This morning I asked myself what I thought my life would be like if I could train my mind to only focus on thoughts concerning God’s love for all people without exception. In other words, what if I were literally incapable of thinking of anything else, how would I show up in the world?

I have come to believe that loving like this is the mind of Christ. And this is how I want to live every second that I am emerging in the world. However, I will confess that I am presently like a person who grew up on a horrible diet and then learned about the benefits of eating healthy. Now that I know about the benefits of eating healthy, I admonish myself when I indulge too much in foods that I know wouldn’t qualify as healthy. And when I look toward my future, I imagine only eating a healthy diet. Do you follow the analogy. If not, let me break it down.

Division, separation, judgment, fear, denial of other’s inherent worth, selfishness, conceitedness, jealousy, and all of their offshoots are essentially the junk food of the “Spiritual Diet”, and take me away from optimal Spiritual Health which is a Love only diet. Now that I have tasted the Love of God and felt its benefits, I “know better” than to convince myself that eating these other “fruits of discord” are worthy substitutes for my Spiritual Food. And so, I do my best to only subsist on Love. But… like when you’re on an actual diet, you find excuses to break it under certain circumstances. And that’s what I am thinking about. What if I couldn’t even consider breaking my Spiritual Love Diet and all I could take in was Love?

For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. – Paul of Tarsus

Love as I understand it is a Presence of Being that dissolves any illusion that there is somewhere, “somewhen”, somehow that God is not. From this Presence of Being we know that God, who is All Love and All Light is the All in All of Creation and God’s Fullness of Being is recognized in the smallest of the small things and the biggest of the big things and everything in between whether they be material, emotional, vibrational, spiritual, essential, or even imaginative.

This is what I am convinced Jesus embodies and invites all beings to embody that they might come to know the reality of who we are in the “eyes of God”. Jesus refused to turn his mind away from that awareness even in the face of his own impending death. I think what Paul attempts to articulate in 1 Corinthians 2, where he expounds on his statement about knowing nothing among the people besides Christ and him crucified, is evidence that he came in contact with this awareness. And if you look at the actions and words of many others throughout history such Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., those who are looking for it will find clues that this Mind of Christ is accessible to all and that “The Beloved Community” toward which these Life Lovers aspire already exists as a Present Spiritual Reality that people enter into when choosing to live from God’s All Loving Presence of Being.

So the question I have for myself is “What is stopping me from living this at all times? In writing this, I think I figured out my answer—false as it may be. Because I am concerned that no one I love will want to join me in that mindset and live in that community with me or if I industrial on living this way, that this world will show me the same door it showed Jesus, Paul, Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi…

But as their lives testified, Perfect Love casts out fear…. So, I am going to continue training my mind toward all Loving thoughts until I’m living the answer to my question to the best of my ability. No excuse not to love.

For added edification…

After reflecting on this question throughout the day, a lay leader and minister in our church shared the poem below in our Church Council meeting. I received it as encouragement from the Holy Spirit. I hope you do as well.

 What to Remember When Waking
 --by David Whyte (Dec 30, 2013)
  
 In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
 coming back to this life from the other
 more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
 where everything began,
 there is a small opening into the new day
 which closes the moment you begin your plans.
  
 What you can plan is too small for you to live.
 What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
 for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
  
 To be human is to become visible
 while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
 To remember the other world in this world
 is to live in your true inheritance.
  
 You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
 you are not an accident amidst other accidents
 you were invited from another and greater night
 than the one from which you have just emerged.
  
 Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
 toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
 what urgency calls you to your one love?
 What shape waits in the seed of you
 to grow and spread its branches
 against a future sky?
  
 Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
 In the trees beyond the house?
 In the life you can imagine for yourself?
 In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?