It's a common temptation – to live our lives almost entirely in the physical world. After all it is always right in your face. We trip and stumble over it constantly as we try to move through our days and tasks. Sometimes we move easily, but sometimes we get stuck in traffic, blocked in by the swarming crowd of other hurrying and striving human beings. That's when we experience anxiety, discouragement, frustration, and anger. All of us, even the minister on his way to speak a message of trust and love, can get stuck in the "rush hour" traffic of everyday life. Then he or she feels the same feelings we all do, is human too, gets angry too. All of us, whether pastor or prizefighter, we all bump up against the physical barriers and limitations of this mortal world.

We handle them best and easiest, and overcome them soonest, when we return to our deeper selves, to the truth at the soul of us, the Christ within us. That eternal bedrock of us is unaffected by any of these limitations, and we see the truth that these barriers are really only the challenges and illusions of the mortal experience, sent to give us something to grow beyond.

The world is a mess today, the physical world that many people have chosen and created. All of us can see the shadows of their choices and actions, looming over us in the back of our minds like dark storm clouds. But the only life we have to live, and the only life we can live, is our own. We can choose to live with compassion but without fear and without hatred. We can choose to live the life we are given with gratitude and with grace.

As I get older, I notice that I'm investing more time in a more spirit-aware way. I sit down privately in silence and just ask God about things. In a while, the answers come, in one form or another. That quiet time sustains me, and again and again it lifts me up and over the most impossible obstacles. Miracles of various sizes and kinds do show up. And yet, except for here in this journal, I do not speak about these things very much with others. Why not?

Because one's personal faith – our individual and very personal relationship with God, does not transfer to another very well, directly. Each and every one of us makes our own way to our relationship with God, and it may take a moment, or most of a lifetime, to get there. Getting honest and up-front about our faith and beliefs and spiritual truths is essential to us, but expressing it in words is usually hard to do.

Sometimes it stirs conflict from others who feel just as strongly, but differently than we do, who are searching out that so-terribly-important personal relationship with God just as we are, and doing it in a different way. At the very least, expressing our own truths, telling about our most personal inner communications with the God of our being, makes us feel awkward and embarrassed. That alone is reason enough why most of us try hide our light.

But you cannot hide your light, because it shows in all you are and all you do – in your very being. There is no need to tell it with words, unless you feel called to do so. God speaks to each of us in a way we can personally understand, and although spiritual leaders may help, each of us must find our own way in this relationship. What is important is that each of us does recognize and accept the truth that we are, each and all, a specific and unique expression of God, part of God's intentional creation, a daughter or a son.

Seek that connectionn every day, that communication point within your own heart, and be honest with yourself about it. You may feel unworthy, and if you do, you will rationalize "Why should God pick me to talk to? I'm nobody special; I'm far from a perfect person; sometimes I'm not even a very nice person, and I don't think I can ever be that good."

But you are that good, already. God sees the best in you, knows it's there even when you don't see it yourself – your unlimited potential. God speaks to all of us, loves us in spite of, and even in the middle of, our mistakes and ugly moments.

Meet God halfway. Speak to God in silence, and God will hear. Listen for God, and God will speak. Yes, to you. Open up your simplest honesty, quietly and privately, and be willing to listen. That's all you really have to do.