Open Hands

When you are open, Love can enter. When you are open, you are strong. Not that you are strong because you are open, but because you are open, you are strong. When you are open, you are open to love, to giving love, to receiving love, to surrendering, to forgiveness, to humility. When you are open to being loved and loving, you forgive easily; you cannot hold your self or others for mistakes or shortcomings, because your hands are literally open and to hold them, is to hold yourself in time. Besides it becomes very tiring to clinch your fist for 40 minutes, let alone 30 years, but that is what we do, we just hold onto bitterness, unforgiveness and hatred and we end up really tired; real bitter and really for no reason. Someone once said unforgiveness is like drinking poison in order to punish the person who hurt you, believing drinking the poison will hurt them, but it doesn't, it only hurts you. If we are struggling with forgiveness one thing we can do is ask God to help us to want to forgive the person. Desire is key; you must want to be free. You must want to open your closed fists and open your hands. Because I am open, I see and understand that I deserve to be loved, that I need to be loved, treated with kindness, forgiveness and I deserve to give love. Not that we humans have done something magical to deserve love, but because the Creator who designed us says, "This is what I made you for- to love and be loved." The car made by Ford cannot say, "I'm not made to drive". And we cannot say to our Creator, "I was not made to love". Indeed the car was made to be driven and we were made to love and be loved. Loved by God, loved by man, loved by self. God is in love with you! God is in love with the person you have not forgiven, God is in love with every part of you, we are the Creator's children. I always thought being closed and "strong" was strength, but strength is vulnerability, strength is an open heart; strength is an open mind and soul. Yes, when I am open harm and bad can get in, but when I am open I can also release and forgive those things because of God's grace. God's grace and love allows us to open our closed hands and receive. God's grace and love through sometimes the most painful experiences gently pushes us to open up. It's amazing the beauty of pain; how God can turn a tragedy into a loving experience. Many times when we are hurt in intimate relationships, or by our mothers, fathers, cousins, an unkind uncle or man who touched us, a parent that beat us, a child who bullied us, we become closed. Because the pain of being unloved, abused and battered has been all too much. We become closed fists, scared to love, scared to be loved, in fear of of being abused again, unloved, yet again. We become bruised, closed, depressed puppies, fearing the very thing we want- love. And we become very tired too. If we can have a shift in perception and see that we were made to love and not live in fear in time we can begin to open are closed fists and surrender to love. Just give up, to love. When we open are hands, we receive, we surrender, we give to love. And when we are open, it does not mean that we won't experience pain and hurts but because we are open we can make the choice to forgive, to love. To live love is a choice. To stay open hearted is a choice. God is our example of perfection because God always chooses to love us, always chooses to forgive us, to surrender to our will! God is the definition of compassion. Wow, God is truly love and we are made of love. To love is where we must return. Dinah Clark/Miss Deliverance

Trusting the (Healing) Process

“You have to Trust the Process”. I thought about the above statement for a couple of days. What does it mean to trust the process? How do we trust the process, and what is it? For me, trusting the healing process is trusting and believing that the Creator knows what to do and how to do it, not I. Trusting the healing process means that the Creator is teaching us that our worth and value is never in question, even if we have been hurt, have hurt ourselves, have been divorced, been abused, fired from our jobs, etc. I have to trust that even in the midst of my mistakes my value is still there, it does not diminish; it cannot and does not fade away. I trust that the process does not always feel good. The healing process involves old, sore, painful wounds to be brought to the surface and they have to be brought up so God can heal them, so you can forgive others and yourself. Trusting the process involves much forgiveness. I see why Jesus told the man who asked about forgiveness to forgive 70 times 7. We all need much more mercy than we have. My healing process is an opportunity to forgive others I have been holding for 2 years, 10 years, and some people I didn’t even know I was holding. People like the little boy who called me, “Nigger” when I was nine year old. Do you know I was still angry with him? You see God has to heal all my old and new soul wounds because this is what the healing process involves. The healing process will bring up some junk, some things you have tried to repress. The healing process will also heal my feelings of rejection. I have just exited an unhealthy relationship and I feel rejected, betrayed and lied to and this process does not feel good. Yet I know God will heal every part of me because the loving healing process has enough room to consume all of life’s pains. The Bible says, “Love conquers a multitude of sins”, a multitude of hurts, a multitude of mistakes. Love is our spiritual healer and we have to trust that Love is enough. Because Love created everything in existence, everything in nature, it created us and because it created us, it can re-create us again and again. Love heals, old soul wounds, new soul wounds; it heals- not in your time, not on the world’s time, but on God’s time. How many mistakes and wrong deeds have taken place all because we became impatient? Impatience spoils good plans, spoils Love’s plans. Impatience kills faith and hope and blessings, and eventually hurts the human spirit and emotional body; all because we could not wait on God’s time we got with another man. All because you could not wait on God’s time you got with the fine sister with the big booty when you had been praying for a wife. All because we could not wait on God’s healing timeline we entered into a new relationship to get over the last one and now we are sitting here hurt, again. I notice when I physically move fast, rushing to get to my car because I’m late for work I accidently smash my finger or drop the book in my hand or trip over the extension cord because I’m not taking my time, and that is the same thing that happens when we don’t wait on God; we start to do things on our time and then when inevitably hurt ourselves and most likely someone else. All because we were impatient. Love is patient. She is so patient that she will allow you to smash your hand, yell at the car in front of you because you had bad time management, trip over the extension cord and then let you fall. Love will patiently wait while you enter into an unhealthy relationship all because of your fears of being alone, she will just wait. Then when you have bumped your head enough and are tired enough she will teach how to move slowly, she will teach you to be patient. Moving at the speed of impatience is harmful to everyone involved. The healing process involves trusting that God’s time is sufficient and perfect, trusting the process means processing old soul wounds and fresh new wounds. Trusting the process means that the Creator is always in love with you, even when the circumstances try to prove otherwise. Trusting the process means that you trust who and what God says you are- perfect, irreplaceable, a walking miracle, good. That I trust. And even when I don’t trust, Love covers mistrust. Love is always trusting us. Dinah Clark/Miss D.

LOVE

LOVE… I did not know I could live here. Here in love. I always conceived being “in love” as a romantic venture involving another human being; which it can be, but it can also be a union where we live in love, with love, with God. I had experienced hell on earth, but never heaven. That is until I surrendered, surrendered to God’s perception of me; God’s ideal of me- highly valuable, good, a walking miracle. I had to surrender my perception of myself- not good enough, inadequate, unworthy- this perception was ingrained early on and I did not know how to get rid of it; so I just fought it. In fighting, we always lose. In surrendering, in giving up, in relinquishing control to the fact that the being created cannot define itself, but the Creator who created the being; I surrendered my awful, limited, useless notion of myself and choose the Creator’s conception of me. “All my life I had to fight”. Yes, this is what I did. Fight. Run around forcing things to be the way I wanted them to be; controlling myself, trying to control others, and then I saw that life and love was the opposite. Life and love says, “Give up, stop resisting”. Well I wish someone had told me. And truth be told, someone told me, but I wasn’t ready to receive the truth, so I just kept fighting and resisting and controlling and forcing and then I grew real real tired- which is what happens when you fight for 20, 30, 40 years; your spirit grows very very tired. Then God said, “Are you done?” And I responded, “Yes, I’m done”. “Good” God responded, “Now give up fighting and just let me love you”. You see it’s hard to let go and surrender to God’s love when you fight the truth. God the whole time is saying, “You are good enough”, Let me love you”, “I am in love with you!” All the while our junk get’s in the way, our abandonment, our molestation, our divorce, our hurts, our physical and emotional abuses experienced at the hands of loved ones, our own emotional and spiritual abuse. So we end up fighting ourselves, fighting God, because this is what “strong” people do. Well it’s hard to keep a muscle flexed for 4 minutes, let alone 25 years. I grew weary of being “strong”, I always had to be “strong” and “stronger”; well I was tired of being strong. I just wanted to be loved. Most of us don’t want to be strong, we just want to be loved and accepted for who we are, and this was true for me. I just wanted to be loved. Then God showed me that I didn’t have to be strong, I just had to open my spirit and heart to receive His Love, give love, surrender control and forgive myself and others. That was strength, love is strength,love was everything I was looking for my entire life. Then there was fear, always lurking in the background, always telling me, “But what if you’re not good enough?”, “What if you never get married?”, “What if you will be an awful mother?” You know fear, most of us know it very well, it motivates most of our actions and behaviors. That was me, motivated by fear, that’s one of the main reasons I have been academically successful, fear. There is the motivating force behind fear and then there is the reality about fear- it leads to death, death of spirit, death of emotional wellness, death of true happiness, death of love. God/Love helped me to see that I was light and love, you know all those clichés you heard and all those spiritual mambo jumbos, yeah, I experienced that, light and love. I’m experiencing myself as a loving, light filled being, just love, not alone, not unworthy, not inadequate, just love, just God’s reflection. So are you! You know it truly feels like heaven on earth. It is way more powerful than fear, love that is. It’s all that is, there is nothing else but love. I feel like I wasted time living in fear, but I didn’t know I could live in LOVE. Love, a state of being where I am forgiven, surrender, give love and receive God’s love continuously. I didn’t know I could live here, rent free, for eternity. But of course I can live here, because I am love, God’s love in human form. I am only returning to the source that created me, LOVE. How good is our GOD! Dinah Clark/ Miss Deliverance