Allow Your Face to Become a Thing of Beauty

“When we are honest with ourselves, God shows up. It is guaranteed. Will that Presence make you jump for joy? Maybe. But maybe that Presence is going to make you cry. Maybe you will weep all night, until your face becomes a thing of beauty, filled with tender light.”
Jason Shulman, Receiving God

I believe God wants us to be honest with him. But I also believe we have to first be honest with ourselves in order to be honest with God. We have to be ready for God to show up, and we have to be willing to stop pulling God’s leg—as well as our own. This means we have to work our way out of any denial that keeps us trapped in self-fulfilling/self-sabotaging delusions. God is always present for us, but God will not enter into a serious relationship with us until we are ready—ready to be open, truthful, responsible and fully open to our real selves and to the real God.

So who is the real God? The Prodigal God, I believe. God is the parent who loves us unconditionally, despite our flaws and failed behaviors. He loves our personalities, how we look (even without our clothes!), how we think, and how we move; He loves are dreams and desires, our light side and our dark side, our successes and our failures. Failures? Yes, even our failures. After all it takes a lot of courage to fail and to learn from our failures, to gather wisdom from failure and to move forward toward success. God loves everything about us. He may not always like our behavior, but He’s big enough to look beyond “bad” behavior and to love us even more when we’re trapped in it. God’s there to fully support us when we’re lost and struggling, but we have to allow Him in by being fully honest with ourselves and thus God.

Being fully honest with ourselves means believing that we are wonderfully made by God. Few of us really believe this. Oh, we believe God made us, but we have a hard time swallowing the idea that we are “wonderfully” made. We know all of our flaws by heart. We have harsh and sometimes hateful words etched into our brains about our many “kooties.” And we need to get over them. Everyone is wonderfully made, and to deny this is to be in a sad state of denial. Why would any of us want to believe that our “kooties” are worse than anyone else’s? Everyone has “kooties.” Some people hide them better, but everyone worries about being “found out.” So instead of believing in our “kooties,” let’s drop the denial and begin to believe in our beauty.

Sitting with God and being fully honest about how beautiful we are might make us cry—tears of sadness and tears of joy. We may feel deep, dark remorse over having believed bad things about ourselves for so long, and for failing to see our true beauty. Then, having grieved ourselves clean, we may experience tears of true joy at being amazed at how our faces have become things of beauty to us, “filled with tender light,” as Jason Shulman says.

Be honest with yourself. Be honest with God. And allow your soul to shine!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No One Can Calm Your Codependent Crazies, But You

Image
Ah, the codependent crazies. Those needy, needy feelings. I remember well the deep emotional pain in the pit of my stomach: The throbbing sting of shame, fear, loneliness and anxious desperation. Those feelings that are like fingernails on the blackboard of your soul. They eat you alive from within as they dig deeper and deeper into the black hole of your inner-emptiness. Yes, I remember them well. And I remember evenings of mental and emotional insanity-- squirming with a magazine, pacing back and forth, indulging in chocolate, chasing up and down the stairs hoping the doorbell would ring, and staring endlessly at the telephone for a sign of hope. All I needed was a call from my false higher power; a call that would help me to know that I was OK, that I was needed, that I was worth thinking about in some good way. I was dying to be emotionally caressed on the head like a poodle desperate for the attention of his master. And certainly I had made that other person into my mas...
Read more

Happiness is Something We Cultivate and Share

Who makes you happy? In reality, no one can make you happy. People in your life can enhance your happiness through sharing your interests. Or they can add to your frustrations by pushing your buttons. But no one can be responsible for your happiness or your misery—aside from you. One of the biggest problems for codependents is that we too often enter relationships looking for everlasting happiness. We expect that the person we choose to attach our dreams to should be responsible for making us happy. In our minds, we fantasize that he/she will be focused solely on us, will spend every waking hour with us and will do everything in his/her power to insure that we are as happy as we can possibly be. In other words, we assume this person will meet all of our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual needs in the same way that we plan to meet all of his/her needs. In our little dream world we will smother each other with attention and we will both drip with the honey of happiness. R...
Read more

Where There Is Kindness, There Is Goodness

Image
Author’s Note: The next few meditations will be from a retreat I directed recently called The Good News According to Disney . If you aren’t familiar with the films that are referenced, I’d suggest to take time to see them and to look for the deeper meaning within them. Many people today still live by the biblical adage “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” They actually believe that they will be at peace if they achieve revenge or restitution for any mishap that has befallen them at the hands of another. They believe they will reclaim their personal power once they have achieved their revenge, but this is impossible. Disney’s Cinderella (2015) reveals the true secret to owning one’s personal power and to retaining it no matter what we experience in life: “Have courage and be kind.” On the surface this motto looks a bit simple and wimpy. But in reality, it holds great power. That power comes from the heart of a person, or in this case Ella, who sees the world not a...
Read more

Become the Person You Want to Spend Your Life With Everyday

Image
I really don’t have to say much about the above quote. It says it all and it’s so true. We are too often taught faulty ways of thinking as children. So many of us get the wrong message at very young ages: Love is about finding the right person to love you. Looking back I realize I wasted many years trying to find that “right” person— the one who could love me into loving myself— instead of trying to BE that “right” person myself. It never occurred to me that I needed to love myself, nurture myself and accept myself enough to become the right person— the person I really needed most in my life. After all, what is my life without me? Now I know that I’m what’s been missing from my own life for years. My life is empty without me and without my spiritual Higher Power. This is true for all of us.  Once We find ourselves, become the “right” person God intended us to be, and become the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with, then we attract others into our lives who ca...
Read more