Where does time go?

My dear friends...

I am struck again by how fast the years of our lives go by. I am, to be honest, utterly amazed that we are already over half way through this year. I can’t imagine where this time went...

What I am clear about is that the days of our lives blow past very swiftly --- and that what used to feel like longer moments within those days seem now like only nanoseconds.

To me, this means that I am being invited by Life Itself to use every single solitary moment to create the highest idea of Divinity I have ever held, and to express it in me, through me, as me --- if, indeed, this is the purpose of life.

I was told in my Conversations with God that it is, and so I have a choice to believe that implicitly, or to set it aside as simply a noble and inspiring thought, having little to do with my day-to-day on-the-ground reality.

The trick for me is to not get so “caught up” in this --- not to make it such a big “Must Do” --- that I cease to enjoy life at all for all the worrying and wondering about whether how I am “showing up” is the best example of God I can produce.

The truth is that however I am showing up is the perfect way for me to show up, because every step I take is a step towards God. That’s become a very important little item for me to remember...so let me repeat it here for us all to absorb:

Every step I take is a step towards God.

Of course, in the truest sense we are never “away” from God, since God is the Indwelling Spirit that animates our very being. This is a wonderful truth, and offers me a fabulous “twist” on that old line from the late Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo. It was Pogo who famously said: “We have met the enemy, and it is Us.”

I am now changing that to say: “We have met Divinity, and it is Us.”

So God and we are One, and since this is true I cannot literally take a step “towards” God. But I think you know what I mean when I say that. When I say that, I mean to articulate the thought that “every step I take is a step towards a greater experience of God, of which I am an individual expression.”

So I cannot take a step away from God if I wanted to. What I need to do now is have compassion with myself when I judge myself for not expressing my highest thought of Divinity in any given moment. This business of expressing Divinity is not something I have to do, it is not a requirement placed before me by a demanding deity. It is an invitation, brought to me by God through the process of Life Itself.

Why bother accepting the invitation when we don’t have to --- and when doing so can sometimes be challenging? Well, my own life has shown me that doing so produces the most joyous, the most serene, the most inwardly peaceful, the most whole and complete and perfect and blissful and soft and gentle and totally wonderful experience of myself that I have ever had, or could have ever imagined or hoped or dreamed I would have, on this earth.

If my desire in life is to be happy and to reside in a place of inner peace, stepping aside from turmoil and struggle, the experience of limitation and lack, and the impression that I am being hurt or damaged in any way by any circumstance or situation whatsoever --- if that is truly the desire of my life --- then I have found the perfect formula. And that would be the reason to accept this invitation. Not because I “have to,” but because it’s the fastest way to achieve what I wish to achieve in as many moments as possible between now and death.

Of course, there is no “death” in the sense of an “end to life.” I use the word “death” here to mean the celebration of my Continuation Day.

Someone asked me recently, “How do you know that anything you have written or are now sharing is true? Supposing you just made it all up, out of your subconscious desire to come up with a ‘story’ for your life that you could live with, that you could be okay with?”

And I answered:  “I don’t know that I haven't made it all up. I only know what it feels like. It feels as if what I heard from God is very real --- and that the experience of hearing from God itself was very real. But you know what? I may have, subconsciously, created the whole experience. Yet that doesn’t seem to me to be the truly valuable question. The important question, to me, is: Can you think of a better way to live? If so, tell me what it is.”

So, as we swing into the second half of this year, I leave you with those observations, from the For What It’s Worth Dept. And I wish you a happy and joyous 2nd half of the Year! 

With Pure Love ,

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE