Truth Byte #7

This weekend, I witnessed a tidal wave of miracles. I watched a man who had bad luck most of his life, fall to his knees and ask to know God. I watched women who were bent over by the weight of their lives stand up straight and claim partnership with the Goddess. I saw children literally grow up before my eyes as the adults that they had become recovered from the past and started waking up to the lives that they had created. All because they were willing to be wrong about God.

These days, we are a bit skittish to talk about faith. It’s a new four-letter word, along with love and hope. In the skeptical, disinterested age of “It's not my problem”, it is very easy to point out all the places where God has surely deserted us, or is simply a master illusion rigged up by prophets of the past. 

It’s easy to call prayer “wishful thinking”, and religious fervor as some sort of psychological placebo. 

And yet, this weekend, I witnessed miracles.

There is an undeniable power in prayer. Whether whispered silently as a wish to the night sky or sung in full crescendo with hundreds of others, it is our nature to turn inwards and upwards and ASK. Because when we don’t ask, we are left to do it all on our own. And that is a heavy, impossible place.

Most of my clients are professionals. They are regular people with regular lives and regular problems.  But what makes them extraordinary is their willingness, at some point in their process, to admit their smallness. 

They are willing to admit that there is some other force that moves them to action, moves them to love, moves them to be greater than they previously though they could be. And the ones who graduate into the “rest of their lives” are those who have found the hand that leads them, the same hand that would never lead them astray.  

People look for that hand in food, in sex, in drugs and alcohol, in work. But when we turn to those temporary solutions, what we miss is the Presence that is always there, waiting. That hand is outstretched, waiting. And we have been too vain, too controlling, to busy to even notice it.

What if you were to pray? What if you were to tune out the noise of the world for a few minutes every day, and just ask? What if you were to give thanks for all you do have, and all you have overcome? Instead of getting a gratitude journal, or attending an online yoga class, or downloading a chanting CD, or buying in to the hundreds of other new-age props out there, what if you were just to sit on the Earth, feel Her supporting you, and pray?

My guess is you would witness a miracle or two of your own.

And prayer is not a negotiation. Prayer is not you saying: If You do this, I will do that.” Prayer is taking the posture of a child, and simply asking for a meal. And then the Parent provides.  It’s as simple as that. 

Sometimes what you ask for is actually junk food, and your Mother/Father knows it, so you may get something that’s just a little better for you than what you asked for. But God/Dess will not let you starve. Not if you ask with no agenda, and no bargaining chips.

Prayer is also non-negotiable. For those who are truly at peace, spiritual practice is foundational to their lives as physical hygiene. Just as you cleanse your body with water, so you cleanse your Spirit with prayer. Daily. Non-Negotiable. You don’t get to get mad with the carrots you were served and go on a hunger-strike. Well, you can, but guess who suffers? You got it.  So eat the broccoli that God gives you every so often, and enjoy the healthy Soul you are becoming. 

The healthier your Spirit, the clearer your mind and heart, and the more you will notice the miracles, big and small, all around you.