Tag: good/bad

Categories
hard outer shell made good

And God said it was Very Good [Gen 1:31]

This dog totally believe he is good, where he is is good and life is just good, especially if I am with him. Photographed by myself at Newborough beach, Anglesey October 2024

Renly believes that wherever I am is good and that he is good and that life is good. Did you know God is omnipresent which means God is with us all the time? So surely we could then at least believe that we are good – very good.

So Genesis 1:31 says God made humankind and said humankind is good; very satisfactory, our best, pleasant, interesting, better than anything else we’ve made. [paraphrase]

Meaning of “Good” thank to https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/good

very satisfactory, pleasant, interesting, better, best

But do we believe it? Do we even get taught it in many of the churches we’ve been to? Too often we get taught that we are sinful, that unless we accept Jesus [whatever that might really means] we are condemned to eternal damnation, and need to repent.

I will go back to the whole idea that sin is just missing God’s mark, which we all do, but isn’t about not being made good.

Sometimes, I think, good can appear a bit of a weak word. A bit like nice. A word that is used more when things are not bad but not great, which is why I’ve added in the Cambridge Dictionary definition.

I think God looks at us and when they say good they mean more on the amazing side of ok than the “just got through” side. How about if we looked at that verse and realised that when God says good it means that we are pleasant, interesting, very satisfactory, the best for the Creator of The Universe to want to hang out with. And not just when God first made Adam and Eve but when God made each and every one of us!

But too often we get caught with the things we’ve done wrong, the hurts we’ve endured, the traumas we’ve picked up, the intergenerational stuff that hasn’t been cleared, and we look at ourselves through all this hard outer shell stuff and we forget that we were made good.

I also think it is this hard outer shell that can make us do horrid hurtful things to ourselves and to others.

I think the amazing thing about healing and learning to trust and hang out with God – whether this is through QEC, Sozo, Freedom in Christ, other trauma healing stuff from wherever, hanging out with friends who see through our hard shell and enjoy being with us, or even a phrase or sentence that slides into our hearts and chips away at that shell – is that we do see that shell for what it is; something that kept us safe from stuff that was going on around us but it is not us. And we will be safer without it.

So as we see the shell for what it is and even get to chip away at it we learn to see ourselves as was originally intended; without the “good/bad” judgements we and others place on us; without those epigenetic tags our ancestors and ourselves picked up; without the mistakes we have made. We start to see ourselves as good, very satisfactory, interesting, pleasant to be with, the best.

And I for one think that if the Creator of the Universe thinks I am good then who am I to argue????

Categories
doors open/closed

Doors!

photographed at my friend’s house April 2022. I was the first one up enjoying the warmth of the conservatory and the bird songs and fresh breezes of the morning

Is this door half open or half closed?

Someone was saying about a sermon they which combined open and closed doors and was wondering about its meaning.

Well this got me thinking! Too often we ask for doors to be opened as a good thing and doors to be closed as a not so good thing. But I remember my sister getting her fingers caught in the back door of our house because the front door was open too and a through draft caused the back door to slam.

Along most streets front doors are kept closed. When I lived a back-to-back houses part of Belfast it was said that if the key was in the door [hence door closed but unlocked] you let yourself in and the owner of the house would make you a cup of tea, but if the door was open a slight bit that meant the person had gone out for a bit and so if you did go in you’d have to put the kettle on yourself.

On a metaphorical level not all open doors are ones we are meant to through. I realised this with my job last year. Because of the skills I have, and the need for people in that sector, I can walk into the sort of job I was doing with ease. But that doesn’t mean that I should go through it.

As with the doors in the area of Belfast I lived in, just because they had keys in or were left a jar that didn’t mean I could walk into them. I was an English person, a new person to the area. I was not family or friend of many years. It would have been presumptuous of me to just walk in and I never did. The same as if I had started that same custom with the keys etc the neighbours would not have just walked into my house because of our lack of longevity in relationships.

So I think not all open doors are a good thing and not all closed doors are a bad thing. We need doors to close so we don’t get our fingers caught in them, but also so that we can move on through the next door. If doors are always open we’ll be dithering about and not being sure where to go and what to do.

But also, I think, we need to fully know who we are – our love ourselves as we are and know our strengths, our likes, our weaknesses and things we are willing to say we don’t like. Then we can look at a door whether it is wide open, open a little bit, is closed with the key in or is fully shut, and decide if we want to really give it a try.

There are doors I have walked through because I have had metaphorical big boots open that actually I didn’t really want to go through but they were open a wee bit and so I pushed. Thankfully I’ve been able to get out of them by learning more about who I am and what I love doing – my passions and my “vocation” so to speak. There are also doors that stood open that I was afraid to go through for various reasons and some of that could have been that even though the door was open it wasn’t my right door at that moment in time.

So there is no good and no bad [back to those Two Trees in the Garden again] but, I think, there is a “know the truth and the truth will set you free” [John 8:32]. The truth of who you are and where you would like to go in your life. Then you can walk through the door with boldness with God, the Creator of the Universe who loves and cares for you unconditionally, and see what happens next.

Categories
ego heart

Heart Versus Ego

Every move he makes is totally heart led. Photographed by me last week

I ended the last post with “Are we willing though to listen to our hearts and not our egos?” and feel I should unpack it a bit.

Logic isn’t bad. In fact going back to a previous post I think life would be easier if we didn’t put things into “good box/bad box” but the Eden myth lets us know humankind chose knowledge of good and evil over life, chose wanting to put things into logical boxes over wanting to trust in God/The Universe itself.

“Humans are primarily primed to be emotionally relationally led survival based beings. Egos don’t want to accept this which is where it all goes wrong. Sadly our world is obsessed with logic. The more they rely on logic the harder it is” Quotes from a conversation from the other day. Note it isn’t logic that is bad but the obsession with, the relying totally on logic that is the problem.

What is Ego though?

Ego is your idea or opinion of yourself, especially your feeling of your own importance and ability:

in psychoanalysis, the part of a person’s mind that tries to match the hidden desires (= wishes) of the id (= part of the unconscious mind) with the demands of the real world


Meaning of ego in English https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ego

But this gets skewed when we have allowed ourselves to be shaped by outside influences – what are parents/friends/teachers/colleagues said about us, what we read on the internet/in newspapers/magazines/books of how we “should be”, when we listen to adverts of what we “need” to be happy. Then we slide logic into the mix and we get confused. We are listening to all those outside influences and not listening to our hearts, not hearing who are true, genuine self is . [see the picture]

NOTE – we are not to be our “best self” but our most genuine self. Best goes back to the good box/bad box, right/wrong mentality. My genuine self is true to me and through that of course I will be giving off a calm energy which will help those around me to be their most genuine selves.

So if our world is obsessed with logic how to we “fix the broken systems”? How do we get to that place of “spiritual and cultural transformation”?

I don’t think we can think this through, that we can logically find an answer. I think it is time to move to a different place, to a place of mystery, of deep spirituality, of not needing to understand but trusting that there is a better way, but something greater than us can bring us to this point. I think we need to stop putting our trust in what we can do and start resting in God/The Universe/Whatever higher power you wish to call it.

How do we do that you may be asking? Because ask you will because that is logical. I’m not sure that many religious organisations can help because there is too much emphasis based on “having the answers” to give to the world, rather than living out the answer, rather than loving people unconditionally – that isn’t logical.

Let us step into the mystery of God, of the Son of God walking the earth, even the death and resurrection of Jesus to be a mystery not to be something that we can say “he died because of this”. Though I do think it is alright to say “One of the many reasons Jesus died is to reconcile us to God but there are many other things that I don’t understand and don’t get and that’s ok”.

Let’s start saying “I don’t know and that’s ok” more and more. Let’s start working on getting rid of the rubbish that stops us from being our genuine selves, that makes us afraid to trust our hearts. Let’s be bold and know there is more than we know but we want to connect with that more than.

I wonder what would happen if we all did that?