Beloveds,

Today's sharing is something I received from a young man who attended one of my workshops. I share it with you hoping it will touch your heart as it touched mine. Thank you, Derrick. A lesson learned and shared guarantees continued blessings.

Start with Prayer
How many times have we heard that prayer changes things? As much as I personally agree with that sentiment I sometimes fail to look at prayer from all of its aspects. I had to learn that to develop a more profound understanding of how prayer changes things in ways that I am sometimes do not appreciate and, ways I have difficulty being peace about. I realized that my perspective of prayer often causes me to doubt my faith or to lose faith in its power.  

I was taught that if ever my life gets turned upside down, without prayer it will be difficult to flip it upright.  Nonetheless, I fail to pray as often or consistently as I should. I also forget the prayers that I have prayed.

A few years ago I experienced a shake up in the form of an ugly breakup with a woman that I had dated off and on for eight years. It  turned my life upside down and I thought equal but opposite energy was needed to flip it back to its correct side.

Eventually I learned that the initial flip was the crisis, and prayer was the energy needed to make the correction. Whenever I slip out of tune with my spirit I loose the ability to differentiate between crisis and correction. Although one can exist from a lack of prayer and the other can exists as a result, I often experienced the crisis and the correction in the same way—I didn’t want either.

In hindsight, the answers to my prayers often showed up much sooner than I was able to accept them. As a result, I often missed them completely. I lost sight of the answers to my prayers because I didn’t want to do the work that went into making the  corrections that answered prayers offer. On a very unhealthy level it was gratifying to completely miss the answers to my prayers because it allowed me to stay in my comfort zone of self-pity and denial. I would then either forget the prayer request or write it off as a prayer gone unanswered. 

In my arrogance I sometimes ignore the things that the universe is kind enough to show me. Life has shown me that shake-ups are inevitable and even when I don’t invite crisis I can’t always prevent it. It has also taught me that I should always be receptive to correction and opportunity. This has not been my state of mind;  I often want the rebuild without the renovation, but ripping apart and destruction must take place first.

The second phase of a renovation is the most cumbersome and tedious, the cutting away, and removing of unwanted or unnecessary materials. After a lot of measuring twice, cutting once, and reconstruction the end result is the refreshed new space. This is a metaphor for my life. The breakup wasn’t about the woman, it was about a prayer being answered. The process of rebuilding an outdated life is often as unsettling as the incident that incited the overhaul.