IDENTITY AS DEEPLY LOVED BY GOD

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God’s love for you has nothing to do with your behavior. Neither our faithfulness nor your unfaithfulness alters Divine love in the slightest degree.

Whether we realize it or not, our being is grounded in God’s love, the generative love of God is our origin.

Love is our identity and calling, for we are children of Love. Created from love, of love and for love, our existence makes no sense apart from Divine love.

Our identity is who we experience ourselves to be - the I each of us carries within. An identity grounded in God would mean that when we thank of who we are, the first thing that would come to mind is our status as someone who is deeply loved by God.

David Benner
The Gift of Being Yourself

BLESSING FOR THE BROKENHEARTED

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Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—

as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,

as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.

Jan Richardson

MAKING DECISIONS

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Most of us have weak decision-making muscles. We do not realize what it means to make a real decision. We fail to recognize the force of change that a truly congruent, committed decision makes.

The word "decision" comes from Latin roots, with de meaning "down" or "away from" and caedere meaning "to cut." Therefore, a decision means cutting from any other possibility. A true decision means you are committed to achieving a result and cutting yourself off from any other possibility.

Committed decisions show up in two places: your calendar and your bank account. No matter what you say you value, or even think your priorities are, you have only to look at last year's calendar and bank account to see the decisions you have made about what you truly value.

See how you have reserved your time. Look at your expenditures. Those are the trails to the decisions you have made.

Carole Hildebrand