the amplitude, grandeur, vastness, enormity and fullness of God's love

Spiritual resource to share: immensity

(So I had a little fun with the thesaurus....) Okay - a little thought-spill* here: If you were to add up all the evil in the world, the injustice, disease, sin, stagnation, apathy, the threats, depression, intellectual self-justification and futility - would that overwhelm God? The textbook answer is no, but to answer that with our hearts, we would have to understand the largeness of God.

How to understand the largeness - the infinitude of God? It's a lifetime assignment. But for me and some friends, nature helps. "All nature teaches God's love for man" writes MBEddy and there is no better way than to look up to the stars, gaze across an ocean or hike up a mountain peak to get a glimpse of God's great love for us.

• A friend was healed of being overburdened when she felt a great clarity of God's love - as if God's love was the overarching sky and her human love only a pinprick in that large expanse.
• Another friend felt waves of God's comfort and warmth sitting in a field of acres of wheatgrass being gently blown by the wind, healing her of the stress of her circumstances.
• And I felt cleansed from an obsessive argument I had been having over an incident with a friend when I sat and prayed at lakeside. The depth of the lake and the consistent waves taught me about patience and trust in God's control of this situation.

Feeling the largeness of God's love makes everything else look small and inconsequential. All of the past hurts, complaints, injuries and injustices weigh "not one jot" in the kingdom of heaven. Their only purpose is to be overcome.

So we overcome them, drop them and turn to where it is really happening - to the truth of being. This is where the real story is. This is where hope blooms into help and creativity finds solutions for all kinds of problems. This is where we join God's divine adventure.

This quote from MBEddy's book Miscellaneous Writings (p. 42) helped:

Only as we understand God, and learn that good, not evil, lives and is immortal, that immortality exists only in spiritual perfection, shall we drop our false sense of Life in sin or sense material, and recognize a better state of existence.

Enjoy today - and don't forget to look up at the sky and remember how infinitely loved you are!



*thought-spill=an elevated form of brainstorm

photo by Gabe Korinek - copyright2007

To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

great people and noble lives

Spiritual resource to share: goodness



I know great people. That is, or rather was, my big secret. These are people with profound thoughts and kind lives. Sometimes I have blogged about them. Other times, I have encouraged them to write about their ideas, healings or courageous acts and "give it to the world." Sometimes they have.

But more often, they haven't. Even with my best encouragement and finding potential publishers for them, offering to share my editing skills (such as they are) or giving them names of magazines where they could submit their brilliant ideas, it hasn't been enough to stir them to immortalize their most wise and wonderful ways. And so I know there are these profound thoughts and kind acts out there, unacknowledged and so under the radar of popular thought as probably never to be seen or heard.

This bugs me. But then, with the plethora of profound thoughts out there, who is being heard? Is it possible for everyone to be heard at once? Of course not.

So, I turn away from seeing acknowledgment as being the main way to affirm one's life and ideas/ideals. Maybe just to live a life of integrity, sharing one's wisdom and acting with courage and kindness is the reward in itself. Like a columbine flower growing on the unexplored side of a mountain, it is beautiful just because it is.

The characteristics of the great people I know are summed up in two ideas from MBEddy's book Science and Heath. In one idea, she talks about grand and noble lives including these qualities: "unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love--the kingdom of heaven." And then she goes on to say

Unselfish ambition, noble life-motives, and purity,-- these constituents of thought, mingling, constitute individually and collectively true happiness, strength, and permanence.

Being great has everything to do with being good. From her book Miscellaneous Writings (p. 354), she includes a cluster of ideas that, it seems to me, would lead one to greatness: "A little more grace, a motive made pure, a few truths tenderly told, a heart softened and a character subdued."

But the grand core of all great lives is Love.

Love cannot be a mere abstraction or goodness without activity or power.... it is the tender, unselfish deed done in secret; the silent, ceaseless prayer; the self-forgetful heart that overflows; .....the gentle hand opening the door that turns toward want and woe, sickness and sorrow, and thus lighting the dark places of the earth. - Mary Baker Eddy

To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.