For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Yours and Mine
It is an interesting world when you live, as I do, as a mystic.
It goes along, with a semblance of normalcy, and then there is the inevitable wall.
Which brings with it a drenching shower of confusion.
I put into action, whenever I can, what I have been taught by God.
Not that I don’t forget some of what I have learned. I do.
But I can call things to mind, go over them again, and apply them when I can.
When I face a wall I do so with a blank slate.
It’s there, I’ve come to see, to show me that no matter how much I think I know, it amounts to no more than a piece of dust under one of God’s fingernails.
It’s basically nothing.
For quite some time now Advent has been for me a time of a most intense learning.
I remember one year when the visions I had were so horrifying that I occasionally went into shock during the visions.
I won’t be about horror this year.
But what looms before me is confounding.
We go through life speaking works. Using them in sentences. Discussing their meaning, even.
This year I am being forced to admit that the way I use a certain word is a universe away from the way God uses it.
Now I have seen this before. God will use a word in a lesson and I immediately use my own internal dictionary to “understand” the lesson. And I’m always wrong.
Always.
The way God sees and explains things is nothing like the way we understand the world.
And for good reason.
We get hungry. We watch our loved ones die. We win a scholarship to a school that will give us the skills that we want.
In short, we have limits. Time. Pain. Patience.
God doesn’t.
So his approach to things holds aspects of reality that we never experience. Or imagine.
We can experience a miracle, but even that leaves us still with getting back to the necessities of life.
This year I am not being crushed. By having to learn the meaning of sacrifice. Or vomiting up my unforgiveness.
I am going to be taught what God means by hope.
Receiving this information made me stutter.
What do I need to learn about hope?
What it is.
Actually.
What hope actually is.
All my lessons boil down to forcing me to face fears I had forgotten I had. Or never even knew I had.
So now I wonder what fear I will be facing by leaving to hope in the way God means me to hope.
I’ll just have to wait and see what it’s all about.
And hope I get through it in one piece.