To Listen

My mother edits my blogs sometimes. She sent me this in an email: “Last line: The scene is worth mediating on! hee hee.”

As you might deduce, this isn’t the first time I’ve written “mediation” in a blog and forgotten that “t.”

And so, in all good humor, I declared, “More meditation! Less mediation!” And I mean it. We all have our areas that we need to grow. For me, I tend to try to help people solve their problems without praying first. Sometimes I try to teach without first studying too.  No.  This isn’t the way it needs to be.  I need to grow in prayer, reflection, learning, and studying.  And true wisdom will overflow from this. This sense of needing this change isn’t a “should”wrapping me in chains.  My heart longs for it.

When it comes to what we each need to focus on, people are not the same.  Some reflect and learn quite a bit and don’t serve much, and they can hear a call  to reach out to others.  I have had heard those who haven’t had enough healthy self-care say that we need to focus on ourselves, and heard those who tend to be selfish saying that we need to forget ourselves.  We don’t have to be perfectly balanced in learning vs. action or self-care vs. service. We can be who we are. Yet we heed the ways we are pulled to growth, and we do it in unique ways. Obviously, we can’t all follow the same path until we get to it.  We are all coming from different directions.

Yet there is one thing that I think is true for a great deal of people. So many of us need to tap into listening. We need to tap into listening to our thoughts, to our perceptions,  to others’ faces, to our Higher Power. We need to read and soak in the words. We need to look around us and see where God is in all this. We need to let in beauty and wisdom. Some are distracted by puzzles and some by parties … but distraction is distraction. So many of our hearts are longing to embrace, not the silence of being alone, but the silence of spending time with the Source of Love and Creator of All Things. We long for the Life we feel in the presence of nature and wonder — the accompanied silence, the beautiful solitude. We desire to break through what we see in front of us until we stand eyes wide open to what is greater and more true than this.

May we stop today. May we listen.

God bless your day.