Dear Friends,

Here I sit at my computer a few days before Valentine’s Day.  In the spirit of the Day I want to write each of you a love letter.  The kind of love I am sending you is the same kind of love God first sent to us – Unconditional Love with no strings attached.  I do not love you because of all that you do or how much you care about the various aspects of your life, although I appreciate your devotion to life. So why do I love you? – because you are who you are in God.  What a joy it is to watch as God unfolds in your life!

Remember the quote, “Which comes first the chicken or the egg?”  It fits with what I am writing to you, but with one major change.  I know which came first between your actions or who you are in God.  It is found in who you are in God.  By doing your spiritual work of growing closer to God one sees the gift of who they are in God.  As that happens for a person they begin to think all things are possible.  They believe in themselves.  They tap into the Source of all that they do – God.  One can begin to see why it is so important for an individual to make sure one’s spiritual life comes first.  The last ingredient in this process is for a person to come to know God’s Voice and God’s Faithfulness.  So many voices in today’s world call us to do this or that.  So many voices tell us we could never do what our heart desires.  So we listen and stop ourselves before we begin.  But those who have been open to God, they know the sky is the limit.  I send you my love in celebration of your awareness of God in your life.  

Have you seen God’s Love and felt It in your life?  How about the spirit which is growing in our world?  Have you noticed how more and more people are getting on board with this idea of being one in God?  Have you seen the joy in people’s faces who believe in unconditional love?  Have you seen the laughter and willingness to respond to needs of those around us who see God as there reason of being?  God continues to fill us with ideas of how we can not only grow in our spirit, but also help others to become aware of God’s Spirit growing in them.  Such insight of the way life is becomes like a snowball building and building as it rolls down the hill of life.

I love you.  I love this awareness.  Most of all I love God.  What more needs to be said?  What more needs to be done?  Living in love opens up life to us in the fullest.  We can now celebrate the good times and hold each other in the bad.  We can encounter new life and let go of what needs to die.  As an old Beatles song once said, “Love is all there is.”  Even more powerfully the Apostle Paul said, ” All things will fall away one day, but love will remain.”

My love to you,

Gary

Dear Friends,

I am writing this letter at the beginning of January.  After living up North for the first 50 years of my life there are some things which are not hard to get over.  Winter is one of them.  The beginning of January up there meant the Holidays were over and now there wasn’t anything to break the long days of Winter until Easter, which sometimes coincided with Spring and sometimes didn’t.  The first few months of the new year could truly drag on.  Unlike here in the South, where the sun shines for a lot of the time and you can get out whenever you like, up north I knew I would be trapped in the house or the office.  I am a nature person and love to be outside, so this was hard on my spirit.  Well as I write these words there is a part of me which still thinks winter will be like it was for the first 50 years of my life.  God reminds me this is not true!

No matter where we live the month of February has the wonderful Day of Valentine.  It is a day to reflect on the gift of love.  Some of us have grown up in homes, churches and jobs where we felt love.  Others of us have not and would have a hard time relating to a gift like that.  Yet even for those of us who have known love it is never perfect, for Perfect Love is found only in God.  The point of my thoughts is to encourage each of us to reflect on that which blocks us from love or a life well lived.  Could it be the ideas we hang onto - like my thoughts about Winter even though now I am blessed with a Southern Winter?  Could it be things or ideas we were taught which said we didn’t deserve love?  Could it even be the idea of a God who is NOT an Unconditional Lover?  On those days when it is cloudy or cool, on those days when we are stuck inside, on those days when we are not blessed with a Southern Winter why not give yourself a Valentine present?  Spend some time reflecting on what stops us from feeling the ongoing gift of God’s Love.

I have found there are so many thoughts and ideas which are on our minds which we don’t pay attention to in any way.  I have also discovered there are patterns of thoughts  of which we also are unaware.  Lastly, I know we often treat ourselves in ways we wouldn’t dare treat others.  We wouldn’t say you are so stupid, or when I look at you in the mirror I get sick, or won’t you ever get it right, or they must have thought you were an idiot when you said that and on and on.  Why don’t we see we don’t want those thoughts to continue.   I keep learning the importance of paying attention to what is happening in my mind.  So much of what happens in my everyday life begins and ends with my thoughts.  I am like others – human- and face what most others face.  so I invite you to join me in loving ourselves by giving our heart the Valentine gift of getting to know who we are – Very Good.  As we do we may find a God already there who says, “At last!  Now I can love you.”

Winter is the season where we lie fallow so God can plant the seeds of self love.  By getting to know ourselves as God does those seeds will be planted in the kind of envionment which will transform our lives.

Happy Valentine’s Day,

Gary