometimes less is more, these extra words can also sound condescending. Speak plainly.Speak clearly.

There is nothing more frustrating than a conversation which is half heard. Always try to speak clearly. If someone asks you to repeat yourself once, make a special effort, because often people will not ask more than once out of a sense of embarrassment.

Be wary of speaking harshly.

If you are really disappointed with someone, you can express your disappointment / frustration without anger / bitterness. The other person will be much more receptive to your message delivered with sweetness – - or at least the absence of anger and disgust. Sometimes it is more beneficial to take the compassionate approach rather than the justice approach. People may deserve a harsh lesson, but, would it actually help?

Avoiding unnecessary communication.

It is good to communicate well, but, you can have too much of a good thing. Don’t bombard friends with unnecessary text messages. Be confident in your friendship rather than looking for constant reassurance.

Method of Communication

In a digital age, we tend to gravitate towards the most convenient communication. But, the most convenient communication can be the least personal and least effective. An electronic message has much greater scope for misinterpretation and misunderstanding than speaking to someone in person. The next time you say something satirical / sarcastic to a friend try imagine sending that message in an email. You can guarantee without the benefit of facial expression / human contact the message would be misinterpreted.

Difficult Communication.

There are many times when we want to say something, but, put it off because of – nervousness, a desire to avoid difficult situations, or a feeling of guilt for having to tell someone off. But, putting off communication often just makes it worse. What tends to happen is that when we put off speaking to someone our mind just magnifies the problems, turning a small issue into a big problem. Our mind speculates on many adverse reactions which are false. If we find ourself in this situation, the best thing is to speak sooner rather than later.

Suggestions for Difficult Communication

Let go of negative expectations ~ they will probably be wrong anyway.

Just speak with kind intentions. If you have the other persons best wishes at heart, then whatever you have to say will be easier to say. Also, if you have good will towards the other person, then you can easily let go of all guilt that may be blocking you from speaking to that person.

Remember the positive things that will occur from bringing up difficult situations.


 The other person may appreciate your intervention at some time –
 even if not now.

Let go of a feeling of pride. Don’t feel the conversation is about having to defend yourself, prove yourself and put the other person down. This kind of attitude is guaranteed to create an awkward situation. Be self-giving and give no importance to silly human pride.

It’s not what you Say, but how you Say it.

Suppose you have to tell someone they have been doing something wrong. There are two approaches. The first is to exaggerate the extent of their mistake and try to make them feel guilty for doing such a silly thing. The other approach is to start off by saying it is the kind of mistake you could have made yourself. Even if you say a white lie and say you once did the same thing, who will be hurt?

If you think about both approaches, you will know exactly how you would want to be treated should someone tell about your misdemeanours.

Give the person your undivided attention.

It may seem obvious, but, often when we are speaking we are subconsciously thinking of something else. I have even skyped someone and during the conversation I heard them typing away in the background. If you are going to speak to someone give that person your wholehearted attention.