07/10/16 Rev. David McArthur
“Times Of Turmoil Need Love”
We witness violence to others. We feel pain. We wonder how much is ours and how to respond. We’re all spiritual beings hanging out in this physical thing. So we look to our spirituality to see how to read this week’s events.
Day after day, year after year, the actions of millions of people have been calling to our desire to wake up. As we struggle to learn this personally it moves out of our unconsciousness into our consciousness. Love brings up patterns of our collective unconsciousness for us so that we can choose. “Stuff” shows up in our unconsciousness that is not consistent with the love we seek to have as human beings. What do we do with that?
What transforms it is love. But I was disturbed because my first response was anger and hate. Our mind polarizes things with “I’m for this and against them”, even though there is only “us”. There are many things to work out: questions and ideas. Within us we place our power in other places. It’s painful to see but gives us choices of what we have in our lives. Embrace that with love. It brings forth wisdom and guides us to healthy boundaries without rejecting the soul which was struggling but expressing in a way that is not ok. If you have been abused you’ve come to a point where you loved yourself enough to say no, to set a boundary. When you set boundaries with wisdom there is growth. When boundaries are set by your reactions it reinforces the abuse. We choose our manifestation.
We’re afraid love makes us vulnerable. We think to love is to accept all of a person without setting boundaries, that if we love enough we’ll heal them. Even Jesus said it was not he who healed the woman who touched the hem of his garment, but he put the healing on her, that it was she, her faith, that healed her. (He was in support of her reaching her wholeness.)
A family I know had a son who had become a drug dealer. They had to say, “We love you but we cannot have that destruction in our world.” They could love but couldn’t heal him; he had to make that change himself. He died violently.
Evelyn’s parents emigrated to America and she was first generation Chinese-American in an environment totally foreign to them. Her father was an alcoholic, and so she lived a life of turmoil. When she was sixteen, her mother passed away and so she was, in effect, an orphan. “What carried me through was my insistence that my mother loved me, and in my mind I was trying to fulfill my mother’s final wish, that I live my soul’s purpose.” It carried her through her biggest failures. As she turned to her mother’s love, she was turning towards that divine love that comes from within the being.
Spiritual power is INFLUENCE, not control over another or over the world. When we choose love we change the consciousness of ourselves and of the whole, so what was unlike love heals. Choose love. I choose love. I choose love. I choose love. The choice is love. Love is the answer. I choose love. It brings transformation for all!