Dear Spiritual Companions,

Did you ever find it difficult to relax?  I am settling more and more into my retirement.  God has opened various doors for opportunities for service so it isn’t like I am doing nothing.  Isn’t it interesting that I even allude to that fact?  More about that later.  Doing things without deadlines, except personal ones, is so freeing.  If I choose to do something that is fine, but if somehow I don’t who is going to say anything?  What I have noticed is the pressure has left my world for the most part.  I now have two day weekends.  The relaxation in my life continues to grow, BUT there is still that inner uneasiness of whether it is alright to be living in this state of calmness.

Where do we get those messages of having to do something with our lives?  One thing retirement has taught me is I wouldn’t want to simply stop doing.  I have this inner longing to want to spend my life in giving ways.  We are bombarded so often with the  message that we are lazy and have to be told what to DO that we never stop and see our inner desire to offer ourselves wisely as a given.  By being bombarded with this constant anxiety of doing we never slow down to discover this truth.  This is because we use the wrong kind of fasting.  We speed around busy all the time and then we wonder why time flies.  Not too long ago I was picking up my morning coffee, after my walk on the levee, and the cashier was taking some extra time.  She apologized about taking so long.  I told her, “That is alright I have all the time in the world.  Life is going fast enough so I don’t have to rush it.”  The world’s definition of fasting is to be in a hurry so you can get on to the next thing that has to be done.  We are on a merry-go-round of hurry with no destination.

How do we end this ride to nowhere.  STOP!  This is the real definition of fasting.  It is more than stopping our eating, which by the way cleans the impurities out of our body.  Now we can stop our mind to clean out the impure thoughts and be reminded of the God thoughts.   I find it interesting how often religions talk about the impure thoughts related to our sexual identity.  To me this is another distraction.  By telling us we are bad for having such thoughts we continue to believe there is something terribly wrong with us.  That is much more of an impure thought than our sexual ones.  Did you ever try to stop thinking about something?  The more you try the more that is all you think about.  If, on the other hand, you come to realize it is just a thought and isn’t harmful unless we act on it, now it begins to fade.  This is because we are stopping old behavior thinking patterns that were self defeating.  Now we can find a new pattern found in accepting that whatever we think, it doesn’t change the fact we are made in God’s Image of Love.  By the way notice becoming more relaxed.

Prayer isn’t an Olympic spiritual sport where we show God how good we are.  No prayer is simply an opportunity to STOP.  If all kinds of thoughts keep filling us it just means we have a lot of thoughts in us.  A way to handle this is to notice there is another thought and let it go.  The more we do that the more we find our spirits relaxing.  If we pray for God’s Will to be done and not for this person to be healed or fixed we also become more relaxed.  If we become aware how the challenges of life are actually building blocks of God’s Love, we will find a House of protection to be surrounding us no matter what is happening or not happening to us.  Because we have fasted from what has been told to us as truth we now can relax into the real Truth – “Fear not for I am with you.”  The more people who believe this the more chance we have to stop the merry-go-round of not knowing what we are doing.

Maybe retirement can be discovered at any age when we grow ever closer to God’s Love found in the gift of relaxation.

Peace

Gary