The Power to Act

It is June 3rd, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and its 75 degrees outside with very low humidity. No, I don’t live in Anchorage, Alaska; I live in Houston, Texas. Like the tumbleweed in west Texas, when June rolls across the parched prairie, visits from family and friends dry up and blow away. Who is silly enough to come to Houston in the summer heat and humidity? For the past 20-odd days, temperatures have been in the mid-90s with humidity running above 90%. That’s pretty much a natural experience. Yet, in the 20 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve never experienced mid-day temperatures of 75 degree during the summer months. I won’t go into a conversation about global warming. Instead I’d rather ponder this change in temperatures as an example of one of those moments in life when things change on a dime. One moment, things are quietly the same and the next instant, life delivers an opportunity for a new life lesson. That is, if you are open to looking for it!

I grew up understanding God as a deity in the sky that both watched over and judged me, depending on my actions. He was fashioned from my Catholic and parochial school years, and my personal experience of my father. I didn’t experience a shaming or a punishing God, but still he was male and distant. Over the years, I’ve fashioned another experience of God, one that is more inclusive and life giving, a benevolent God who is not up in the sky but is living in ‘creation,’ amongst and through us all. I call my God, Creator God, because I am, like the earth that I inhabit, always in movement, in the process of expanding or contracting. I live in creation, and I am a creation; these powerful moments that I experience are part of the interplay between the Creator and me as a creation and they bring opportunities for personal and spiritual growth.

I can’t recall an instant when this life view came into being. Like creation itself, my life view has evolved over time. I’ve had moments that, like a tornado traveling across the plains, have flattened the landscape of my life and left me devastated. When I learned that Gene, my first husband, had advanced lung cancer and it had metastasized to his brain, or when I was incorrectly diagnosed with the early onset of Alzheimer’s. Those lessons were hard to miss; they were as big as life, up front and very personal. Those experiences caught me up in the cyclone, lifted me up into the atmosphere and left me spinning round and round. When the winds stopped, the landscape of my life had irrevocably been changed. Like an overgrown forest, new growth was possible after the destruction. When such life-altering events happen, even those who never give a second thought to why they are here, or life itself, often take time to reflect on their new life conditions. The reason I know that is because I was one of those people. With time and distance, the lessons began to emerge; that I was more than the roles I was playing, that I was not really alone as long as I kept close to God, that the seeds of strength and possibility that I ascribed to the men in my life were already growing within me all along.

Life’s situations, big and small, are the dinner plates upon which life’s messages, like healthful food, is served. For life to provide nourishment I can’t just look at it; it must be eaten and digested. Life’s situations bring messages that must be ingested and chewed thoroughly in order for the fragrant aroma of a lesson to emerge and provide for spiritual or personal growth. They can be as subtle as a change of weather or as earth shattering as a tornado that destroys homes as well as dreams. I no longer wait for the cataclysmic to look for meaning in life, and so the lessons that come to me now are more like a gentle rain upon the land; they are peaceful and bring nourishment. Everyday interactions between the Creator and the creation bring new opportunities to learn and grow.

Sometimes the messages are subtle, like the third time someone tells me that I must read this book or see a movie, or a question answered unintentionally by a stranger in passing, or a sermon that I know was crafted just for my benefit, or moments when I’m driving, and out of the blue, I realize that my desires and my actions are not in alignment; I’m speeding up when I want to slow down. And they can be calamitous; when I parked my car out on the street because the roofers were parked in our driveway and it was totaled because of flash flooding. Certainly it can look like a random act of nature; and there is always some truth in that, but is it the only truth? Like creation itself, life and my experiences of it do not fit into an either/or box. Believing in the randomness of life leaves me powerless or victimized! It denies my interconnectedness with the Creator and it strips me of my own part of the creation.

When I look at those life situations as a message, to be brought back into my heart, and read as a loving gesture from a benevolent Creator, I can use any situation as an opportunity to grow. The seemingly random act of my car being totaled provided a new lesson to chew on; what was I suppose to learn from it? My lesson was one of non-attachment, to hold lightly to things and people around me. I loved my Lexus and felt a sense of pride when I drove it; as if the driver and the car were one—an emblem of status! After the initial fight to get the car to the dealership in the middle of a flood, I eventually had to laugh at the irony of it all; and I have a different relationship today with my Acura. There is a new division between the car and who I am; my ego is no longer enmeshed with the car I drive. My car is fun, a reliable mode of transportation and acceleration!

When reading life’s situations as messages, I feel empowered and engaged; I’m on the dance floor of life, learning to let go of control and learning to listen to the rhythms of the song that I’m experiencing. By living my life as an integral part of creation, I am never alone. There is the dancer and the dance. It is a very intimate relationship that always brings life and growth to me even when material things, like the current in a raging river, move quickly downstream. In my relationship with the Creator God, I’ve found that there is always gold at the end of the rainbow and that the rainbow is visible only after the storm. I’ve found that it is my job to seek out rainbows and to glory in the exploration and the pieces of gold I discover in each life lesson that I discover along the way.

When I take the time to chew on the unseasonably cool temperatures that I’m experiencing, I’m reminded that it is appropriate and necessary to chill out when things around me are heating up. To take advantage of life’s reprieves; to celebrate them rather than damn them for getting in the way of my personal plans. To understand that the only thing I really do have control over is my reaction to life’s moments. That life is not scripted and I am always better off going with it rather than pushing up against what is. In the larger picture of life, I am after all, the creation, not the Creator; and the two are not divided but one!

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