life: acoustic & amplified
poetry, quotes & thoughts about life
Archive for the category “Winning”
A Scottish challenge for us this day – from one of my favorite writers!
Behind the Wires
Look around you, can’t you see what you’re missing,
Look around you, open your eyes;
There’s a whole world of loving and meeting
In a place where hostility dies.
Oh, I know that you don’t mean to hurt me,
You only want to protect what you’ve got,
But don’t you know the best way to lose it
Is to think that your freedom can be bought.
If you shut out your spirit of adventure,
If you close up your heart from within,
You build walls to keep out the danger
and find that you’ve locked yourself in.
I believe that peace is what we’re after,
But we’ve drawn up the lines for a war;
Surrender in trust to one another,
It’s the only thing worth fighting for.
So come out from behind your fences,
You’re in a war that no one can win,
Take a chance, lay down your defenses,
If I pull down the wire from the outside
Please won’t you pull it down from within.
Kathy Galloway (written for the women of the Greenham Common Peace Camp)
Love Burning Deep
used with permission
Keep your eyes and heart open as you go…
Miracles are everywhere!
Sometimes it’s the path itself where the beauty of God is revealed to us!
We are never alone!
I keep getting back up…
There are days when I just want to quit. I don’t want to keep fighting these battles. I just want to go my own way. I want to give up and be comfortable. I don’t want to be aware, or have to choose. I don’t want to be strong. I want to jump into the music business and go to the top. I want to sell myself to get there. I want to sing to thousands of people and get praise and acclaim from all over the world. I know I could work hard enough. I want to be spoiled and live in a nice house. I want to buy shoes and be shallow. I want to be beautiful and dress fabulous in designer clothes and prove to everyone, especially certain people on a short list I have, what I…yes, I said it, what I can do. If I can’t do that, then I want to forget it all and be able to be satisfied with some simple job and blend into anonymity, which then makes me want to just lay in bed for days, in my pajamas, and only get up to eat ice cream out of the container. I want…I want….I want….is the recurring theme.
Every day I am aware of how difficult, even impossible, it is to live this spiritual life. Every day I face a new choice of who I want to be, how I live. It goes against everything I seem to want. Every moment is a new choice to make. So many choices and so many times I fail. Over and over I fail. Yet God remains faithful. I have lived my faith – I have found the faithfulness of God to be so much more mind-blowing than I could ever comprehend. I have lived the miracles. No one can take that away from me! And so I continue with the struggle to love, the struggle to open my heart, the struggle to be patient and obedient and wait on God’s timing for my music. One more day the battle wages on and I chose to take one more faltering step with God. Yes, the warrior is a child every morning, every night and all through the day. Thankfully I know the truth that everything is grace! Gods mercy remains and is new every morning – just for me. Oh, and for everyone else who chooses to receive it.
Henri Nouwen says this about Spiritual Choices:
Choices. Choices make the difference. Two people are in the same accident and severely wounded. They did not choose to be in the accident. It happened to them. But one of them chose to live the experience in bitterness, the other in gratitude. These choices radically influenced their lives and the lives of their families and friends. We have very little control over what happens in our lives, but we have a lot of control over how we integrate and remember what happens. It is precisely these spiritual choices that determine whether we live our lives with dignity.
Then Sings My Soul…
Carpe Diem
Finally, what I really want is to be happy in this moment,
where the magic and miracles happen. Stay in the moment and all gifts are added as you breathe and take inspired action.
~Joe Vitale
For me 2012 is: the year of tenderness and vulnerability
Anne Voskamp (www.onethousandgifts.com) ‘names’ her years. My son, Brandon, and I used to have a rhyming theme for each year…ie: 2009 – will be fine; 2010 – time to win, etc. We would chant it and have fun, but overall it really didn’t have much meaning. 
I didn’t ‘name’ 2011, but, as I look back on it, it was truly a year of Transformation in many ways (check out the full Songs from the Valley Newsletter at www.songsfromthevalley.com).
Ann has chosen a greek word for ‘communion/community’ for her year 2012 – http://www.aholyexperience.com/2012/01/what-the-new-year-needs-most/. I like it. I even considered adopting it and taking the path with her this year, but as I sat down to write it, I realized that over this past year I have become more and more aware of the lack of tenderness and vulnerability in our lives and in our relationships – and how important it is! I must tell you it is one of my hardest and most challenging battles for me to continue to open my heart and offer tenderness and vulnerability to people who don’t even understand the principle. Yet, that is the heart of God to me, how could I not allow God to use me to show that heart to others?
I believe this so strongly, and continue to try to live it. I know this can only be from God – not me. It is my biggest miracle. I am not naturally tender. I can be very hard, I can set my mind and do very hard things – I have had to do very hard things. I am stubborn and I love fairness – I don’t naturally like to fight, but unfairness makes me want to fight to win! Yet, my belief system continues to challenge my heart. I have experienced much unfairness in my life, and God has used it to break me open and show me the importance of tenderness and vulnerability. ‘Love your enemies’ has kicked my proverbial butt many time! In 46 years, I only have one friend who has ever allowed me to glimpse a return of this principle in action. That friend has made a huge impact on my life, even though the friendship is, in some ways, very distant.
It is one of the most challenging things in my life for me to continue to practice what I believe on this issue, and yet I know it must be done, I want to get so much better at it, but I have a feeling this will always be something I will find difficult – if it was easy everyone would do it, right? All I know for sure is – without it there is no true, unconditional love in the world.
I understand why so many people are hurting and why they have shut down, and I know how important it is to show them they have a choice, and that making those choices are an all important, vital part of love and of living a happy and full life! And so my 2012 is dedicated to this theme of tenderness and vulnerability. It feels right.
This TED talk (I love TED!!!!! www.ted.com) is on vulnerability and it is so good! I want everyone to listen to it! This is a very, very, very, important talk. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html
Vulnerable, Like a Bird
Henri Nouwen http://www.henrinouwen.org/
Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird. To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support. Life and death are connected by vulnerability. The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives. Let’s not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life during the times we are powerful, successful, and popular. 
We are set to Soar into the impossible. – Ann Voskamp
God is looking for people through whom He can do the impossible.
What a pity when we plan only the things we can do by ourselves.” – A.W. Tozer
Set jaw, set times, set sights, set back to the wind…and unfold arms, like wings extending.
A New Year blows in.
I feel that Spirit wind catch, lift.
We are set to Soar into the impossible.
– Ann Voskamp
http://www.aholyexperience.com/
Happy New Year!!!
Life is Beautiful! – Motto of Marc’s Bagels, Blue Ash, Ohio
“I don’t really want more time;
I just want enough time.
Time to breathe deep & time to see real & time to laugh long, time to give You glory & rest deep & sing joy…
I just want time to do my one life well.
Life at its fullest is this sensitive, detonating sphere —
and it can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried and reverential—
a bubble held in awe.”
~ One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
2012: Time to remove shady people from your life – Paulo Coelho
A new year is upon us.
It’s time to take down the old calendar, and if it has nice pictures, save it—you can use it again in 2022— and put up the new one, or the 1984 one that you’ve saved for 2012.
As you do, ponder the old calendar. Look at all those days. God was with you on every one of them. Think of all you’ve done, and give thanks for your endeavors. Give thanks for all the people you met, the folks who did things for you, the souls you touched, the companions you had on the way. Give thanks for all you’ve seen, and marvel at how the things that you’ve experienced, and the ways you chose to receive them, have become a part of who you are. Give thanks for the challenges, the terrible days, the long hauls, for they, too, are part of the journey that has brought you to this day, and part of who you are.
And of course remember all your mistakes, and even more important, what you learned from them. And know that as you leave behind the old year, all those mistakes are forgiven. The little goofs and the profound betrayals, the odd slips and the unbreakable habits, all are forgiven. They are as past as that old year, gone. All that remains is wisdom, what you learned from them.
You have changed and grown. That’s the good news as you stand at the threshold of a new year: we can change. In the new year we can become new people. Of course we resist change, but the truth is that it’s really not change that we dislike so much as loss. It’s our resistance to change that’s hard. Change, and the loss of the familiar, puts us in a vulnerable, powerless position, a place where we’re not in control, and we don’t “know” enough. That’s what we don’t like.
And that— that place of powerlessness, dependence and not knowing— is the gospel place, the place where our only hope, and our only power, is God. It’s the place Jesus invites us to be. It’s all about dying first and then rising. Did you notice last Sunday what Simeon in the temple said about the baby Jesus? “This child is set for the falling and the rising of many in Israel” (Lk. 2.34). Not the rise and fall, like coming and going. But the falling (first) and then the rising. So 2012 is the year you will die.
And rise. You will surrender everything to God’s infinite love, and let God re-create you. Enter the new year ready to die and rise in the Spirit of the Eternal One who gives you life as a gift.
As you put up the new calendar, even if it says 1984, be mindful that you are about to become someone new. This re-creation will involve loss, and you will be tempted to resist it. But God will be with you every single one of those 366 days. Be ready to accept the changes that will come, to rely on God’s merciful presence, and to be re-created in this new time. The whole year will come at you one moment at a time; you can enter into each present moment, willing and lovingly present, for you will be in the Loving Presence.
May God deeply bless your new year. It will be good.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
life: acoustic & amplified 