God is big.

Spiritual resource to share: a walk

Okay, walk with me on this one.  No, skip with me because that's how this fun little musing felt.  I kept thinking of ways to answer the question "Why do I love God?"  As I kept thinking about this and how I would answer, I kept bumping into different bits of songs from the book of Psalms.

I love God because.....
God is big.  Really, really big.  God includes everything that I love and everything that is worth loving.
God is about abundance, joy, triumph, satisfaction.  Everything that I love has its source in God and in what is infinite, eternal, substantial and real.
"I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being." Pslams 104

I love God because....
I can relate to God.   I relate to Love and God is Love.  I relate to harmony and balance.  I love those qualities.  I love structure and improvisation - evidence of Love's order and spontaneity.  I love these ideas because I am made of these ideas.  I can relate to God because I am the very evidence of God -an idea of God - a child of God!  In the most basic way, then, God has made me.
"I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." Psalm 139

I love God because....
God is always more.   Although there is an end to the search for God, there is no end in discovering how far-reaching and all-encompassing God is.  There is no end to knowing how intimate and exacting God's care is and how infinite and available God's resources are.  Knowing God even in a small way, I recognize God's love when in a new place, I recognize God's provision in the midst of seeming lack, and God's guidance when there once was doubt. 
"The Lord, the Mighty One, is God, and he has spoken; he has summoned all humanity from where the sun rises to where it sets. From Mount Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines in glorious radiance." Psalm 50

So it follows on this path, that I should ask you, Why do you love God?






Photo by Kim C Korinek
King James Version used in Psalms 104 and 139
New Living Translation used in Psalm 50

God is All-in-all and why this matters

Spiritual resource to share:  unity in diversity




I was thinking over the idea that is shared over a dozen times in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.  "God is All-in-all."  So I did what every good 21st century thinker would do.  I googled it.


"All in all" is used to express when we take everything into account, once we have considered all sides of an issue, or wrap things up with a final analysis.


But it goes much deeper than that.  I came across several essays searching for truth in Milton's Paradise Lost and his other writings. 


Milton's quote was the only other quote on my search that even came close to "All-in-all."  Milton wrote "God shall be All in All." This means that God is the omnipotent, omnipresent Oneness.  Unity, the essayist explained, need not involve a loss of uniqueness, but embraces individuality and diversity in an ultimate Oneness.


Here are some of Eddy's ideas with God as All-in-all:


The maximum of good is the infinite God and His idea, the All-in-all.



The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind,--that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.



The Scriptures imply that God is All-in-all. From this it follows that nothing possesses reality nor existence except the divine Mind and His ideas . 



Most notable is the use of All-in-all in the "Scientific Statement of Being," from Science and Health which reads in part: "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter.  All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." 


All right then.  This all jives.  So why is it important that we know this?


It takes some thought at times for me to consider just how large the idea of God is.  That God is All, yes.  But to understand that this Allness encompasses the most infinitesimal and intimate details as well as the grandest, most expansive and infinite ideas, is to understand God's supremacy.


It follows then because God is infinite  - the ultimate Oneness -  God is the umbrella that maintains and sustains all individualities, and embraces all diversities of gifts.


Does that mean that you and I are all the same?  No - we are proof of infinite God.  Like individual numbers proving the existence of a higher mathematics,  we are God's reflection shown in infinite diversity.


Once I can wrap my thoughts around this, I find it easier to heal.  Why?  Because it's been proved and reasoned out that the one Mind governs all. No one is left out of health, wholeness and abundance.


It gives me a foundation for church - that I can expect and see unity amongst differing ideas and practices.


It gives me hope. I can understand how God loves all the wide diversity called mankind.  The tenderness with which I know God, is the same tenderness God pours out to all Her children.


God is All-in-all.

your definition of God = your religion

Spiritual resource to share: infinite God

I have been sharing Godwords on my facebook page for months now. Godwords are a collection of 3 to 7 words that prompt thought into considering the multi-faceted nature of God.


So when I wrote the Godwords of today: brilliance, improvisation, order, calmness and music, a friend responded:

Hi friend. Why GODwords? Are brilliance, improvisation, order, calmness and
music dependent on religion? Love you.

I thought it was a good question because it makes you ask other questions. Like -- can a spiritual quality be dependent on a spiritual discipline? Hmmmm. Or -- can religion encompass universal qualities? Can religion be universal?

I can see the larger question here.

If one understands religion as being a restrictive way to govern behaviour, a system of beliefs passed down from generation to generation, or a formalized and traditional way of determining meaning in life, it is difficult to smoosh into that narrow definition qualities of thought that are expansive, eternal, infinite and universal. So if that is the case, then the answer to the above question must be no. Actually the question itself is hard to answer because there is no dependence here.

God is infinite and infinity is not something the limited human thought can easily grasp. Humility - that quality necessary for our spiritual growth - ushers in the idea that we are not the creator, but reflect all that our Creator, God is. Seeing that God is infinite, we are in awe!



What if one's understanding of religion went beyond a system of beliefs to a practice of infinite spiritual ideas that results in harmonious relationships, bodies and organizations? What if one's understanding of religion ran parallel to math or to music?

What about math? The principles are fixed, but its applications are infinite. Solutions are found.
What about music? The notes may be the same, but their infinite combinations create comfort, inspiration , unity, and joy.

SO what about religion? I see it as a way to understand God, as all that is infinite. It does not restrict, but releases and reveals the joy, order, peace and spontaneity of God's love! Its applications are infinite and the infinite interplay of spiritual qualities create all that is good.

MBEddy writes: "The infinite never began nor will it ever end." Neither will our understanding of God ever end, but grow increasingly more comprehensive, expansive and practical. As my understanding of God grows, so does my religion.






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.

Parenting: giving our kids our best

Spiritual resource to share: our spiritual inheritance

Last Christmas, I heard the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel's Messiah being played over the radio. My older son crossed the room and I found myself tearing up when he asked "What's wrong?"

I remember being in a choir while in High School and singing this with hundreds of others in choir and orchestra. It was such a thrill. We were so jazzed and inspired, we were singing at the tops of our lungs. I lost interest in whether or not the notes were right on. This loud noise that came from all of us, at once, sounding relatively in tune was an amazing experience!

Part of my role as a parent is to make opportunities for my kids to experience life - its joys and thrills and then to be there when things seem to fall apart. How many times have I wanted to "give" an experience to my kids that I have had. At that moment, hearing Handel's Messiah, I realized that I can't give them all of what is wonderful and mysterious. They need to find and take that on themselves.

It was a bittersweet moment. All I could say to my son is that life is an incredible trip. Go far, drink deeply. My dad once said that I should go out, explore the world. I could always come back, lick my wounds, but then go out again. Wise words from an old adventurer himself.

What we give our kids - aside from the basic food and shelter, millions of words of advice and counsel and our example - is to share what we have inherited from our brilliant, spinning world and to give them permission to explore it at their own time and in their own way.









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.

Our Father-Mother God

Spiritual resource to share: the motherhood of God

An unlikely picture for this post? Maybe, but I love the fatherly and motherly qualities expressed by this dog!

Our local paper has a regular column called “Faith and Values” written by our area’s spiritual leadership. My friend Erin, a Methodist youth minister and new mother, wrote the most recent article last week with the title: “Our Mother who art in heaven.” In it, she asks a few questions:

“…why don’t we teach them (all kids) the concept of a heavenly Mother? As a woman, I was created in God’s image, right? I don’t think God can be limited by our lack of understanding, but do we limit ourselves with our partial concept of God? Sometimes I need my Dad. Sometimes I need my Mom. Can’t God be both?”

Oh yeah. I think I love this question because I love the answer even more. I firmly believe that God is both our Father and our Mother.

With the Biblical premise that Erin brings out – if we are made in the image and likeness of God, who created male and female, then fathering AND mothering must be divine. To me, it's logical that God is our Father as well as Mother.

What other Biblical evidence do we have?

• “God is Love.” That’s from the book of John.
• “The Lord is my Shepherd." The 23^rd Psalm explains the motherhood of God thoroughly.
• And from another Psalms, Psalms 91: “ I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress...He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust”

Mary Baker Eddy brought out the idea of God as Father-Mother in her spiritual perspective of The Lord's Prayer. She also writes:

The ideal man corresponds to creation, to intelligence, and to Truth. The ideal woman corresponds to Life and to Love. In divine Science, we have not as much authority for considering God masculine, as we have for considering Him feminine, for Love imparts the clearest idea of Deity.

In my own experience, I have been comforted and healed by feeling the gentle, loving presence of an all-loving God, guiding me so many times: when my family made a series of moves across the country; when I have been healed of resentment and anxiety, of physical ailments, and much more. I have felt companioned and encouraged when I thought I was all alone. God's mothering qualities and gentle presence of peace and approval has strengthened me more than my many blog posts can ever tell!

I have leaned on the idea that I am the image and likeness of my Father – Mother God as a parent. It has helped me see that the source of my mothering is God. The idea of a mother’s love being spiritual is powerful:

A mother's affection cannot be weaned from her child, because the mother-love includes purity and constancy, both of which are immortal. Therefore maternal affection lives on under whatever difficulties.

Sometimes I have needed the strength and protection of a father, other times I have needed the unconditional love and comfort of a mother. I am so glad to know that God is both!

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.

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.

On my knees

Spiritual resource to share: healing as worship work

It's not uncommon for people to ask me "Does Christian Science work?" when we get into a discussion about healing through prayer. I say yes, and then we are off to a neat discussion.

In these discussions, I try to lift thought above the idea that prayer is like a pill - something you can take to alleviate the pain, heal the wound, make the bad things go away, etc. The healing prayer I practice is not just about physical phenomeon, but about transforming the whole understanding until we see more clearly who we are as a child of God. When this happens, the whole body conforms. We shoot for the high goal of understanding God and our relationship to Her. Then everything falls into its natural place of harmony, balance and mobility.

About a year and a half ago, I had taken a tumble down the stairs and badly wrenched my knee. Not only that, but my dog started limping. Thinking it may be that something was lodged between her pads, we went to the vet to see what it was. There was no thorn, he said, It was her knee. So all two of us were limping around.

What started out as a desire to heal wrenched knees became a prayer to go beyond the complaint of the body to the praise of and communion with God.

I saw that God fills all space - that God is expressed in Her purity of affection and unconditional Love that is pouring out more than we can even comprehend. Love nourishes, supports and guides us, that is, God causes us to grow; God feeds, supports, preserves, encourages and strengthens us. Every ankle bone, knee joint, muscle and connecting tissue is an expression of the fluidity, agility and grace of God's creation.

I also reasoned that each of us is completely mobile with no obstructions, accidents or scar tissue to interefere with our expression of joy. Our movement and energy is indestructible.

We reflect light (light also means easy, agile and nimble). Now this line of reasoning was something that I needed to persist with. Seeing my dog limp and feeling the pain in my knee were discourging. But I did persist.

The end of the story is that now we are all moving about normally, running, working out, I even did a cross country ski race that following winter. Our dog runs, jumps and dances (it's like a running, twisting, tail wagging kind of combination).

But the glory of the healings is in knowing that through humble and persistent prayer, we can acknowledge and feel so much more than just an improved body. We have an improved understanding of who we are as a child (or dog) of God and can "glorify God in (y)our body, and in (y)our spirit, which are God's."




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