Spiritual Ponderings

Usually the thoughts that impress me profoundly often come just as I am waking up. However, last night they came in extended form while I was sound asleep interspersed with other dreams. After waking up to continue thinking about them I realized that the ideas themselves were not really new to me but the connections between them were making far more sense at the heart level inside of me. That for me is very encouraging. I feel like my heart is so slow to understand the wonderful things my head has been learning about God and about reality. For it is not until my heart really grasps and believes these truths that they are going to begin to really make a difference in both my relationships with others, with God and also how I react under surprise pressure. That is one part of my life that I am keenly aware needs to be healed and that still lurks deep inside of me, pockets of vulnerability threatening to discredit everything I have been saying and teaching for years. What is emergi...

Grace. Graceful . Graciously . Graciousness . There is something interesting that goes on inside of me whenever I think about these various words. The strange thing is that all of the words after the first one seem to have very little to do with grace. Now I realize that this idea seems absurd when exposed out in the open like this, but that is just the point. Why is it that inside of me, in the feeling, intuitive, experience-based part of my being, that these last three words would seem to have so little connection with the word grace when they are so obviously based on that word? It doesn't take much brilliance to realize that much of the problem lies in the fact that the word grace has been hijacked and distorted by religion in my experience whereas the other words have not had so much confusion associated with them. Now, if someone reading this has not experienced the level of confusion from religion like I have they may be puzzling over everything that I have said s...