essays
TypeWrmercury
#101 - My Best Is

When I was six years old and learning to read, I fell so much in love with words and books that I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up and write a book. In college I studied to be an artist, but I gave up my art to marry and to put my husband through school. After that part of my life ended in my late twenties, I wanted to do something meaningful, something that might really matter. I remember that used to pray: "Lord let me be your instrument." I didn’t know how, and I didn't know yet then, but He already had. I already was, because that's what every human life is for— to express God. Everything in this life is actually a miracle, even when we don't see it.

So I became one of the instruments with which God writes his poetry, and tells His truth. I always had within me, the voice of spirit that teaches and helps and shares, and lives the story. I always was, even as you are too, the hands with which God helps and heals.

When I sit with my private thoughts at sunrise with my soul with my heart and my mind quietly open, I receive all the answers I need. I know that through the day and the night, and all my days and all my nights, God is never any farther away than my own heartbeat, and even closer than that. God is all that I am, and even when this human heart has ceased, He will still be here, and so will I.

Most of my early life I wrongly assumed that I had to do something in this world, in order to be worthy of God's love. I had some foolish idea that I must pay back the gifts He gave me, as a return on His investment. What a silly idea of the human ego.

God does not set quotas for his children. God's gifts are gifts, not loans, and not, strictly-speaking, investments. They are ours to pay forward, and to share with each other, and I believe that we give joy to God when we love and share together. But I know He loves us no matter what, unconditionally. God loves us no matter what we do, and no matter what we don't do. He loves us because He is us; we are his creation, we are God's mind made manifest in physical form. We are God's way of expressing, His art, His poetry. In this world, everything there is, is God expressing, trusting us to choose who and what to be. From the moment we first recognize and choose God to empower our lives, God does. But we are given our own free choice. We can choose love, or anything else, and be who we want to be.

Looking back across all these years of my life from a distance, it's clear to see: I have done so much more in this world and in my life and in the lives I have touched, after I stopped trying to do things all by myself. My things, I thought. Things I ought to do.

When I changed my way of being, and instead of so much efforting and striving, when I opened up and made my life and mind and energy completely available to God, to do God's things, everything changed. Things got easy instead hard, happy instead of frustrated, I found myself amazed and grateful instead of disappointed. I’d had a marvelous life already, I just hadn't seen it until I gave up the struggle against life, and surrendered into trusting life and God.

I became more than I had dared to before. I became all I hoped to be, and more. I became God's firefighter and God's paramedic. Every scholarship I applied for, I won. Every challenge in my fire service career I met with courage and honesty and trust in God, and I succeeded far beyond my own expectations.

I understand now, that it is God's will for me to be who I am, where I am, doing what I am doing, That has always been the truth, even when I wandered and seemed to lose my way. I have never really been lost, there was always a path for me to choose, and God will surely and always show me what to do next. He will place it right here in my heart, where I can't possibly miss it. As long as I keep my faith, I can't possibly fail, for I can do all things through Spirit that is in me.

So I am God's writer now. I have come to tell the story, and the truth shall make me and many others, free. I wait and listen in my prayer of heart, and the answer is already there. The help is always there, and the gift is already given.

this Month's New Thought Essay, Poetry, and Blog. Darkhorse Press New Poets