From Shame to Shine, Part 1

We don’t come here as human beings on a spiritual journey.  We come here as spiritual beings on a human journey.  Our purpose is to grow to be the best that we can be, and we come equipped with everything we need to fulfill that purpose.

In the beginning, God created… and it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…

 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

And God blessed them…

And God saw all that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.

I want to be sure you heard that last sentence….  And God saw everything that he had made, and, it was very good.  Not just good, but… very good.  That Divine act of creation included every one of us.  Each of us was made in the image of God, with a Divine spark, and with a close, loving connection to the source of all creation.  Yet, at some point in our earthly journey, many of us have holes blasted through us by life, by the negative messages of our own egos, or by one of the myriad factors we encounter during our time on this earthly plane.  The result is that we feel disconnected from the Creator, from each other, and from our best selves.   We take on the message that we’re not good enough… that we are unworthy to be in close harmony and communication with the Divine Creator and with our highest self.  So, we begin desperately to seek a way to fill the huge, aching hole we feel at the center of our being.  We run faster and faster to hide our unworthiness from the world, from God, and from ourselves.  We try to stuff the hole with alcohol, with sex, with money and power, with the perfect body, the perfect mate, or with mediocrity… with a submission to being less than because it’s all we deserve.  While all these addictions will, temporarily, alter our mood and our perception of self and circumstances, the “fix” never lasts.  The end result is greater pain, hopelessness, and fear that this soul-numbing despair is all that we can expect in this world.

God doesn’t make mistakes.  He made us.  We are His children, endowed with an Eternal Soul, and born perfect in His sight.  How is it possible to travel from perfection to unworthiness and despair in one brief lifetime… in just a few short years in that single lifetime?

          It’s actually very simple.  We begin to accept the reality dictated by the human ego rather than our higher spiritual selves.  We accept the message of less than, wrong sex, intellectually inferior.  

I don’t know how you feel when you look at the images and captions I included with today’s Rise and Shine, but I feel tearful…. devastated…. broken. I’ve looked at these pictures countless times as I worked to create them, but my sorrow has never been diminished by the repeated exposures. .  I can feel the pain literally bleeding off the page into my heart.  Somehow I realize that accepting messages like these as truth is one of the ways we begin to lose ourselves.  We take them in without question as if they were written on the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.

What persuades us to accept and believe statements that scream “BAD, UNWORTHY, LESS THAN”? Someone hurls words as weapons, and we just stand there, believing we have no option other than to be wounded. Is that the truth? Think about it. The last time I checked each and every one of us is human. We all make mistakes. So, why did I just choose to give another flawed human the power to define me? That is one of the most profoundly important questions any of us ever ask.

“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Sounds good, right? But totally wrong. Research is proving that the human body, which has an innate wisdom about what is healthy for it and what is not, is harmed by hateful words. We would probably be less significantly injured by someone throwing a stick at us instead of a mean-spirited word. Physical injuries are easier to heal than injuries to our perception of self. Seeing ourselves as bad or not ______ enough handicaps our ability to believe that God “raises me up to be more than the human world says I can be”. Anything and everything is possible because that is exactly what God put us here to do – to shine and transform the world – and ourselves.

Let’s return to that earlier question. “Why did I just choose to give another flawed human the power to define me? I chose. I chose? Yes, I just said that I chose to accept an opinion or a bad moment as gospel. I chose.

God gave each one of us free will – for good or for harm. The Garden of Eden is an incredible example of free will having a really bad day. What does that mean for each of us? It could mean that we have the power to choose how we will react to things… that we have the power to choose who we will be. Perhaps the concept of free will is a far greater gift than we ever imagined. The absolute, God-given gift to choose. What will you do with this gift? Will you use it for good or for harm? Will you duplicate the snake and the apple scenario and condemn yourself to seeing yourself as stained forever, a rotten apple with no hope of redemption? Will you honor that still, small voice inside yourself that says, “I’m something more; I know it, I just know it somehow, despite all these harsh messages shredding my soul” and free yourself to step into the light and shine?

YOU HAVE THE POWER! CHOOSE.