My friends do you trust in the reality of your true being?  Jesus taught that the person that lives within you is greater than the one seen by the world.  How often do you let that person within you see the light of day?  For many of us it is not often enough.  For a long time I did not even question the authority of my being.  I knew I was created by God and I trusted in God’s work.  So when I spoke I felt like it was only by God’s will that I was doing so.  I knew that I had no motive outside of Love so I didn’t feel like I needed anyone’s acceptance or approval to speak my heart.

However, after coming up against enough resistance  and misinterpretation I started to wonder about myself.  I had been told by many people that I was naive and truth be told I have been played enough times that I could see why they said that.  That’s when I started slipping.  I gave the same authority to the word of people that I gave to the Word of God.  From that point I began to struggle between the Reality that I knew God created me in and the perception that people drew from my words and actions.  But by the grace of God I kept my eyes open and watched how I was living so that I could gain wisdom and distinguish between the Loving Truth and the fear based lie that we often let inform our lives.

Being in seminary has given me an opportunity to shape my voice and reflect, but more than that it has helped me reclaim the Truth of Being in the presence of other seekers and beautiful souls.  I have also been blessed with a wife and child who love me and family and friends who accept me for who I am.  So I dare to be bold and say that God is the root of all being and we all live in God’s being.  As Paul taught in Acts 17, in God we live and move and have our being. In Hebrew one of the names for God is HaMakom which means The Place. If that is the case, then why don’t we experience our lives like we live in God?  I say it is because of what I was doing–letting the word of people outshine the Word of God.  And for those who claim not to know the Word of God, I quote John in saying “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”

I think Forrest Gump put it best when he said, “I may not be a smart man, but I know what Love is.”  We all know what Love is.  You can tell because we are always looking for it or looking for a replacement when we feel like it is missing.  You can’t miss something unless you know what it is to have the thing.  We know Love  because we come from God and are in God.  It’s time to take the blindfolds off and promise ourselves to never let anyone “make us” something that God did not create us to be.  We are Children of the Most High so let’s start acting like it.

Who’s with me!?